Strategy without a clear definition of success is not truly strategy; it is merely activity. After eleven installments exploring the landscape, tools, alliances, difficult cases, and financing mechanisms, it’s important to be explicit about what the United States actually aims to achieve in Eurasia and what the next decade should deliver. Discussing means only makes sense if there is clarity about the goals.

The objective is not dominance. China and Russia are resident Eurasian powers with interests, historical relationships, and geographic presence that the United States cannot and should not try to eliminate. The objective is something more achievable and more valuable: a Eurasian environment where countries have genuine strategic choice, where U.S. partnerships are seen as the highest-quality option for economic development and technology cooperation, and where no single authoritarian power can impose its preferences on the region by virtue of structural dependency. That environment, built through patient and consistent engagement over a decade, is worth more than any single military or financial advantage measurable in a given year.

What the Destination Looks Like

The destination is specific. Critical mineral supply chains running through multiple countries with U.S.-backed processing capacity, reducing China's chokehold on the materials that both the clean energy transition and advanced defense manufacturing require. Digital infrastructure across Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East is built on open-architecture, trusted-vendor telecommunications networks rather than Chinese surveillance-capable alternatives. A network of Technology Prosperity Deals extending the U.S.-Japan-Korea co-innovation model to India, Singapore, Poland, Israel, and eventually others, creating a web of aligned technology standards, coordinated export controls, and shared R&D investment across the globe's most dynamic technology economies.

Functioning trade and logistics corridors, IMEC operational between India and Europe, the Trans-Caspian Middle Corridor handling significant commercial volume, and north-south connections that eventually link Central Asia to South Asian ports, giving landlocked and developing economies genuine alternatives to dependence on Chinese and Russian transit. Human capital networks built through education programs, research partnerships, and entrepreneurship initiatives that give the next generation of Eurasian leaders direct, formative experience of American institutions and values. These are not aspirations. They are achievable outcomes if the tools described throughout this series are deployed consistently over the decade.

The Near-Term Agenda

In the near term, the next two years, the priority is deploying existing tools with greater urgency and visibility. DFC capital commitments in Central Asian mining and processing should be operationalized from the MOU to an active project, with specific milestones and accountability. Open RAN pilot deployments in ASEAN should be launched with coordinated financing from the U.S. and Japan. The IMEC coordination body should be established with a clear mandate and adequate staffing. C5+1 should be elevated to heads-of-state level frequency, signaling that American engagement with Central Asia is a presidential priority, not a bureaucratic sidebar. Technology Prosperity Deal negotiations should be formally launched with India and Singapore.

Each of these is specific enough to track and accountable enough to generate real consequences if it does not happen. The discipline required is to treat these as commitments with deadlines rather than as aspirations subject to indefinite deferral. The track record of American engagement initiatives that were announced with fanfare and then quietly abandoned is long enough that partner countries discount new announcements until they see evidence of follow-through. The way to change that calculation is to follow through, visibly and on time.

The Medium-Term Architecture

In the medium term, years three through five, the goal is to build institutional infrastructure that enables sustained engagement regardless of electoral cycles. Political transitions in democracies are inevitable, and American engagement strategies that rely on the personal enthusiasm of specific officials do not survive them. The institutions need to be strong enough to carry the strategy forward.

A permanent U.S.-Central Asia Business Council would provide a durable infrastructure for corporate engagement. A fully capitalized and expanded DFC with streamlined application processes for small and medium enterprises would broaden the pool of private capital that can access government risk-mitigation tools. An annual Eurasia Cybersecurity Forum that produces actionable threat intelligence sharing would create an ongoing mechanism for the kind of coordination that currently happens episodically. Bilateral Investment Treaties with Uzbekistan, Georgia, and other emerging economies would signal a long-term American commitment in a legally binding form that survives political cycles. Joint R&D funding with India and the EU would provide a financial foundation for co-innovation agreements.

The Long-Term Measure

In the longer term, years six through ten, the measure of success is whether the architecture is functioning independently of constant political attention from Washington. Are Central Asian states demonstrating genuine strategic autonomy vis-à-vis both Russia and China, making their own choices based on their interests rather than being structurally compelled by infrastructure or debt dependencies? Are Indo-Pacific technology supply chains meaningfully diversified away from single-country concentration? Are U.S.-backed trade corridors handling significant commercial volume that generates real economic stakes in their continuation? Are the Technology Prosperity Deal networks producing jointly developed technologies that are setting global standards?

These are not binary outcomes. They exist on continuums. But directional progress on each of them would constitute a genuine strategic achievement that compounds over time, creating the kind of deep, structural alignment that the United States built with its postwar allies and that has proven far more durable than any formal treaty commitment.

The Consistency Imperative

The most important discipline required is consistency. The United States has a well-documented tendency to announce Eurasian engagement initiatives with significant fanfare and then allow them to atrophy as political attention shifts. China's advantage in Central Asia and Southeast Asia is not primarily a function of superior strategy. It is a function of showing up every year, in every meeting, with capital and proposals, while American engagement has been episodic. Consistency is not glamorous. It does not generate dramatic moments that yield short-term political credit. But it is what converts relationships into structural partnerships, where officials in Almaty, Hanoi, Riyadh, and New Delhi have built their economic plans around American involvement because that involvement has proven reliable across years and administrations.

The Eurasian gambit is not won in a single bold move. It is won through the accumulation of thousands of smaller ones: financing decisions, standards-setting participation, trade framework negotiations, engineer exchanges, fiber cable routes, port upgrades, and scholarship programs that individually seem modest but collectively constitute a strategic architecture. The United States built exactly this kind of architecture after World War II, and it underpinned seven decades of unparalleled American prosperity and security. Building its 21st-century equivalent, adapted to great power competition and technological transformation, is the central task of American statecraft in the years ahead.

The pieces are on the board. The game is underway. The window for shaping its outcome is open, but it will not remain open indefinitely. Eurasia is not waiting. China is not waiting. Russia, diminished but present, is not waiting. The question is only whether the United States will show up with the seriousness this moment demands, and stay. It is time to play seriously.

The most common objection to ambitious American engagement in Eurasia is financial. China spent an estimated $1 trillion on BRI projects in a decade. The United States, it is argued, cannot match that kind of state-driven capital deployment and therefore cannot compete on infrastructure. This objection misunderstands both the nature of the competition and the actual financing tools the United States has available.

