Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev (L) gives a folder labeled “Economic Partnership between Uzbekistan and the United States” to US President Donald Trump during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on September 23, 2025. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
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Among the few winners from the recent UNGA events must surely be Uzbekistan. Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev got a personal meeting with President Trump in front of the cameras. This, in the wake of an announcement by DJT on the Truth Social network praising Mr. Mirziyoyev for signing a $8 billion deal purchasing Boeing Dreamliners, adding ‘this will create over 35,000’ jobs in the US’. ‘Mr.Mirziyoyev is a man of his word’, he said and ‘we will continue to work together on many more items’. This is pretty warm enthusiasm in the lexicon of Mr.Trump.
The Uzbek President later had a roundtable meeting with top US companies and financial institutions for further investments and joint projects. According to various reports bilateral trade has quadrupled since Mirziyoyev took over, with 300 US companies participating thus far. Mineral mining particularly in strategic metals and rare earth materials seems top of the list (the Colorado School of Mines VP met with the Uzbek Prez and agreed to open a Center in that country.) Beyond mining and mineral processing, the roundtable focused on banking, IT, transport and energy infrastructure and much else.
This column, as readers know, has repeatedly dwelt on the strategic importance of Central Asia and the ‘Stans. Most especially on the Western world’s need to upraise the profile of the region, its economy and political heft, as a way to counterbalance the past domination of Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and the like. Interestingly, this is one area in which the current administration has actually built on the Biden era’s initiatives. So, for example, Mr.Trump has boosted the future of the Zangezur Corridor aka the Trump Corridor by unprecedentedly bringing Armenia and Azerbaijan together to create it – thereby giving Central Asia a trade corridor to the world that, for the first time in centuries, bypasses Russia (and Iran and China). The column has focused on that corridor several times over the years.
Direct trade with the West also means a political model for the region potentially more enlightened and relaxed than its neighbors. This column, back in October 26 of last year, was the first to break important news of an assassination attempt on Komil Allamjanov, a central figure in the liberalization of Uzbek public speech and political processes. He had worked on a Presidential Commission headed by Mirziyoyev’s daughter, Saida Mirziyoyeva, on just such initiatives. The plot went deep into the state’s arteries but the perpetrators were ultimately flushed out and imprisoned. A top suspect had escaped to South Korea where authorities were impervious. This column helped expedite the situation by alerting and questioning the SK media, which in turn spurred the authorities there.
Having survived and prospered unscathed, Allamjanov is now pursuing life as an entrepreneur and academic, not least in the US. He has just been appointed a special advisor to the Central Asia Program at George Washington University. This is exactly the kind of positive outcome that closer bonds with the West can bring about. In the past, the US and Europe have treated the region as a dark zone, sunk in unalterable Sovietic practices. Greater interest with engagement changes the equation. In past years, the region has so often teetered on a knife-edge of instability that US support makes a transformative difference.
Why should the US, indeed the West as a whole, care about a landlocked stretch of faraway geography hitherto in the sphere of influence of other regional powers? In the first place, as mentioned above, not engaging merely gifts monopoly over a sizable chunk of the world, its output and resources, to America’s rivals. Hitherto, Russia, China, Iran, have exercised a kind of veto and tax over Central Asia’s growth, being the only access to global trade. There’s no reason to further empower said US rivals economically. The more options offered to Uzbekistan and surrounding countries like Kazakhstan to diversify financially, the more they will break free and prosper. The more they prosper, the more Russia and China will need to look back to monitor the new giant growing in their backyard rather than pressure their neighbors in front.
And then, of course, there’s the matter of Afghanistan. The forces boiling in that country have a tendency to extend beyond the region. The Uzbeks, perhaps more than any other neighbor, exert influence across the border. There’s a hefty chunk of ethnic Uzbeks living in the Afghan north. Cross-border trade has always been a factor. Afghan leaders in Kabul are sensitive to Uzbek nuances. Here, then, is a potential geostrategic lever for the West in its otherwise fraught relations with Afghanistan. As the Afghan population gets more desperate under Kabul’s primitive rule, which country will they look to for relief? Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan and the like, or a booming and carefully secular Uzbekistan with guaranteed women’s rights? In short, Tashkent offers a useful conduit for the world to temper the export of extreme Islamism – and to counterbalance Moscow’s increasing detente with the Taliban.
Commercially, politically, culturally, the US needs to keep intensifying its embrace of Tashkent. The amount of investment in effort and funds, promises to pay back multiply in geostrategic terms.