Can the United States reassert influence with pragmatic, transactional approach to Central Asia as C5+1 summit gets under way?
United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio is arriving in Samarkand, the fabled Silk Road city in what is now central Uzbekistan, for talks with key regional ministers on Saturday.
The C5+1 – Central Asia plus the US – summit to be held from Saturday to Tuesday heralds Washington’s new approach to the ex-Soviet region – pragmatic, purely transactional and devoid of speeches about democratisation and human rights.
At the dawn of Central Asia’s independence, Americans used to show up in the mostly Muslim region strategically stretched between Russia, China and Iran, bearing gifts – and giving lectures.
After the 1991 Soviet collapse, amid the region’s economic degradation, joblessness and poverty, US and European diplomats and businessmen were seen as ambassadors of the brave new world of capitalist prosperity.
They wanted reforms – and not just the economic ones.
Western diplomats made sure that former Communist apparatchiks-turned-new regional leaders understood that they’d get investments, technologies and international recognition only in exchange for abandoning the Soviet-era totalitarian ways of governing and building the economy.
The West held forums and workshops on human rights, democracy and decentralisation of governance, and sent thousands of students and officials to Western schools.
And the West accused regional leaders of losing their moral compass and threatened sanctions when they began to amend their nation’s constitutions to extend their presidential terms, appoint their family members and friends to key government jobs and help them create business empires that often competed with Western investors.
“When the West began moralising, teaching them about democracy, human rights, they immediately turned towards China or Russia,” Galiya Ibragimova, Uzbekistan-born, Moldova-based regional expert, told Al Jazeera.
Uzbekistan, the region’s most populous nation of 37 million, offers a perfect example.
Its iron-fisted President Islam Karimov was the first ex-Soviet leader to allow a US military base on its soil in 2001.
But four years later, he kicked it out after Washington lambasted his brutal suppression of a popular revolt in the eastern city of Andijan that killed hundreds of unarmed civilians.
In 2005, a leaked US diplomatic cable called Karimov’s daughter, Gulnara, a “robber baron” who forcibly took over lucrative businesses and was seen as her father’s successor.
Turning to Russia
As to moralising and lecturing, the tables have turned since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, observers say.
Moscow still has plenty of soft power in Central Asia – from movies and pop music to theatre festivals and propagandist TV shows that constantly lie about the war.
The Kremlin also uses its economic clout to promote the imperialist concept of the “Russian World”, where the region is seen as Moscow’s “near abroad”, and its pre-Russian heritage is snubbed as backwards and insignificant.
In 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that Kazakhstan had “never had statehood”, and his ideological allies repeatedly threatened to annex its Russian-speaking northern part.
This year, Kazakhstan began extraditing Kremlin critics and supplying gas to Russia amid Ukrainian drone attacks on its oil refineries.
In January, Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov said Moscow should launch a “special military operation” – a term reserved for the war in Ukraine – in Central Asia and Armenia.
Critical remarks from minor political figures followed – but no rebukes from the halls of real power.
Meanwhile, Central Asian labour migrants have been duped or forced into enlisting to fight in Ukraine in droves, while Moscow uses Central Asian companies to import microchips, communications equipment and machine tools to build drones and missiles.
“These days, the US and Russia have switched roles. Today, it’s Russia that began building ties through moralising,” Ibragimova, the regional expert, said.
Return of the White House?
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump’s administration has abandoned the pro-democracy stance and now advocates a utilitarian, transactional approach to foreign policy.
“Under Trump, the American policy in Central Asia is all about ‘just business and nothing more’, without being nosy about human rights, reforms. They are content with everything,” Ibragimova said.
Earlier this month, Trump received Saida Mirziyoyeva, the daughter of Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev.
A year earlier, Mirziyoyev pledged to invest up to $100bn in the US economy, buy Boeing aircraft and even US-grown cotton, even though Uzbekistan is one of the world’s largest cotton growers.
Washington did not say a word about Mirziyoyev’s crackdown on critics or his daughter’s growing domestic clout.
After largely ignoring Central Asia during Trump’s first term, the White House wants to resume its presence.
“The interest is mostly geopolitical and military-strategic, considering the region’s location in the zone of Russia’s and China’s interests,” Alisher Ilkhamov, head of the London-based Central Asia Due Diligence think tank, told Al Jazeera.
“In the future, Washington apparently wants to have a military base here as a deterrent measure against China,” he said.
The economic interests seem to be focused on rare-earth minerals – crucial for manufacturing a wide array of technology – and other critical elements, especially since China uses them as a political cudgel in its ties with Washington.
The deposits are abundant, but need development, technologies and investment.
Meanwhile, the White House shows little interest in human rights violations in Central Asia, such as the jailing of political opponents and independent journalists.
“An interest in these issues, unfortunately, is absent from Rubio’s agenda, because these problems went missing from US foreign policy priorities since Trump returned to the White House,” Ilkhamov said.
A Norwegian human rights advocate echoes his concerns.
“There are uncomfortable similarities between Trump’s worldview and established authoritarian regimes like Tajikistan and Turkmenistan,” Ivar Dale, a senior policy adviser with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a rights watchdog, told Al Jazeera.
“However, Marco Rubio probably has a better understanding of Central Asia and the challenges there than does [Vice President] JD Vance and [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth,” he said.
The US State Department “should bring back the focus [on human rights] if the C5+1 format is to be taken seriously going forward”, he said.