China's BRI capital came primarily in the form of sovereign loans from Chinese state banks, loans that recipient countries must repay, often at interest rates that are higher than concessional, frequently tied to procurement from Chinese firms, and sometimes secured against strategic assets when repayment becomes difficult. This model has a specific appeal: it moves quickly, does not impose governance conditions, and delivers visible infrastructure that governments can claim as achievements. But it creates specific liabilities that compound over time: debt distress, sovereignty concerns, and political backlash when the terms become apparent to publics who did not fully understand what their governments had signed. Sri Lanka, Zambia, Pakistan, and others provide documented case studies.

The American model is structurally different and ultimately more sustainable, but it needs to be deployed at a greater scale and with greater urgency to compete, and closing the gap between pledge and deployment has been the chronic failure of American development finance strategy.

The PGII Commitment and the Execution Challenge

The Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment represents the G7's commitment to mobilize $600 billion in infrastructure investment by 2027. The critical word is "mobilize.” PGII does not plan to deploy government capital equal to that total. It plans to use government financing tools to catalyze private investment that would otherwise not flow to developing-market infrastructure. This is the right model. Using public capital to derisk private investment, rather than competing with private capital through direct government lending, is both more fiscally sustainable and more likely to produce infrastructure projects that are commercially viable in the long run.

The challenge is execution speed. Private capital does not flow to developing markets because the risks, political, currency, regulatory, and legal, are too high relative to available returns. Reducing those risks efficiently requires institutional capacity, deal-making expertise, and streamlined processes that government bureaucracies do not naturally develop. Getting from pledge to deployed capital faster requires deliberate institutional investment in the agencies that move money: the DFC, Ex-Im, USAID's Development Finance function, and MCC.

The Development Finance Corporation

The Development Finance Corporation is the primary vehicle for catalyzing private investment in Eurasia. Created by the BUILD Act in 2018 with a $60 billion portfolio limit, DFC can provide debt financing, equity investments, political risk insurance, and technical assistance for private sector projects in developing countries. Its recent co-financing of mining and processing infrastructure in Central Asia represents exactly the kind of deployment the strategy requires.

But DFC's current capital limit and operational capacity need significant expansion if it is to operate at the scale Eurasian competition demands. The legislative case for increasing DFC's mandate is strong: the return on DFC investment is not just commercial but strategic, and the strategic returns from a more deeply integrated Eurasian partner network are enormous. Congress should treat DFC capitalization as a national security investment, not just a development finance appropriation.

Political Risk Insurance

Political risk insurance is probably the most underappreciated tool in the U.S. financing arsenal. The reason American private capital does not flow into Central Asian mining ventures, Southeast Asian digital infrastructure, or Middle Eastern renewable energy projects at the required scale is not primarily inadequate returns; it is that the risk premium associated with operating in politically uncertain environments makes the risk-adjusted return unattractive compared to alternatives in more stable markets.

DFC insurance covering expropriation risk, currency convertibility, and political violence transforms the risk calculation for private investors in ways that no amount of diplomatic encouragement can match. Expanding access to this insurance, particularly for small and medium enterprises that currently cannot navigate DFC's application process efficiently, would unlock significant private capital sitting on the sidelines. Many American companies have the technology, expertise, and interest to operate in developing Eurasian markets. What they lack is affordable risk mitigation that makes the business case internally defensible.

Blended Finance and the First-Loss Structure

Blended finance structures deserve more systematic deployment. In a blended finance arrangement, concessional public capital, from USAID, MCC, or DFC, absorbs the first-loss tranche of a project, making the remaining investment attractive to commercial investors who would otherwise require returns too high for the project to be viable. A project with a 10 percent expected return that carries 5 percent risk might not attract private investment. If public capital absorbs that 5 percent risk, the same project at the same return becomes commercially attractive to a much broader pool of investors.

This model has worked in clean energy deployment in sub-Saharan Africa and in digital infrastructure projects in Southeast Asia. It should be standardized as a tool across Eurasian infrastructure categories, renewable energy in Central Asia, fiber-optic cable in the Caucasus, 5G in ASEAN, rather than deployed only on a case-by-case basis, where individual project teams reinvent the wheel.

The Export-Import Bank

The Export-Import Bank provides export financing that directly benefits American companies competing for overseas contracts, and it is systematically underused as a competitive tool. American companies frequently lose infrastructure bids in developing markets, not because their technology or execution quality is inferior, but because their financing package is not competitive with what Chinese state banks or European export credit agencies routinely offer as a matter of national policy.

Germany, France, Japan, and South Korea all deploy their export credit agencies aggressively to support their firms in developing markets. The U.S. should do the same. Ensuring that Ex-Im is fully funded, staffed with deal-making capacity, and aggressively using its full authority to support American firms competing for Eurasian infrastructure contracts would immediately improve American firms' competitive position in markets where the financing package is the decisive factor.

MCC and the Governance Premium

The Millennium Challenge Corporation's model, requiring demonstrated governance reform as a precondition for access to capital, should be preserved and its geographic scope expanded. Countries that make the governance commitments MCC requires should be rewarded with access to a larger pipeline of American government and American-mobilized private investment. This creates positive incentives for anti-corruption reforms and rule-of-law improvements that make American investment viable and that serve the long-term interests of the host countries themselves.

The financial case for American engagement in Eurasia is ultimately straightforward: the returns to a Eurasia more economically integrated with the United States are enormous, both commercially and strategically. The capital required to generate those returns is available in private markets. What is needed is the institutional architecture to deploy it efficiently, the political will to sustain deployment over the decade-long time horizon these investments require, and the strategic coherence to ensure that individual financing decisions contribute to a coordinated objective. All of those things are achievable.

The BRI was never primarily about altruism, and neither is this. American engagement in Eurasian infrastructure should be understood as a strategic investment in the conditions that sustain American security and prosperity over the long term. Frame it that way in appropriations debates. Fund it accordingly. The choice is whether to treat it with the seriousness it deserves.

Central Asia does not appear on most Americans' mental maps of strategic competition. That is a problem. The five republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan sit at the geographic heart of Eurasia, bordering Russia to the north, China to the east, Afghanistan and Iran to the south, and the broader Islamic world to the southwest. They hold some of the world's most significant reserves of hydrocarbons, uranium, rare earth elements, and strategic minerals. They have young, rapidly urbanizing populations, governments that are seeking, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to reduce historical dependence on Russia's economic and security architecture, and a growing appetite for the technology partnerships and infrastructure investment that the United States is positioned to provide.

