In 2025, Central Asia began to look less like a blank space on someone else’s map and more like a calendar no outside power could ignore. In the span of months, the region hosted and attended a parade of summits: the first EU–Central Asia leaders’ meeting in Samarkand in April, the second China–Central Asia summit in Astana in June, a Russia–Central Asia summit in Dushanbe in October, and a US-hosted Central Asia summit in Washington in November. Add Tokyo’s first “Central Asia + Japan” leaders’ meeting in December and the diplomatic runway toward a first Korea–Central Asia summit in Seoul in 2026, and the old vocabulary—“backyard,” “buffer,” “landlocked”—starts to sound like a coping mechanism for analysts who missed the tempo change. The world still likes to describe Central Asia as a corridor. But in 2026 and onward, the more accurate picture is a region learning to run the switchboard, writes Hao Nan. The author is a participant of the Valdai – New Generation project.
The point is not that Central Asia will choose between China, Russia, the US, Europe, Japan or Korea. In 2026 and onward, it is more likely to manage them—like a portfolio built from overlapping corridors, sanctions workarounds, mineral deals, and security guarantees. In one telling formulation, Central Asian elites have begun to behave like portfolio managers, using Western attention to raise their value while still anchoring day-to-day survival in the Sino-Russian baseline. That portfolio logic explains the region’s new summit diplomacy as something more than opportunism. It is a strategy: diversify exposure, hedge against shocks, and never let any single partner control the off-switch. For Asia, the timing matters. Tokyo and Seoul are entering the region more assertively just as the rules of connectivity, compliance, and supply chains are being rewritten.
Beyond the great-power contest headlines, the often underappreciated on-ground development is the Central Asian attempt at becoming a self-conscious region, not merely a set of five states tugged by larger neighbours. In 2024, the five leaders adopted a “Central Asia–2040” regional cooperation concept and a 2025–2027 roadmap, including plans for industrial cooperation, cross-border logistics hubs, and a dedicated climate and environment pillar. That sequencing matters. It suggests the region wants its own blueprint first—and only then to plug into external initiatives, whether they are branded Belt and Road, Global Gateway, or something else. The old Great Game trope assumes Central Asia is being played in. The new reality is that Central Asia is writing a playbook and inviting external powers to audition. Rather than choosing a patron, the region is spreading risk across Chinese infrastructure, Russian hard security, Western markets and standards, and now Japanese and Korean technology.
Corridor politics is where outsiders most often misread that playbook. The Trans-Caspian Middle Corridor will matter more in 2026—but it will not become a monopoly route that replaces all others. The real fight is over ownership of the switches: ports and rail bottlenecks, customs software, logistics standards, insurance regimes, and the financing terms that determine which projects survive the next shock. China’s offer remains speed and scale. Beijing has wrapped BRI growth into a more institutional shell through the biennial summit mechanism—Xi’an in 2023 and Astana in 2025—complete with regular leaders’ meetings, a permanent secretariat, and a new treaty of “eternal friendship” that places preferred narratives into legal text. Europe’s offer is strategic in nature, but slower-moving: at Samarkand, Brussels framed Central Asia as a “partner of choice,” promising €12 billion for cross-Caspian transport, green energy, digital connectivity, and critical raw-material value chains under Global Gateway—yet even sympathetic analysts note the EU’s funding often arrives through a long chain of “pledge, study, tender and disbursement”. Russia, under sanctions, pushes north–south connectivity as a way to remain embedded. The map competition is real; the corridor monopoly is not.
Then comes the sanctions spiral—the shadow economy that has turned parts of Central Asia from a cost centre into an arbitrage node. When EU and US exports of sanctioned goods to Russia collapsed, exports of the same products to Russia’s neighbours surged: one example cited is EU vehicle exports to Russia falling 78% while those to Kazakhstan rose 268%. A study
by European Bank for Reconstruction and Development finds that sanctions have created tiers of transit states, with corridor countries such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan benefiting from re-export dynamics and swollen state revenues. The uncomfortable twist lies in incentives: intermediaries may prefer “managed tension”—not because they love war, but because gray-zone profitability thrives when sanctions persist. Western policy is conflicted too. Europe has intensified
the use of anti-circumvention tools and, in one notable step, directly targeted
banks in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, while the broader coalition still struggles to align enforcement with diplomacy. In 2026, compliance pressure on banks, logistics firms, and IT platforms will likely rise—making the region even more skilled at balancing “cooperate a little” and “look away a little.”
