Central Asia’s Washington waltz: Praise, protocol, and pragmatism
One striking feature of the U.S.-Central Asia summit was its restraint: no sermons, no talk of countering China or Russia, just mutual praise and polite transactionalism.
There have now been two U.S.-Central Asia summits — the first in 2023, and the second this week — and both have taken place in the United States. No American president has ever made the return journey.
Donald Trump was not about to break that pattern. Certainly not for a presidential summit.
A man known to have a notoriously brief attention span was never going to be induced to travel halfway across the globe to submit to hours of speechifying by some of the world’s most leaden orators.
Still, it would be wrong to cast the visiting quintet, the presidents of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, as mere cap-in-hand petitioners. They hold assets Washington wants: minerals, routes, energy, the raw materials of Trumpian “deals.” But the deference with which they played their hand made it clear who still sets the table.
Nevertheless, Washington appeared aware of the optics, and it sought to manage them.
On the eve of the summit, Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to visit all five Central Asian republics in 2026, a symbolic reversal of direction.
As to why such a visit would happen, Rubio was explicit: business.
“We are looking for opportunities for American innovation and American business and American products to expand to more markets,” he said. “You are looking to take the resources, both your people and natural resources, that God has blessed your nations with, and turn them into responsible development that allows you to diversify your economies.”
For years, the region’s resource diplomacy centred on oil and gas. Now, every conversation comes back to critical raw minerals, the metals that power electric cars, smartphones, and, increasingly, geopolitics.
In another summit curtain-raiser development, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s hovered in the background as his Industry and Construction Minister Ersayyn Nagaspayev signed a Memorandum of Understanding with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on cooperation in the field of critical minerals.
What this means in substance will become clear in the fullness of time.
To date, the firmest achievement on the critical minerals front is the granting of exploration licenses to 14 sites across Kazakhstan to U.S. company Cove Capital. Under an agreement signed in March, Cove Capital and Tau-Ken Samruk, a state-owned Kazakh mining holding, formed a joint venture, Akbulak REE, that could, if explorations yield anything promising, generate $1.1 billion in investments.
As to the November 6 summit itself, the event was more fodder for the protocol sketch writer than the political or economic analyst.
C5+1 summits involving China, Russia, and the European Union have typically taken place in vast halls or around grand, circular tables designed to convey parity and pomp.
In Washington, by contrast, the setting was markedly more modest and asymmetrical.
The six presidents were seated at a long rectangular dining table. President Trump sat at the centre of one side, flanked by his vice president, J.D. Vance, and Rubio, opposite the five Central Asian leaders. The intimacy verged on the awkward: too close for ceremony, too stage-managed for spontaneity.
The Central Asian presidents’ interventions were mercifully brief, disciplined, and at times startlingly devotional.
Tokayev hailed Trump as “a great leader, statesman, sent by heaven to bring common sense and tradition back into U.S. policy.”
Uzbekistan’s Shavkat Mirziyoyev likewise fell over himself to shower his host with plaudits.