The strategic significance is not purely economic. Central Asia is the geographic fulcrum on which Eurasian connectivity balances. The trans-Caspian trade routes, the north-south energy corridors, the digital backbone that will eventually connect the Indian subcontinent to European markets: all of them run through or near these five countries. Whoever shapes the infrastructure and institutional relationships of Central Asia over the next decade shapes the connectivity architecture of the entire landmass. That is what China and Russia understand, and what drives their sustained engagement in the region.

Kazakhstan: The Anchor

Kazakhstan is the anchor of the Central Asian strategy. The largest of the five by both area and economy, Kazakhstan has pursued a consistent multi-vector foreign policy since independence, maintaining close ties with Russia through the EAEU, building deep economic links with China through BRI investments, and gradually deepening its relationship with the West through energy exports, investment partnerships, and cautious democratic reform. Its critical minerals endowment is extraordinary: the world's largest uranium producer, plus significant chromium, manganese, copper, titanium, and rare earth elements. The government has been explicit about wanting to develop processing capacity to move up the value chain rather than remain a raw-material exporter, dependent on Chinese refineries for the transformation that generates real economic value.

Kazakhstan has also demonstrated real institutional capacity. Its independent foreign policy is not performative. When Russia sought to pressure Astana into circumventing Western sanctions after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Kazakhstan publicly declined and took concrete steps to avoid secondary sanctions exposure. That kind of demonstrated independence, under significant pressure from a powerful neighbor, deserves recognition and reciprocal commitment from Washington.

Uzbekistan: The Opening

Uzbekistan has undergone a remarkable opening since 2016, when President Mirziyoyev implemented reforms that liberalized the currency, opened the country to foreign investment, and reduced the state's direct economic involvement in key sectors. The reforms have been real, if incomplete. The country has signed a critical minerals MOU with the United States, is hosting increasing American investment interest, and is actively positioning itself as a logistics hub for Trans-Caspian trade. Its population of 37 million is the largest in Central Asia and is young, educated, and urbanizing rapidly.

The Uzbek opening represents a window that may not remain open indefinitely. Governments that choose to reform their economies and open to international investment do so in a context of competing pressures. Chinese investment is available, Russian influence is persistent, and the domestic political economy of opening creates winners and losers whose interests will shape subsequent policy choices. The United States should treat Uzbekistan's current reform trajectory as an opportunity that requires active engagement now, rather than a stable condition that can be relied upon without reinforcement.

The Competition Is Real and Active

China has invested heavily across Central Asia through BRI, financing railways, highways, pipelines, and special economic zones that address real infrastructure needs. It has secured long-term supply agreements for Kazakh and Uzbek energy and minerals. Chinese firms are deeply embedded in construction and infrastructure. Russia maintains its EAEU leverage and extensive security relationships built over decades of Soviet and post-Soviet integration. The question is not whether China and Russia are competing in Central Asia; they clearly are, but whether the United States can offer a compelling enough alternative to shift the balance of economic relationships over time.

The answer is yes, but only if the engagement is sustained, specific, and competitive on the terms that actually matter to Central Asian governments: reliable capital at reasonable terms, technology partnerships with genuine knowledge transfer, and relationships that treat these countries as strategic partners rather than pieces on a board being managed from Washington.

What Active Engagement Looks Like

The C5+1 platform needs to move from diplomatic process to visible results. A U.S.-Central Asia Business Council, modeled on similar mechanisms that have worked in Southeast Asia, would create a structured channel for American corporate engagement with Central Asian markets, providing the deal-flow infrastructure that currently lacks institutional support. Special Economic Zones with American tax treaty provisions and guaranteed DFC political risk insurance could anchor specific investment projects that demonstrate the American model in concrete form.

Digital infrastructure in Central Asia is at a decision point that will not remain open much longer. These countries need 5G networks and are actively weighing bids from Chinese, Russian, and Western vendors. The combination of American financing through DFC, Open RAN technology from trusted vendors, and cybersecurity capacity-building through State Department programs gives the United States a viable, competitive offering. But it needs to be actively presented, competitively priced, and backed by credible long-term support commitments. Countries do not choose infrastructure vendors based on geopolitics alone. They choose based on who shows up with a real, fully packaged proposal.

Education and human capital are the longest-horizon investments with the most compounding returns. Expanding Fulbright scholarships for Central Asian students, funding regionally oriented STEM graduate programs with American university partnerships, and running technology entrepreneurship programs for young Central Asian professionals would build a generation of leaders with direct, formative experience of American institutions and values. Alumni networks persist through political transitions. The connections built in graduate programs outlast the administrations that funded them. The United States built its postwar influence partly through exactly this kind of educational investment, and the model works.

The window for shifting Central Asian countries' economic orientation before their infrastructure dependencies are fully locked in is narrowing. Every Chinese-built railway, every commissioned power plant, and every deployed Huawei 5G network closes a door that becomes progressively harder to reopen. The U.S. needs to be present in Central Asia with real resources and real proposals now, not as an abstraction, but because the choices being made today will determine the regional architecture for decades.

Security Assistance as a Complement

Economic engagement in Central Asia is most effective when paired with security assistance that addresses the real anxieties of governments in the region. The Central Asian states face a range of security challenges: border instability from Afghanistan, the risk of extremist spillover, and the underlying concern about being caught between two large and occasionally coercive neighbors. The United States has existing security assistance programs for Central Asia, including Foreign Military Financing and International Military Education and Training, that build relationships and capacity without the alliance commitments that Central Asian governments are not in a position to make.

Expanding these programs modestly, emphasizing defensive capabilities and institutional military reform rather than offensive hardware, gives Central Asian security establishments a genuine stake in the American relationship and helps them resist the pressure toward Chinese or Russian security dependence. Security relationships also tend to be durable across political transitions in ways that purely commercial relationships are not; they build institutional habits and personal networks that persist.

The Central Asian opportunity requires treating this region as genuinely important rather than instrumentally useful. The countries of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and their neighbors, are not pieces on a chessboard to be maneuvered in a great-power competition. They are sovereign states with their own interests, histories, and visions for their futures. American engagement that respects that reality and offers genuine partnership rather than patronage is more likely to succeed and last than engagement that treats these countries as objects of strategy rather than as participants. That respect, consistently demonstrated over time through reliable follow-through, is ultimately what makes American partnership attractive in a region with ample reasons to be skeptical of outside powers with long reach and short attention spans.

