Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev (L) gives a dossier called “Economic Cooperation between Uzbekistan and the United States” to US President Donald Trump during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 23.
AFP via Getty Images
Among the few winners of the recent UNGA events must definitely be Uzbekistan. Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev took a personal meeting with President Trump in front of the cameras. This, after a communication With DJT about the truth, the social network that praises Mr Mirziyoyev on the signing of an 8 billion dollar deal that buys Boeing Dreamliners, adding “this will create over 35,000” jobs in the US “. “Mr Mirziyoyev is a man of his speech,” he said, and “we will continue to work with many more objects.” This is very warm enthusiasm in Mr. Trump’s dictionary.
Uzbekistan president later had a roundtable meeting with leading US companies and financial institutions for further investment and joint projects. According to various reports Bilateral trade has been quadrupled since Mirziyoyev took over, with 300 US companies participating so far. Mineral extraction, especially in strategic minerals and rare earth materials, seems to be top on the list (the VP Colorado School met with Uzbek Prez and agreed to open a center in that country.
This column, as readers know, has repeatedly succeeded in the strategic importance of Central Asia and the “Stans”. In particular, the Western world’s need to return to the profile of the region, its economy and its political inclination as a way of compensating for the previous domination of Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and the like. Interestingly, this is an area in which the current administration has actually based on the initiatives of the Biden era. Thus, for example, Mr Trump reinforced the future of the Zangezur corridor, also known as Trump’s corridor, bringing primary Armenia and Azerbaijan to create it – thus giving Central Asia a commercial corridor to the world that for the first time in centuries, bypassing Russia (and Iran). The column has focused on this corridor several times over the years.
Immediate trade with the West also means a political model for the area potentially more enlightened and relaxed than its neighbors. This column, on October 26 of last year, was the first to break significant news for an assassination attempt at Komil Allamjanov, a central element in the liberation of Uzbek’s public speech and political processes. He had worked on a presidential committee led by his daughter Mirziyoyev, Saida Mirziyoyeva, on such initiatives. The plot went deep into state arteries, but the perpetrators finally rinse and prisoner. A top suspect had escaped in South Korea, where the authorities were impenetrable. This column helped to accelerate the situation by warning and challenging the SK media, which in turn pushed the authorities there.
Having survived and prosper without alteration, Allamjanov is now seeking life as an entrepreneur and an academic, mainly in the US. He has just been appointed Special Adviser to the Central Asian program at George Washington University. This is precisely the kind of positive effect that the narrower links with the West can bring. In the past, the US and Europe have seen the region as a dark zone, sinking into unchanging Soviet practices. The greatest interest with dedication changes the equation. In previous years, the region has been so often put on a knife-end of instability that US support is making a transformative difference.
Why, in fact, the West as a whole, is interested in a land section of distant geography until the realm of the influence of other regional forces? First, as mentioned above, there is not just a monopoly gifts over a large part of the world, its production and resources, to the opponents of America. Until now, Russia, China, Iran, have brought a kind of veto and tax on the development of Central Asia, which is the only access to world trade. There is no reason to further strengthen that our American opponents financially. The more options offered in Uzbekistan and surrounding countries such as Kazakhstan to differentiate, the more they will break and prosper. The more prosperous, the more Russia and China will have to look back to watch the new giant growing on their doorstep and not to push their neighbors ahead.
And then, of course, there is the issue of Afghanistan. The forces boiling in this country tend to extend beyond the area. Uzbeks, perhaps more than any other neighbor, have an influence on the border. There is a heavy piece of ethnic Uzbecs living in the Afghan north. Cross -border trade has always been a factor. Afghanistan leaders in Kabul are sensitive to Uzbeck shades. Here, then, is a possible geostrategic lever for the West in otherwise full of relationships with Afghanistan. As the population of Afghanistan becomes more desperate under the primitive rule of Kabul, in which country will they seek relief? Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan and the like, or a flourishing and carefully secular Uzbek with guaranteed women’s rights? In short, Tashkent offers a useful pipeline for the world to mitigate the export of extreme Islam – and to offset Moscow’s growing detention with the Taliban.
Commercial, politically, culturally, the US must maintain the intensification of Tashkent’s embrace. The amount of investment in effort and funds promises to return multiplication to geostrategic terms.
