As intense great power rivalry sweeps the international system, middle powers increasingly tend to find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Ulugbek Khasanov explores how Uzbekistan maintains equilibrium in its foreign policy and strikes a balance between external powers seeking influence in Central Asia.
In the fifth book of his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides describes the negotiations between Athenian envoys and the inhabitants of the island of Melos in 416 BC, an episode that has gone down in history as the “Melian Dialogue”. This episode has also come to be remembered as an early example of coercive diplomacy. The neutral island was ordered to submit, and in return offered only appeals to justice and invocations of the gods. The proud Athenians held their ground: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”, and, true to their word, they put the male population of Melos to the sword, consigned the women and children to slavery, and repopulated the island with Athenian colonists.
In contemporary international relations, the Melian Dialogue is frequently misread as a “law of international politics”, whereby force determines the outcome and principle amounts to mere rhetoric. This reading has also gained considerable currency in the political rhetoric of the Trump administration, which invokes the principle of might makes right: in January 2026, National Security Adviser Stephen Miller declared openly that the world is “governed by force” and that this is “the iron law of the world since the beginning of time”.
The eminent scholar Jonathan Kirshner, in a recent article in the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs, observes rather pointedly that this understanding of the laws of politics distorts present–day reality and has become highly contentious. The Athenians’ words are not Thucydides’ own judgement, but a line delivered by politicians whose arrogance leads inexorably to catastrophe. The true lesson of the History is addressed, in fact, not to the weak but to the great power being destroyed by hubris, or overweening pride. In the ancient Greek historian’s account, both the “law of force” and “hubris” appear at the very moment of a state’s greatest power and, paradoxically, coincide with the loss of its former authority and its subsequent decline.
The events surrounding Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland and many others amply confirm the American scholar’s argument.
Let us put the question differently: what logic governs those who are neither Athens nor Sparta? What happens when small and medium–sized states refuse to remain passive objects of great–power competition and instead forge their own model of collective agency? In working out its own answer to this highly topical question, Central Asia becomes a significant case study for understanding present–day trends in world politics.
The logic behind the region’s response to security challenges is straightforward: if the problem is structural rather than merely psychological, then the response must be institutional too. In this logic, structural power derives not from the size of an army or the volume of GDP, but from the quality of a state’s institutional architecture. The contemporary system of international relations—with its financial markets, technological interdependence, global supply chains and digital infrastructure—magnifies this dependence many times over and turns institutional connectedness into an independent source of influence. It is in this context that Central Asia’s experience acquires real significance, all the more so because it extends well beyond the local setting.
This is not another iteration of multi–vector diplomacy, nor simply a matter of individual states balancing between great powers, but a qualitatively different strategy altogether. It involves building regional collective agency through internal institutionalisation and integration into a range of parallel structures of international cooperation. This is precisely what the region’s successful engagement with the major players of world politics demonstrates—within the EAEU, the CIS, the SCO, the Belt and Road Initiative, the WTO, the EU, the UN, the OTS, the OIC, the collective ‘C5+’ dialogue format, and many others, across the full spectrum of regional and international security issues.
On 16 November 2025, Tashkent hosted the Seventh Consultative Meeting of the Heads of State of Central Asia, chaired by the President of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev. The summit concluded with the adoption of a Joint Declaration, agreement on a regional security concept, and the approval of a catalogue of risks for 2026–2028. The central substantive message was the Uzbek leader’s proposal to transform the consultative dialogue into a strategic format—the “Central Asia Community”—complete with a permanent Secretariat, an upgrading of the status of national coordinators to special representatives of the heads of state, and the establishment of its own platform for multilateral meetings.
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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