Iran is not a peripheral problem for American Eurasian strategy. With 86 million people, vast hydrocarbon reserves, one of the most highly educated populations in the Middle East, and a geography placing it at the intersection of Central Asia, the Gulf, and the Caucasus, Iran sits at the center of multiple strategic dynamics that American Eurasian policy cannot address effectively without at least a framework for managing the relationship over time. The current state, decades of sanctions, no diplomatic relations, and mutual mistrust calcified by generations of confrontation, is not a stable equilibrium. It is a frozen conflict that costs both sides and forecloses options that American strategy might otherwise have.

This is not an argument for naive engagement. The Iranian government's support for destabilizing proxy forces across the Middle East, its documented pursuit of nuclear weapons capability, and its consistent hostility to American interests and regional partners are facts that any realistic assessment must incorporate. The point is simpler: none of those facts makes the relationship permanently frozen. Selective, conditional engagement is not the same as endorsing the government that manages it. The United States has maintained pragmatic channels with adversarial governments throughout its history when doing so served American interests and advanced achievable objectives. Iran is not uniquely irredeemable.

The Science Diplomacy Model

The most promising model for incremental engagement is science and health diplomacy. This approach has a Cold War precedent worth revisiting seriously. U.S.-Soviet cooperation on polio vaccine trials in the late 1950s proceeded despite peak Cold War tensions and helped build communication channels between scientific communities that proved valuable later. The principle is clear: find domains where the interests of ordinary people in both countries converge, and use technical cooperation in those domains to build the human connections that political negotiations eventually require.

Iran has genuine public health challenges: a healthcare system under chronic strain from sanctions-driven shortages, a significant cancer burden relative to regional peers, and recurring infectious disease pressures that are not contained by the country's borders. American public health institutions have expertise that Iranian counterparts would benefit from, and the exchange would be genuinely reciprocal. Iran has epidemiological data from a large population with distinctive disease patterns that are underrepresented in global health research. A consortium of American and Iranian public health researchers working on shared challenges, initially through neutral venues or international organizations, and gradually through more direct channels as trust develops, would accomplish two things simultaneously: address real health problems and create a network of Iranian professionals with direct, positive experience engaging with American institutions. That network becomes a constituency for normalization.

Water management offers another domain with obvious potential and genuine urgency. Iran faces severe and worsening water scarcity driven by climate change, agricultural overextraction, and infrastructure deterioration. So do its neighbors in the Gulf and Central Asia. Joint technical working groups on desalination technology, aquifer management, and irrigation efficiency could include Iranian scientists alongside Gulf and American counterparts, in formats sponsored by international organizations lacking formal diplomatic standing. This is not conventional diplomacy. It is the creation of technical relationships that eventually support diplomatic ones, the scaffolding before the building.

Digital Engagement and Civil Society

The digital dimension offers both a challenge and an opportunity. Iran maintains one of the most sophisticated domestic internet censorship and surveillance regimes in the world, and the Iranian population's desire for access to uncensored information is evident in the consistent use of VPNs and circumvention tools despite government restrictions and legal risk. American support for internet freedom tools, Tor, Psiphon, and related circumvention technologies, has been a quiet but genuinely important form of soft engagement with Iranian civil society. Expanding that support, along with funding for Persian-language independent journalism, educational content, and online learning platforms, maintains the channel between American values and the Iranian public consciousness even when official channels are entirely closed.

This matters for a specific reason: the gap between the Iranian government and the Iranian population on the question of American engagement is substantial and has been documented repeatedly in polling data obtained despite the methodological challenges of surveying under authoritarian conditions. A significant portion of the Iranian population is sympathetic to American culture, interested in the West, and frustrated by the economic consequences of their government's foreign policy. That population is the long-term counterpart to American strategy, not the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Economic Sequencing

Economic incentives require careful sequencing that acknowledges political reality. Any serious pathway toward Iranian economic reintegration with the West runs through the nuclear question. Sanctions relief has always been tied to verifiable restraints on Iran's nuclear program, and that link is not negotiable if nonproliferation is to be maintained as a genuine norm. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action demonstrated that a negotiated arrangement was achievable, and its collapse illustrated how fragile such arrangements are without sustained political commitment across administrations.

A future nuclear deal, if achieved, should be followed by phased, conditional economic engagement calibrated to Iran's compliance. The sequencing matters: beginning with humanitarian trade, already technically permitted, food, medicine, and agricultural equipment; then proceeding to co-investment in the energy sector if compliance is maintained; and eventually extending to academic and technology exchanges as the relationship stabilizes. Each phase should be explicitly conditioned on verifiable compliance with the previous phase's commitments, and each should be designed to be reversible if commitments are violated. This is not a blank check. It is a structured incentive architecture.

The Diaspora as Bridge

The Iranian diaspora is an underused asset in American strategy. Millions of Iranian-Americans, many of them highly educated professionals in technology, medicine, and finance, maintain personal connections to Iran while being deeply integrated into American society and sharing American values. Programs that facilitate legitimate connections between diaspora professionals and Iranian counterparts, in carefully structured formats that comply with sanctions law and are transparent about their objectives, could advance both economic development in Iran and the cross-cultural understanding that ultimately supports political normalization.

The diaspora is not simply a lobbying constituency to be managed. It is a human bridge across a divide that has persisted for decades, and it represents proof that Iranian culture and American values are not incompatible. The United States should treat it as the strategic asset it is.

The case for patient engagement with Iran is ultimately pragmatic. A permanently isolated Iran is an Iran more likely to deepen its partnership with Russia and China, to pursue nuclear brinkmanship as a deterrent strategy, and to rely on proxy conflict as its primary instrument of regional influence. None of those outcomes serve American interests. Selective, conditional engagement preserves the possibility of something better, and in strategy, preserving optionality is often the most important thing you can do.

The Regional Stakes

The regional stakes of getting Iran engagement right extend beyond the bilateral relationship. Iran shares borders with Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Caspian states. Its involvement in, or abstention from, regional economic integration projects could be transformative for connectivity across the Middle East and Central Asia. A future Iran that is engaged, partially integrated into regional trade networks, and facing genuine economic incentives for stability is a different actor than an isolated Iran with no stake in the status quo. The difference matters to every American's security and economic interests in the broader region.

The Gulf states have their own complex relationship with Iran, deep suspicion combined with the pragmatic recognition that a permanently destabilized neighborhood hurts everyone. The Abraham Accords created a new diplomatic architecture in the region that, in a different political environment, could eventually provide a framework for Iran's partial integration. American strategy should maintain flexibility in the sequencing and format of any future engagement while making clear that the preconditions of verifiable nuclear constraints and the reduction of proxy destabilization are non-negotiable.