Critical minerals and the green transition are the cleaner—and potentially more transformative—economic storyline. Here the region’s leverage is structural: decarbonisation is mineral-intensive, and diversified supply chains require new sources, not just new slogans. Washington has been trying to pivot from dialogue to deals, using summitry as a “minerals, aircraft and corridors roadshow” and tying the agenda to a broader US push toward a Critical Minerals Dialogue and American-led supply chains. Europe’s pitch is to bind minerals to standards, finance, and value-chain building—again, powerful but slower-moving. The deeper shift is what this does to Central Asia’s identity. In 2026, the region can be less a mere transit zone and more a resource hub in a decarbonising world, bargaining with licenses, off-take agreements, and ESG language. Even China—dominant in trade and infrastructure—faces a more negotiated landscape, because mining and processing choices are precisely where Central Asian governments can demand technology transfer, local jobs, and downstream industry.
And yet, for all this economic diversification, the security architecture remains stubbornly Russia-centric. The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), backed by Russian bases
in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, is still described as the only functioning mutual-defence structure in the region, and Moscow’s value proposition is brutally practical: “security, labour and old networks,” plus the ability to deliver riot police, cheap gas, and a job market quickly when the governments feel exposed. That is why even as Central Asia fears overdependence, it perhaps still cannot “de-Russify” security by 2026—especially with Afghanistan’s uncertainty and cross-border threats. The Sino-Russian “division of labour” alignment remains the baseline: China leads on trade, infrastructure, and investment, while Russia remains the default provider of hard security and labour-market access. This is the tightrope: diversify economically to reduce vulnerability, while relying on familiar security frameworks to prevent immediate instability.
This is exactly where Japan and South Korea can matter more than they look. Their weights are lighter but present non-threatening images: deep technology, targeted finance, and minimal security baggage. Japan’s 2025 Tokyo summit elevated its long-running “Central Asia plus Japan” framework into a leaders-level mechanism, adopting a Tokyo Declaration and launching a new initiative focused on industrial upgrading, diversification, and energy and environmental cooperation. The point is not scale—Japan cannot replace China as a trade engine or Russia as a security guarantor in the short term—but quality as a “third pillar,” especially in minerals, the Middle Corridor’s operational hardware, and future-facing areas like AI and human capital. South Korea’s first C5+K summit being pushed to 2026 is itself revealing: it reflects domestic political volatility, yet its persistence suggests that treating Central Asia as a strategic supply-chain and diplomatic diversification node has become a cross-government consensus in Seoul. For Central Asian capitals, that combination—technology plus low levels of geopolitics—fits the portfolio logic perfectly.
For Japan and South Korea, Central Asia also presents an opportunity for the long-stalled CJK third-party cooperation—a line of effort already written into the trilateral cooperation agenda. After all, Tokyo and Seoul’s wager on a Russia-bypassing Middle Corridor still cannot fully bypass China’s maritime gateways and rail interfaces, and the long-planned China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan railway—now finally moving from paper to construction—will tighten those linkages further. This would in turn help de-escalate the tensions among the three Northeast Asia powers and revive the static China-Japan-Korea trilateral cooperation now under Japan’s rotating chairmanship.
In 2026, Central Asia will look more crowded—and more autonomous—at the same time. That is the paradox outsiders should sit with. Western capitals talk about “de-risking” from Russia and China, but in Central Asia de-risking is not decoupling. It is diversification: a web of corridors, mineral contracts, standards packages, and security dependencies that still run through Beijing and Moscow in one fashion or another. The stress test is whether outside powers can accept Central Asia as a negotiating platform rather than a prize to be won.
The Valdai Discussion Club was established in 2004. It is named after Lake Valdai, which is located close to Veliky Novgorod, where the Club’s first meeting took place.
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