Foreign ministers and senior officials from more than 50 countries convened on Feb.4 in Washington for the United States’ inaugural Critical Minerals Ministerial. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were among the delegations present – symbolically significant for a region that has spent the last decade signalling “multi-vector” foreign policy while operating under structural constraints.
Rasul Kospanov.
Washington’s message was openness and coordination, framed as an alternative to strategic dependency on China’s processing dominance. The ministerial also made something else explicit: Central Asia is increasingly treated as a strategic hub in its own right, not a geopolitical buffer to be managed.
But Central Asia’s challenge is different. The region must convert diplomatic attention into concrete projects that deepen domestic processing, create skilled employment and increase strategic autonomy. And that will not happen if Astana and Tashkent wait for Washington’s “frameworks” to become factories.
The gap in intent vs. concrete outcomes
The current asymmetry is clear: China has translated engagement into financed, operational projects, often bundled with contractors, concessional credit, and long-term offtake. Western partners have mainly engaged through MoUs and frameworks that signal political intent but do not, on their own, build mines or refineries.
Since 2022, EU firms have invested in five critical materials projects in Central Asia, and identifiable U.S. involvement is still – concentrated in a few flagship or early-stage deals. By contrast, Beijing’s footprint already spans twenty-five critical minerals projects in the region with Chinese investment and active management.
Vlad Paddack.
As a result of this gap, Central Asia has become increasingly embedded in Beijing’s processing chains. This is especially evident in Kazakhstan, where up to 99.98 percent of tungsten ores and concentrates are exported to China. Additionally, Russia’s Rosatom has a strong presence in Central Asia’s uranium sector.
The ministerial showcased a more ambitious U.S. concept for “mineral sovereignty,” including the launch of a new coordination platform, FORGE, positioned as a successor to earlier partnership formats. It also featured a more interventionist instrument: tariff-backed price floors intended to reduce volatility and counter market dumping that deters new investment. These ideas matter because they signal that the U.S. is moving beyond rhetorical alignment toward shaping the economics of the supply chain.
Yet they also underline the core problem. Price floors and trade-zone concepts do not automatically create capacity in Central Asia. They are enabling conditions, not execution. They help define the rules of the game, but the region still needs players willing to localize production on the ground.
Uzbekistan’s own initiative shows what “project-ready” looks like: in March 2025 Tashkent announced a $2.6 billion three-year program covering 76 projects and 28 minerals, explicitly aiming to move from extraction to processing and finished products. This is designed for partners that can execute at scale. The point is not that Western partners lack capital or expertise, but that the engagement model has rarely been structured to convert interest into construction-ready projects.
Kazakhstan has launched the largest geological mapping program in decades, investing $470 million into a detailed survey of subsoil resources. At the same time, the Baiterek development institution has been transformed into a national investment holding company. Each year, it will support around 15 major projects with preferential financing. This is a substantial boost for companies looking to start production in Kazakhstan. The state is taking on early-stage risks and acting as the first investor in capital-intensive projects, clearing the way for private business.
This is where the conversation should shift from geopolitics to incentives. There is no shortage of private capital in the U.S. and Europe. Investors hesitate because of perceived risks – regulatory unpredictability, geopolitical exposure, infrastructure bottlenecks, and skills gaps – and because the overall package of incentives is often too thin to justify entering a region that can feel “frontier” compared with alternative jurisdictions. Public finance can underwrite political risk insurance, provide concessional tranches for infrastructure bottlenecks, or support early-stage technical and workforce development that private capital will not fund.
If Western partners want Central Asia to be a commercially rational choice, they must use public instruments to absorb the risks that private investors will not. The real constraint is not market failure; it is policy design.
Washington pushes for techno-economic sovereignty
The U.S. is undergoing a deeper shift toward techno-economic sovereignty: consolidating AI leadership, energy systems, supply chain security, and advanced manufacturing under tight presidential oversight. The logic is inward-looking: dependencies are reframed as vulnerabilities, resilience becomes an organizing principle, and industrial policy becomes foreign policy.
The ministerial’s emerging “vertical integration” emphasis reflects this. Washington’s value proposition is not simply buying Central Asian ore instead of Chinese-processed material. It is to reconfigure supply chains among “trusted partners” while keeping the highest-value stages of refining and advanced manufacturing anchored in, or closely aligned with, U.S.-centric ecosystems.
This matters for Central Asia because the U.S. will engage selectively abroad when projects are de-risked, compliant, and aligned with U.S. resilience objectives. In practice, this means Central Asian states should assume that Washington will not be an active driver of regional industrialization. It will be a catalyst where conditions are right, and a gatekeeper where they are not.
That selectivity is not hostile to Central Asia – it is structural. It is precisely why Central Asian agency, not Western rhetoric, must be the engine.
A window of opportunity
2025 brought high-level gestures, including the C5+1 Presidential Summit in Washington and a landmark critical minerals deal with Kazakhstan. 2026 added a ministerial to institutionalize cooperation and an MoU formalizing critical minerals cooperation with Uzbekistan. But intent is not momentum, and Central Asia should not wait for U.S. demand to materialise on its own.
The immediate opportunity is to align Central Asia’s industrial strategy with the West’s stated preferences without surrendering the value chain. That starts with midstream capabilities. Shipping ore is costly, exposed, and low-margin. Exporting refined metals and intermediary products offsets connectivity constraints and strengthens Central Asia’s position in the value chain. It also fits Western partners’ language of “secure supply” because processed intermediates are closer to industrial use than raw ore.
Connectivity is the second hinge. Western discussions increasingly place the Middle Corridor into broader initiatives that aim to reduce transit dependence on Russia and China. For Central Asia, connectivity translates directly into bargaining power. The more credible the region’s export routes, the less discount it pays for perceived isolation, and the more feasible it becomes to scale midstream projects that require reliable logistics.
Finally – execution through companies, not memorandums. Central Asia’s key resource players are mostly state-owned or quasi-state corporations, such as Kazatomprom, Navoiuran, and Uzmetkombinat. Cooperation should therefore be built around concrete project-based deals between companies and investors, with clear economics, licensing terms, and guarantees.
For Central Asia, the alternative is path dependency and gradual absorption into China’s supply and production chains, eroding the region’s political autonomy. Central Asia is currently enjoying a rare moment when its multi-vector foreign policy is paying off, and major powers are competing for the region’s resources. That label is meaningless unless the region uses it to build. The region must be the guardian of its own destiny.
The authors are Rasul Kospanov, a senior researcher at NAC Analytica (Nazarbayev University) and Vlad Paddack, a senior analyst at AKE International and a fellow at Nightingale Int. The Nightingale International company operates internationally, with a focus on Central Asia, as well as operations in the USA and the EU.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Astana Times.