Patient engagement with Iran is not a concession. It is a recognition that the current equilibrium is unstable and that the United States has an interest in shaping its replacement. The alternative, permanent isolation producing a more desperate, more nuclear-armed, more Russia-and-China-aligned Iran, is worse for American interests than the uncertain path of incremental, conditional engagement. Strategy requires choosing between imperfect options. The case for engagement is not that it guarantees improvement. It is the option most likely to produce outcomes compatible with American interests over the long term.

Russia presents the American Eurasian strategy with a defining paradox. It is simultaneously an adversary, an active military aggressor in Europe whose actions have fundamentally altered the security landscape on the continent, and a country that occupies the geographic center of Eurasia in ways that cannot be managed around through pure avoidance. The Trans-Siberian Railway, the pipeline networks running from Siberia to Europe and China, the Russian language and cultural influence extending across Central Asia and the Caucasus: these are not preferences that can be wished away. They are structural realities that any serious Eurasian strategy must account for, not pretend do not exist.

The starting point for honest analysis is that full normalization of the U.S.-Russia relationship is not a near-term possibility. As long as Russia continues its war in Ukraine and refuses to engage with the international legal framework governing territorial integrity, the political and moral case for maintaining sanctions and international isolation is overwhelming. The United States should not pretend otherwise, and no amount of strategic maneuvering changes that fundamental reality. The question is not whether to normalize. It is about managing a difficult relationship over an extended period in ways that minimize damage and preserve the possibility of something better.

The EAEU as Leverage

The Eurasian Economic Union provides a useful lens for understanding the opportunity structure within the Russian space. Russia's economic union with Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan functions more as an instrument for maintaining Russian influence than as a genuinely mutually beneficial economic arrangement. The sanctions imposed after 2022 have made Russia a less attractive economic anchor for EAEU members. Kazakhstan, in particular, has been explicit about its desire to maintain economic relationships with Western countries and to resist any pressure to circumvent sanctions on Russia's behalf. This creates a real opportunity for American engagement, not by asking these countries to break with Russia, which is unrealistic and would impose costs they cannot afford, but by making American economic partnership sufficiently valuable that they can maintain genuine strategic autonomy.

For Kazakhstan specifically, the U.S. approach should respect its multi-vector foreign policy while ramping up trade and investment that gives Nur-Sultan leverage within the bloc relative to Moscow. A Kazakhstan that is economically strong and globally connected can assert more autonomy within the EAEU than one that is dependent on Russian transit routes, Russian banking relationships, and Russian investment for basic economic function. Armenia, a deeply frustrated EAEU member increasingly skeptical of the economic benefits and disappointed by Russian security failures in Nagorno-Karabakh, is actively courting alternative partnerships. Modest American support for Armenia's technology sector and energy diversification reduces its sense of captivity within Russia's framework without requiring a dramatic break that Yerevan is not positioned to make.

The Middle Corridor as a Strategic Tool

The Trans-Caspian Middle Corridor is the most important single infrastructure project for reducing Russian structural leverage in Eurasia. Every ton of Central Asian exports that flows westward via the Trans-Caspian route rather than through Russian territory reduces the transit dependence that has historically made these states economically beholden to Russian goodwill. The corridor's growth since 2022, driven in part by the desire to avoid exposure to secondary sanctions from Russian transit, has already demonstrated this dynamic in real commercial terms. Accelerating the corridor's development is both an economic investment and a concrete step toward loosening a structural dependency that has constrained Central Asian foreign policy for decades.

The practical steps are described in the infrastructure article earlier in this series. The strategic logic bears repeating: infrastructure that routes trade around Russian territory reduces the leverage that Russian control of transit has provided for decades. It is competition at the structural level, below the threshold of direct confrontation, and it produces lasting results that persist through political cycles.

Track II and Long-Term Positioning

Track II diplomacy deserves more investment than it currently receives in the U.S.-Russia context. Official channels are frozen by necessity. But unofficial channels, former officials, academics, scientists, and civil society organizations, can maintain communications that will matter enormously when conditions eventually change. The people who know their counterparts, who have negotiated with them, who understand their constraints and interests, are an institutional asset that atrophies if not maintained.

Arms control is the most obvious domain for Track II engagement. The collapse of the INF Treaty, the expiration of New START, and the general deterioration of nuclear risk-management frameworks pose dangers that are not in either country's interest. The world is entering a period of deep uncertainty about nuclear posture, missile deployment, and escalation risk with fewer formal guardrails than at any point since the early Cold War. Quiet conversations among technical experts about arms control verification concepts, crisis communication mechanisms, and strategic stability principles help preserve the institutional knowledge and personal relationships that would be essential in any future negotiation.

Arctic governance is another domain where track II engagement has value. The warming of the Arctic is creating new shipping routes, new resource extraction opportunities, and new military competition in a region where Russia, the United States, Canada, and the Nordic states all have significant interests. The collapse of Arctic Council engagement following the invasion of Ukraine has left an institutional void that creates risks. Maintaining scientific and technical conversations about Arctic ecosystems, shipping safety, and search-and-rescue cooperation through non-governmental channels preserves some functional connection in a region where practical cooperation has genuine value for all parties.

Energy and the Post-War Landscape

Energy represents a longer-term dimension of the Russia strategy. European energy diversification away from Russian gas supply, one of the most significant strategic realignments of the decade, creates both opportunity and risk. The opportunity is in cementing European energy independence through LNG infrastructure, renewable energy development, and nuclear power cooperation that uses American small modular reactor technology. The risk is that replacing the Russian supply creates new dependencies on other suppliers who may not be reliable partners.

American small modular reactor technology represents both a commercial opportunity and a strategic instrument. Helping Eastern European countries that operated Soviet-era nuclear plants replace aging reactors with American SMR technology would provide clean energy, reduce residual dependence on Russian nuclear fuel cycles, and embed American technology companies in European energy infrastructure for the long term. The commercial and strategic cases for this investment point in the same direction.

The honest conclusion about Russia is that the U.S. should manage it firmly in the short term, compete with its influence actively in the medium term, and maintain the institutional capacity for a better relationship in the long term. Patient strategy is not a weakness. It is the recognition that Russia will not always be governed by its current leadership, and that the connections and frameworks preserved or built during this difficult period are investments in the future.

