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How Trump can break China’s tightening grip on Central Asia

The ceremonial launch of the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway on December 27 was the latest indication of China’s growing influence in Central Asia.

Construction is expected to take six years and will bolster China’s growing trade with a strategic region the US has de facto abandoned since withdrawing militarily from neighboring Afghanistan in 2021.

China’s trade with Central Asia, comprised of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, hit US$89 billion in 2023, making it by far the region’s largest trade partner.

China’s trade was followed by the EU with $53.9 billion, Russia’s $44 billion and Turkey’s nearly $13 billion. Central Asia has long been considered Russia’s sphere of influence but that’s perceptibly shifting toward China, in part due to the Ukraine war.

America’s combined trade with Central Asia in 2022, the last year for which the Office of the United States Trade Representative has published data, was a meager $4.4 billion.

This is in spite of the “United States Strategy for Central Asia 2019-2025: Advancing Sovereignty and Economic Prosperity”, published in February 2020 under the previous Trump administration.

India trailed behind at $2 billion in 2023 followed by Iran at $1.5 billion in 2022 and Pakistan at just $309 million that same year.

India and Iran’s low level of Central Asia trade is somewhat surprising considering their involvement in the International North-South Transport Corridor and the US sanctions waiver for India to conduct trade with Afghanistan from Iran’s Chabahar port (and then presumably throughout the rest of the region).

On that score, India and Iran clinched a 10-year Chabahar port deal last spring but the Biden administration surprisingly threatened

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