In Central Asia, Iran has friends

Tehran faces profound hostility from many of its immediate neighbours, as well as from the collective West. Central Asian governments, meanwhile, are cultivating warm economic and diplomatic ties.

Iran is at daggers drawn with Israel and hemmed in by the West’s economic sanctions.

Tensions between Tehran and several Gulf nations are in a semi-permanent simmer.

And earlier this year, Iran risked igniting a regional conflict by firing missiles at militant camps in Pakistan.

Relations between Tehran and its neighbours to the north, in Central Asia, meanwhile, have rarely looked better.

This diplomatic amity is nothing new. In the immediate wake of the Soviet Union collapsing, Iran spied an opportunity to make friends. It was the first country to recognise the independence of Tajikistan, a fellow Persian nation. It was second in line for Turkmenistan, with which it shares a long border. It was the first mainly Muslim country to recognise Kazakhstan’s independence. And it was towards the front of the line for Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Those early overtures produced little of note. The last couple of years has seen the momentum pick up, however. And this makes for a curious geopolitical puzzle.

The West is energetically courting Central Asia, partly with a view to diluting the region’s strategic and economic reliance on Russia. That breakout operation requires Central Asia to engage with any available alternatives. And that includes Iran.

Four of Central Asia’s presidents have travelled to Iran since 2022. Tajikistan’s Emomali Rahmon ended a nine-year absence from Tehran by visiting in May 2022. He enjoyed it so much that he returned in November. Kazakhstan’s Kassym-Jomart Tokayev went in June 2022, Turkmenistan’s Serdar Berdymukhamedov also visited in June 2022, and Uzbekistan’s Shavkat Mirziyoyev made the trip in June 2023. Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov pledged while meeting Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in Bishkek in September 2022 that he too would pay a visit at some stage.

Few of the relationships have been as turbulent as that between Iran and Tajikistan.

Economic engagement was robust until around 2015, when things went badly south. It was that year that Iran elected, for reasons not entirely clear, to offer a platform at a public event in Tehran to a Tajik opposition leader, Muhiddin Kabiri, who had earlier that same year been charged by Dushanbe with mounting an attempted coup. The accusations were groundless and Tajik officials never tried to produce any evidence. But the diplomatic furore was real.

Tajikistan sharply pivoted away from Iran into the embrace of Saudi Arabia. But Tajik hopes that this realignment might precipitate a shower of investment from Riyadh proved illusory.

By returning to Tehran in 2022, President Rahmon signalled that all was forgiven. The trade figures tell the story. The two countries did $121 million of trade in 2021, doubling the amount a year earlier; that number rose to $240 million in 2022, and then $270 million last year. Despite Dushanbe once flat-out accusing Tehran of trying to topple its government, cooperation today extends to military affairs. Tajikistan has since 2022 hosted a facility for the production of Iranian-designed Ababil-2 tactical drones.

For gas-rich Turkmenistan, Iran is emerging as an important transit territory for energy exports.

In November, officials from Turkmenistan spoke to a visiting Iraqi delegation about the idea of supplying their country with up to 9 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually over a period of five years. Iraq would not be getting Turkmen gas as such. They would instead be receiving gas from Iran, whose remote north-eastern regions are in turn reliant on Turkmen gas in the coldest months of winter.

A similar proposed swap deal, which again would entail Iran’s involvement, is being hammered out between Turkmenistan and Turkey. The Turkmen president’s father, National Leader Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, appeared to suggest at a diplomatic conference in Antalya in March that this set-up could culminate in gas from Iran ending up in Europe via Turkey.

Kazakhstan together with Turkmenistan look to Iran’s usefulness as a transit state in other ways. An inaugural Kazakh-Turkmen joint working group on transportation in November produced a shared commitment to develop the China-Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan-Iran logistics corridor. Exciting possibilities lie among all the dry pronouncements about tariff policies and the harmonisation of infrastructure development. The significance of these landlocked nations, should they play their cards right, gaining relatively seamless access to major Persian Gulf ports and, consequently, vast new markets, cannot be overstated. Kazakhstan hopes to build its own terminal in Iran’s Bandar Abbas port, although progress on this initiative appears to have stalled for now.

Kazakh President Tokayev laid important groundwork in developing the person-to-person networks all this will require during his visit to Tehran, when he announced that Kazakhstan was introducing a 14-day visa-free regime for Iranian nationals.

“I believe Iranian businessmen will take full advantage of this,” Tokayev said at the time.

Side note: Tokayev went to Iran in June 2022. Three months earlier, law enforcement authorities in Kazakhstan arrested Kairat Satybaldy, the nephew of former President Nursultan Nazarbayev, on corruption charges. In a 2010 paper on Central Asia-Iran relations, scholars Sebastien Peyrouse and Sadykzhan Ibraimov described Satybaldy, a former KGB general, as a key intermediary between Astana and Tehran. In the same paper, Peyrouse and Ibraimov alluded to then-Astana mayor Imangali Tasmagambetov as another important broker for Iran dialogue. Tasmagambetov is now general secretary of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation.

The official visit to Iran of Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev in 2023 was succeeded by a pattern seen with other Central Asia peer nations. A flurry of lower-level delegations followed in Mirziyoyev’s steps to bulk out conversations on cooperation in energy, transport, finance, and education, among other things.

In talks in Tehran in March, Iran’s Energy Minister Ali Akbar Mehrabian said something that will have been heartily welcomed by his Uzbek opposite party, whose country is increasingly struggling with chronic power outages.

“When Iran has surplus electricity, it can export it to Uzbekistan. In the summer, when our country needs more electricity, any surplus can be imported from Uzbekistan,” Mehrabian was reported as saying.

Tashkent has reciprocated such pledges of support with unusually demonstrative shows of diplomatic solidarity. When the Israeli air force recently targeted Iran’s consulate in Syria with a missile attack that claimed the lives of two Iranian generals and five officers, Uzbekistan was swift and robust with its condemnation.

“It is absolutely unacceptable to attack diplomatic and other missions of foreign countries,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement. “That is a severe violation of the foundations and principles of international diplomatic law.”

The Uzbek reaction to Iran’s reprisal against Israel over the weekend was more measured.

“[Uzbekistan] calls on all parties to show restraint, to refrain from further military actions, and also to adopt all possible measures in pursuit of a speedy political settlement of the conflict,” the Foreign Ministry said.