Civil Society and the Long Game

Civil society engagement in Russia itself is a long-game investment that should not be abandoned despite the difficulty of the current moment. The Russian population is not identical to the Russian government, and the future of Russia's relationship with the West will depend in part on what kind of society emerges from the current political and military crisis. Supporting access to uncensored information, funding Russian-language independent journalism, and maintaining academic and cultural exchange with individual Russians who are not associated with the regime's security apparatus keeps alive the possibility of a different relationship in a different political era.

This is patient work with no near-term payoff. But the United States made similar long-term investments during the Cold War, in radio broadcasting, in exchange programs, in the dissemination of ideas across the Iron Curtain, and those investments contributed to the eventual outcome. The Russian society that emerges from the current period will have been shaped by what it was exposed to and what connections it maintained with the outside world. American strategy should influence that shaping where it can, with realistic expectations about the timeline.

The honest conclusion about Russia is that the United States should manage it firmly in the short term, compete with its influence actively across the EAEU periphery in the medium term, and maintain the institutional capacity for a better relationship in the long term. That is not a weakness. It is the strategic recognition that countries, like people, change over time, and that the investments made during difficult periods can determine what becomes possible when conditions improve.

Every strategy for American engagement in Eurasia eventually runs into the same constraint: China is already there, deeply embedded in the economic architecture of most countries on the board, and is not going anywhere. This is not a problem with a simple solution. It requires a framework for navigating competition that is sharp enough to be effective and disciplined enough to avoid escalation into confrontation that would damage the global economy, destabilize American alliances, and produce outcomes far worse than the status quo of managed rivalry.

The framing matters enormously. The United States is not at war with China. The two economies are deeply intertwined; China remains America's second-largest trading partner, and their financial and commercial ties involve trillions of dollars in mutual exposure. The goal is not comprehensive decoupling, as some American voices advocate. That would mean trying to sever economic relationships that have generated substantial wealth on both sides and that hundreds of millions of ordinary people depend on. The goal is de-risking: reducing the specific vulnerabilities that China's market position creates in strategic technology sectors while maintaining the broader commercial relationship that benefits both economies.

BRI's Real Record

The Belt and Road Initiative has invested roughly $1 trillion in projects across 150 countries in its first decade, addressing real and urgent infrastructure gaps. This is not propaganda; it is fact, and dismissing it allows China to occupy the space between what countries genuinely need and what the U.S. is offering. American strategy has to acknowledge the need before making the case for a better way to meet it. Countries that feel lectured about Chinese debt traps by an American government that did not show up with its own infrastructure proposal will make their own calculations about who is offering a genuine partnership.

China's model has documented weaknesses that American diplomacy has systematically underused. Debt sustainability is the most prominent. Multiple smaller BRI partners, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Zambia, and others, have ended up with debt levels that create serious fiscal distress and, in some cases, pressure to cede commercial or strategic assets to Chinese creditors when payments cannot be serviced. The pattern is consistent enough that it has become a political liability for Beijing across parts of Africa and South Asia, where enthusiasm for the BRI has cooled considerably as the terms have become apparent to publics and parliaments.

The U.S. counter-narrative needs to be specific and evidence-based rather than abstract. Compare a U.S.-backed solar project in Jordan that came in on budget, created local jobs, and transferred technical capacity to Jordanian engineers against a delayed BRI coal plant in Southeast Asia that used imported Chinese labor and left the host country with an oversized loan and an electricity plant it struggles to maintain. These comparisons exist and are documented. They should be promoted as central to how American development agencies communicate their model to prospective partners.

The Standards Competition

Standards competition is where the next decade of U.S.-China competition in Eurasia will be most consequential and least visible to general audiences. International standards bodies, the International Telecommunication Union, the International Organization for Standardization, and the IEEE set the technical specifications that determine which technologies are compatible, which products can be sold in which markets, and whose intellectual property is embedded in globally adopted systems.

China has dramatically increased its participation in these bodies over the past decade and has succeeded in advancing Chinese technical standards in areas like smart cities, facial recognition, and 5G network architecture. If Chinese-proposed standards become the global default in AI governance, 6G telecommunications, or digital identity systems, every country that implements those standards will be deploying Chinese-designed architecture in its most sensitive infrastructure. The United States and its allies need to engage these bodies with equivalent seriousness and bring Eurasian partners into the coalition, shaping open, interoperable, privacy-respecting standards before Chinese alternatives become the path of least resistance.

This is not a visible competition. It happens in technical committee meetings with dozens of attendees, producing standards documents that almost no one outside the relevant engineering communities reads. But its effects are enormous and long-lasting. The standards set today for AI model governance, quantum encryption protocols, and 6G network architecture will shape how these technologies are deployed globally for decades. Getting those standards right, and ensuring that countries across Eurasia are represented in setting them alongside American and allied voices, is a strategic priority that requires sustained attention and institutional investment.

Export Controls and Alliance Cohesion

Export controls on advanced semiconductor technology require careful calibration. The restrictions implemented since 2022 are strategically justified, preventing China from acquiring the most advanced AI chips and chip manufacturing equipment is a legitimate national security priority that serves American interests. But export controls have real costs: they push China to accelerate its semiconductor development, disadvantage American chip companies in the Chinese market, and create pressure on allied countries to choose sides in ways that are commercially painful. Controls should be maintained where genuinely necessary and should be as surgically precise as possible to avoid imposing broader economic costs on the alliance network that makes American strategy viable.

The coalition question is critical. Export controls that the United States imposes unilaterally and that allied countries do not implement create arbitrage opportunities for Chinese buyers and create friction in alliances that American strategy depends on. Getting Japan, South Korea, and the Netherlands to align their export control regimes with American restrictions has been a significant diplomatic achievement. Maintaining that alignment as the commercial costs become apparent will require continued attention and reciprocal commitments.

People-to-People as Long-Game Asset

People-to-people connections deserve protection as a strategic asset. Chinese students at American universities, researchers in American labs, and entrepreneurs building companies with American venture capital create understanding and lasting ties that persist even when governments are at odds. The instinct to restrict Chinese academic exchange in the name of technology security should be resisted, except where specific, documented transfer risks can be demonstrated on a case-by-case basis. Blanket restrictions would damage American science, alienate a generation of Chinese professionals who might otherwise become advocates for engagement, and foreclose civilian-level connections that may eventually matter.

The goal in managing China's competition is to create a Eurasian environment where countries have genuine alternatives and exercise genuine choice. China will not stop competing. The question is whether the United States decides not to, and whether it competes with the consistency and strategic coherence that the contest requires.

