US engagement in Central Asia has often been transitory. Now, it may have real staying power.

When Donald Trump and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev got on the phone on July 10, their conversation ranged from the implementation of billions of dollars in commercial agreements to nuclear nonproliferation to an invitation for the American president to visit the Kazakh steppe. What was striking was not any single item but the routineness of the exchange. A US president and a Central Asian leader now talk the way close partners do—and that is new.

Consider the past eight months. Tokayev traveled to Washington in November for the first C5+1 summit ever held at the White House, where Trump announced Kazakhstan’s accession to the Abraham Accords—the initial addition of his second term. Companies from the two countries concluded 29 agreements valued around $17 billion. Trump has since extended G20 invitations to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan for the Miami summit. A procession of senior Americans has passed through Astana this year, including Senator Steve Daines (R-MT), Special Envoy Sergio Gor, and a delegation from the US Chamber of Commerce. Cumulative American investment in Kazakhstan now exceeds $100 billion, and may rise to $137 billion in the medium term.

For a relationship that spent most of the last 35 years as an afterthought in Washington, this is a remarkable turn—and it was not preordained. Throughout much of 2025, Uzbekistan appeared to be winning the contest for Trump’s favor. Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev landed a proper bilateral with the president at September’s UN General Assembly session and paired it with an $8 billion Boeing order; Tokayev managed only a brief greeting, and Kazakhstan’s $4.2 billion locomotive contract with Wabtec, though larger than anything the region had signed with an American manufacturer in years, generated a fraction of the attention. There were whispers that Gor, Trump’s envoy for the region, who was born in Tashkent, might be partial to his birthplace. 

November rearranged the board. By bringing Kazakhstan into the Abraham Accords—a framework at the heart of Trump’s personal legacy—Tokayev offered something no aircraft order could match. At the summit dinner, he was the first foreign leader invited to speak, and Kazakhstan left Washington with the marquee deal of the gathering: a joint venture between its national mining company and New York’s Cove Capital to develop the Severny Katpar and Verkhnee Kairakty tungsten deposits, likely the largest undeveloped tungsten resource on earth, with US development-finance agencies weighing over $1 billion in support. That project has since drawn fire at home—reporting tied its American parent to the president’s sons, and Senate Democrats have vowed hearings—but the underlying strategic logic is bipartisan and durable.

That logic begins with China. Beijing controls upward of 80 percent of the world’s tungsten and dominates rare-earth processing. It has shown a willingness to turn that dominance into coercion, restricting exports of materials on which American defense and aerospace manufacturing depend. Tungsten sits on NATO’s short list of defense-critical raw materials. Diversifying away from Chinese chokepoints has become one of the few genuine points of consensus in US economic strategy—and Kazakhstan holds reserves of 21 of the 50 minerals Washington deems critical, mines more uranium than any other country at a moment when the United States is weaning itself off Russian nuclear fuel, and may possess rare-earth deposits rivaling any outside China and Brazil following the Kuyrektykol discovery. No other state in the region combines that endowment with three decades of proven contract performance: Chevron entered the Tengiz field in 1993, and Kazakhstan still supplies about one-fourth of the company’s worldwide production.

Geography adds another dimension. The Middle Corridor across the Caspian Sea gives American firms a route to Central Asian resources that touches neither Russian, Iranian, nor Chinese territory. Freight along the Kazakh section has grown fivefold in seven years and jumped by more than a third in the first three months of this year alone.

Astana has its own reasons to lean in. Kazakhstan’s foreign policy doctrine—multivectorism—exists to prevent dependence on any single power. Russia’s economic pull is fading under the weight of its war, and its regard for its neighbors’ sovereignty commands less confidence in Astana than at any point since independence. China has absorbed much of the resulting space. Good relations with Beijing are a fixture of Kazakh policy, but shifting reliance from Moscow to Beijing would defeat the doctrine’s purpose. A robust American vector restores balance—which is why Tokayev has pursued it with such discipline.

There is also a deeper reason this moment favors Central Asia, and it says as much about Washington as about the region. This administration has stopped grading partners on ideological kinship or alliance seniority. Brussels, a treaty ally many times over, is viewed with suspicion for regulating American firms and hedging on American priorities. The relationships gaining altitude—the United Arab Emirates, Poland, Israel, Azerbaijan—belong to states that deliver concrete value and approach the world through the arithmetic of prosperity and stability rather than doctrine. By that standard, Central Asia competes well: it offers resources, transit, investment, and predictability, and asks mainly for partnership on commercial terms. Kazakhstan, with the deepest pockets and the fullest ledger of delivered projects, competes best of all.

None of this makes the rivalry with Uzbekistan zero-sum, and Kazakh officials are careful never to describe it that way. Uzbekistan brings the region’s largest population and a genuine reform record, and its pledge of $100 billion in US-bound investment and purchases over a decade—however optimistic economists find the math—keeps Tashkent firmly in the game. Both presidents are courting a Trump visit, which would be the first by a sitting US president to Central Asia; Mirziyoyev wants him in Samarkand, Tokayev in Kazakhstan. 

However, the corridor needs both countries, the minerals map spans the whole region, and every deal signed anywhere between the Caspian Sea and the Tian Shan Mountains raises the value of the neighborhood. What has changed is the hierarchy of the partnership: on the measures Washington now cares about—minerals in the ground, ports on the Caspian, capital already deployed—Kazakhstan sets the pace.

The history counsels humility. American attention to Central Asia has always run in cycles: the nonproliferation partnership of the 1990s, when Washington helped a newly independent Kazakhstan relinquish what was then the planet’s fourth-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons; the Afghanistan years, when the region mattered as a logistics chain; the long drift after 2014; the Biden administration’s cautious re-engagement, conducted largely through the lens of Russia sanctions. Each cycle ended with Washington’s gaze moving elsewhere. Announced deal values, meanwhile, tend to deflate as feasibility studies replace press releases.

But two things distinguish this cycle. The American need for mineral supplies beyond Beijing’s reach is structural and will outlive any administration. And Kazakhstan is converting goodwill into hard assets—mines, rail fleets, data centers, processing capacity. For once, the United States is engaging Central Asia not as a waypoint toward some other objective but on what the region itself has to offer. Kazakhstan earned that shift, and both countries stand to profit from it. The task now, for Washington as much as for Astana, is to be still building when the headlines move on.

About the Author: Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein is the director of the Turan Research Center, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an expert at the N7 Foundation, and a research fellow at the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. He also sits on the advisory board of the Alekain Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to providing education to women and girls in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. He specializes in Eurasia and the Middle East, and his work has been featured in outlets including Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, the Atlantic Council, Novaya Gazeta, RFE/RL, Foreign Policy, and others.

The post Kazakhstan’s American Moment appeared first on The National Interest.