Nobody is choosing
Five landlocked states are being courted by three Western powers, two rival technology blocs, and the two neighbours they cannot leave. The striking thing is how few of them are picking a side — and how well that is working for them.
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Boundaries from Natural Earth 1:50m public-domain data, projected equirectangular with a standard parallel at 45°N and simplified for display. Route alignments are indicative, drawn through real waypoints rather than surveyed.
The argument
Since November 2025 this region has acquired a United States leaders' summit, an EU strategic partnership, a British ministerial format, an Abraham Accords signatory, and seats in both of the world's competing technology blocs. Read as a run of headlines, it looks like a pivot westward.
Read against what happened with Moscow over the same months, it looks like something less dramatic and more interesting. In the year Tokayev publicly asked Putin to stop the war in Ukraine, Kazakhstan also recorded its highest-ever trade with Russia, signed a currency swap, and agreed to have Rosatom build two nuclear units. Nothing was traded away. The Western gains were additions, not substitutions.
So the organising question of this brief is not whether Central Asia is turning west. It is not. The question is what a middle power should do with a region that has become very good at accepting offers from everyone — and whether the West's current instinct, which is increasingly to demand exclusivity, is the right response or precisely the wrong one.
The argument is set out across , published as it developed. This page is the standing summary.
Why the brief is called Landlocked
Every state here is landlocked, and Uzbekistan is one of only two countries on earth that is doubly landlocked — every one of its neighbours is landlocked too. That is not trivia. It means no government in the region can reach a customer without a third country's consent, which is why Kazakhstan can criticise Moscow publicly and still be unable to act on the criticism. Geography sets the ceiling on how far any realignment can go, and most commentary on this region ignores it.
The five states are not moving together
A structural divergence is opening up. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have the diplomatic bandwidth, the reserves and the reform record to be courted. Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan largely do not, and Western concentration on the top two risks pushing the other three toward Moscow and Beijing by default. The country data behind that divergence is set out in the next section.
Five states, one label, very little in common
Treating Central Asia as a bloc is the first analytical error. A country where remittances are half of GDP and one that supplies two-fifths of the world's uranium do not have the same interests, the same leverage, or the same room to manoeuvre.
The comparison that matters
Remittances and growth: World Bank open data, 2024 values. Median age: UNICEF, Generation 2050 in Central Asia, November 2025, 2025 values. Turkmenistan remittance data is not published by the World Bank and is shown as unavailable rather than estimated.
| Country | Median age (2025) | Remittances, % GDP (2024) | GDP growth (2024) | Defining endowment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kazakhstan | 29.7 | 0.1% | 5.0% | Uranium, oil, rare earths, the transit landmass |
| Uzbekistan | 27.0 | 14.4% | 6.5% | Population, gold, copper, the most diversified economy in the region |
| Turkmenistan | 26.9 | not published | 6.3% | Natural gas — reserves ranked fourth in the world |
| Kyrgyzstan | 25.4 | 26.6% | 9.0% | Hydropower, gold, and an unusually open political system by regional standards |
| Tajikistan | 22.2 | 47.9% | 8.4% | Hydropower — and the deepest labour dependency on Russia anywhere in the region |
The single most important number on this page
Remittances were 47.9% of Tajikistan's GDP in 2024 and 26.6% of Kyrgyzstan's. Over 80% of migration flows from both countries went to Russia as of 2023. No Western package of any plausible size substitutes for that. Any strategy that ignores labour mobility is not addressing the binding constraint on those two states.
Uzbekistan is the region's largest population at over 38 million, one of only two doubly landlocked countries in the world, and the only state bordering all four other Central Asian countries as well as Afghanistan. Real GDP grew 7.7% in 2025, exports rose 24% led by gold, copper, zinc, uranium goods, food and fertilizers, and international reserves reached $70bn.
World Bank country overview · worldbank.orgKazakhstan produced about 25,839 tonnes of uranium in 2025, roughly 40% of world output, and is moving deliberately up the value chain — a fuel pellet fabrication plant opened in 2021 and reached its 200 tU/year design capacity in 2024. In an October 2024 referendum, 70% of voters backed new nuclear energy.
World Nuclear Association country profile · world-nuclear.orgTurkmenistan holds proven gas reserves ranked fourth globally after Iran, Russia and Qatar, with the Galkynysh field alone accounting for the large majority of the national total. Reserve estimates vary widely between auditors and official statements, and Ashgabat has at times claimed figures far above independent assessments.
Oil & Gas Journal · ogj.com — note this assessment is a decade old; VOA has separately documented the gap between Turkmen claims and audited estimates.Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan hold no significant fossil fuel reserves but sit on the bulk of the region's hydropower potential; Central Asia as a whole accounts for around 5.5% of world hydropower potential, most of it undeveloped. This is the basis of the region's water–energy bargain: upstream states hold the water, downstream states hold the gas.
Peer-reviewed analysis in Economic Analysis and Policy · sciencedirect.com; World Bank Central Asia Energy-Water Development Program.Country by country
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Harry Pye
I am an international relations student from Wales, based in London. I write on foreign policy and policy design, with a particular interest in the places that sit at the edge of Western attention and the institutional questions that decide what happens there. I also write about British, Welsh, and European politics and culture.
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