The Innovation Advantage

There is one dimension of American competition with China that rarely gets articulated as forcefully as it deserves: the innovation edge. The United States leads the world in fundamental research, the density and quality of its venture capital ecosystem, the breadth of its technology company landscape, and the attractiveness of its innovation hubs to global talent. These are not permanent advantages; they require sustained investment and openness to maintain, but they are real and substantial today.

For Eurasian countries making technology partnership decisions, alignment with the American innovation ecosystem offers something the Chinese model does not: access to the cutting edge of commercial technology development, not just the previous generation's infrastructure. Countries that anchor their research universities in partnerships with MIT, Stanford, and Caltech are positioned differently from countries that adopt Chinese technology standards developed in a closed innovation system. The U.S. should make this case explicitly and back it with the research partnership programs, talent mobility frameworks, and co-investment mechanisms that make the argument concrete.

The competition with China in Eurasia will not be decided by a single policy, a single investment, or a single corridor. It will be decided by the cumulative weight of thousands of decisions made by governments, businesses, and individuals across the region over the next decade, decisions about which technology to adopt, which financing to accept, which standards to implement, and which model of governance to emulate. American strategy is about shaping the environment in which those decisions are made so that the free, open, high-quality option is genuinely available and genuinely attractive. That is achievable. It requires consistency, competitiveness, and the strategic patience to let the results compound.

Free trade agreements are not what they used to be. The era of sweeping market-opening deals that transformed global commerce, NAFTA, the Uruguay Round, and the WTO accession process has largely given way to more targeted, sector-specific, and digital-first economic frameworks. This is partly a function of domestic politics in the United States, where large trade deals have become politically toxic regardless of their economic merits. But it is also a genuine evolution in how international economic cooperation works. For American strategy in Eurasia, this evolution is an opportunity rather than an obstacle if the new tools are well designed and deployed consistently.

The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, launched in 2022 with 14 initial partners, is the most significant recent expression of this new approach. IPEF is not a traditional trade deal. It does not open markets with tariff commitments in the conventional sense. What it does is create alignment frameworks on digital trade, clean energy standards, supply chain resilience, anti-corruption measures, and labor practices. For countries not ready for the full scope of a formal FTA, IPEF provides a pathway to building economic relationships with real value. The supply chain pillar, negotiated to completion, establishes a mechanism to identify critical supply chain vulnerabilities and coordinate responses among partners, a capability that proved conspicuously absent during the pandemic disruptions that shocked manufacturing worldwide.

The Gaps in Current Architecture

The gaps in the current U.S. trade architecture across Eurasia are significant and addressable with targeted effort. There is no bilateral trade deal with India, despite it being arguably the relationship with the highest long-term strategic and commercial potential among non-allied partners. There are no formal trade frameworks with Central Asian states despite their growing importance for critical minerals and transit corridors. The digital trade dimension, covering data flows, cybersecurity standards, e-commerce regulations, and fintech frameworks, is underserved across much of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where Chinese platform companies are establishing early market positions that become structurally entrenched.

Bilateral Investment Treaties deserve renewed emphasis. BITs have fallen somewhat out of fashion in American trade policy circles, but they remain powerful instruments for signaling long-term commitment to a given market and establishing the legal foundations for American private capital. Negotiating BITs with Uzbekistan, Georgia, and other developing Eurasian partners, guaranteeing protections against expropriation, ensuring fair dispute resolution, and creating transparency in regulatory processes, would tangibly reduce the risk premium that currently keeps American capital out of these markets. The cost is low. The potential return in mobilized private investment is significant and would compound over the years of deployment.

The C5+1 Vehicle

The C5+1 platform, the United States plus the five Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, represents a chronically underused vehicle for regional trade facilitation. Elevating it to heads-of-state level on a regular basis and backing that political signal with concrete programmatic investment would communicate something important to governments in the region: the United States is a serious long-term partner for Central Asian economic development, not merely a counterbalancing presence that shows up only when Russia or China overreaches.

A U.S.-Central Asia Trade and Investment Initiative, tailored to the region's specific conditions, could identify the regulatory barriers and customs procedures that impede American commerce and establish a time-bound process to remove them. The C5+1 Critical Minerals Dialogue has already demonstrated that substantive issue-specific engagement through this platform can produce results. Extending that model to broader trade facilitation, standardizing border crossing procedures, harmonizing product standards, and reducing documentary requirements would open meaningful commercial opportunities for American firms that currently find the transactional costs of operating in Central Asia prohibitive.

Digital Trade as the New Frontier

Digital trade is where the most significant new framework work needs to happen across Eurasia. Singapore has pioneered a model of Digital Economy Agreements that address data flows, AI governance, cybersecurity cooperation, and e-commerce regulations in ways traditional trade deals do not. The U.S. has negotiated preliminary digital trade frameworks with Singapore and several other partners, and the structure is sound. What is needed is a systematic rollout across Eurasia, especially in ASEAN, where the digital economy is growing rapidly and Chinese platform companies are establishing dominance in e-commerce and fintech, a dominance that will become structurally entrenched if American alternatives are not available.

Digital trade agreements do more than facilitate e-commerce. They set the norms for how data is governed across borders, whether citizens' data can flow freely, how AI-generated decisions are held accountable, and whether governments can mandate data localization that creates digital fiefdoms incompatible with an open global economy. Getting these frameworks right with Eurasian partners before norms are set by default in favor of more restrictive models is a strategic priority shared by commercial trade policy and national security policy.

Supply Chain Resilience as Trade Policy

Supply chain resilience has become a trade policy objective in its own right since pandemic-era disruptions exposed how fragile global supply chains built for efficiency rather than redundancy actually were under stress. A Critical Supply Chain Alliance among trusted partners, identifying key categories like semiconductors, EV batteries, medical supplies, and rare earth materials, and coordinating diversification efforts, provides a framework for translating risk assessments into concrete investment and policy actions.

The U.S. CHIPS Act demonstrated that domestic industrial policy can meaningfully shift supply chains. The external pillar of that strategy, ensuring that friendly countries in India, Vietnam, and elsewhere are supported in building the manufacturing capacity that serves as a genuine alternative to Chinese concentration, needs equivalent resourcing and attention. Without the external pillar, domestic investment in American semiconductor capacity simply shifts the concentration of vulnerability without eliminating it.

Tax agreements and investment guarantee frameworks round out the architecture. American small and medium enterprises face higher relative barriers to operating in new Eurasian markets than large multinationals that can absorb the legal costs of market entry. Programs that reduce those barriers, through bilateral tax treaties, simplified dispute-resolution mechanisms, and expanded access to DFC insurance, would broaden the base of American commercial engagement in ways that pure government-to-government frameworks cannot achieve on their own.

Trade architecture requires constant maintenance. China has been methodically building its version of this architecture across Eurasia for over a decade. The U.S. response needs to match that methodical quality with equivalent commitment over the decade-long time horizon that real economic influence requires.

Values and Conditionality

Any reset or deepening of trade relationships must be paired with clear-eyed attention to the values dimension. Progress on trade and technology deals should be accompanied by advocacy for the rule of law, intellectual property rights, and the basic governance standards that make commercial relationships sustainable. This is not moralizing. It acknowledges that commerce depends on predictability, and that predictability depends on governance.

For estranged states, confidence-building measures might necessarily precede more explicit promotion of values. But for warm and potential partners in Tier 2 countries like Uzbekistan, Georgia, and Vietnam that are actively reforming and opening up, the U.S. should use trade frameworks to encourage and reward the governance improvements that benefit both parties. MCC's model of governance conditionality has demonstrated that this approach works: countries that know American investment is tied to demonstrated reform have incentives to reform that they would not otherwise have.

The ultimate purpose of trade architecture in Eurasia is not just to facilitate commerce. It is to create economic relationships deep enough that the countries involved have a genuine stake in the rules-based international order that makes those relationships possible. Countries with deep trade ties, mutual investment, and interoperable digital infrastructure have stronger incentives to support norms that protect those relationships than do economically isolated countries. Trade architecture, in the long run, is governance architecture, and building it across Eurasia is among the most important things the United States can do for the durability of the international order it helped construct.

The electric vehicle in your driveway and the precision-guided munition in an American arsenal have more in common than their engineering. Both depend on a supply chain that runs through a handful of countries, is dominated at the processing stage by China, and is almost entirely absent from most American strategic conversations about economic security. That supply chain, for lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, tungsten, antimony, and a dozen other critical minerals, is where the material foundation of both the clean energy transition and advanced defense manufacturing is being decided right now, in negotiation rooms and mining feasibility studies that receive a fraction of the attention that chip fabs and AI models generate.

The statistics are unambiguous. China controls roughly 85-90% of global rare earth processing. For some individual minerals, the Chinese market share in refining runs even higher. This is not primarily a story about where the minerals are mined; rare earth deposits exist on every continent. It is a story about where they are processed into usable materials. China built the processing infrastructure over decades, often at below-market cost, creating a chokehold that is genuinely difficult to dislodge quickly. The dependence is not theoretical. In 2010, China restricted rare earth exports during a territorial dispute with Japan, sending global prices spiking and triggering emergency procurement measures in Tokyo. A similar action directed at American defense contractors in a moment of strategic crisis would be far more consequential for military readiness timelines.

Where the Solution Lives

Eurasia holds much of the answer. Kazakhstan is one of the world's most mineral-rich countries, with significant reserves of uranium, it is the world's largest producer, as well as rare earths, tungsten, and chromium, which are essential inputs for advanced manufacturing. Uzbekistan is emerging as a serious player in lithium and a range of other critical materials, and its government has been actively seeking international investment partners since the economic reforms of 2016. Kyrgyzstan has antimony reserves of global significance. Mongolia has copper and rare earths at scale. These are not secondary sources or marginal deposits. They are the basis for a genuine alternative to Chinese supply chain dominance if the infrastructure, investment, and processing capacity are built alongside extraction.

The United States has taken initial steps. In 2024, it signed a Memorandum of Understanding on critical minerals with Uzbekistan and supported an American firm's competitive bid on Kazakh tungsten deposits against a Chinese challenger. The C5+1 Critical Minerals Dialogue provides a forum for coordinating the policy frameworks that investment requires. These are real achievements that should not be understated. The gap is between signing MOUs and actually operationalizing them into functioning supply chains with in-country processing capacity that changes the global market structure.

The Processing Bottleneck

Closing that gap requires investment in the right part of the supply chain. The Department of Commerce and the Development Finance Corporation should co-finance the construction of processing facilities in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to refine ore into usable intermediate materials, rather than just mining it and shipping raw rock to Chinese refineries for value-added transformation. This midstream investment is where the real leverage lies. Countries that can offer refined rare earth oxides, processed lithium compounds, or refined tungsten have dramatically more economic bargaining power in global markets than countries that export ore. Building that processing capacity, with environmental and social governance standards that make the output commercially acceptable to European and American industrial buyers, creates lasting value for both the host country and American supply chain security.

The Minerals Security Partnership, a coalition of like-minded countries including Australia, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and the UK, should be actively expanded to fully integrate Central Asian states. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have begun participating, creating a framework for aligning on ESG standards, sharing geological data, and coordinating investment decisions. A Central Asian critical-minerals corridor, with mines and refineries in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan feeding into global markets via the Trans-Caspian Middle Corridor, should be an explicit strategic objective for 2030, with annual milestones and accountable program management.

Solving the Demand-Side Problem

The demand-side problem is as important as the supply. American and allied manufacturers need to know they can count on non-Chinese mineral sources at reliable volumes and prices before investing in supply chains built around those sources. The U.S. National Defense Stockpile could play a critical role by committing to long-term offtake agreements for rare earth oxides and other critical materials sourced from Central Asian partners. This mirrors China's approach: guaranteed demand from a creditworthy buyer gives mining investors the confidence to commit capital to projects with longer payback periods than commercial investors would otherwise accept. A government backstop at the purchasing end reduces the commercial risk that currently deters private capital from Central Asian mining ventures.

Technology can close the traceability gap that complicates sourcing from developing markets. Blockchain-based supply chain tracking that verifies that minerals were extracted under acceptable labor conditions, with environmental standards met and without conflict financing, is commercially feasible today and is already deployed for cobalt tracking in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Extending similar systems to Central Asian operations would address the legitimate compliance concerns of European and American industrial buyers operating under increasingly strict import regulations. It would also give Central Asian governments a tool for managing the environmental and social dimensions of rapid mining expansion.

The broader point is that critical minerals are not a supply chain problem with a purely commercial solution. They are a national security issue with commercial dimensions. China's dominance in mineral processing is a strategic asset deliberately built over decades of patient investment. Dislodging it requires sustained commitment of capital, technical expertise, diplomatic engagement, and the political will to treat Central Asian partnerships as genuinely important, not peripheral to American interests, but central to American strategic capacity. The minerals are there. The partnerships are available. What has been missing is the urgency that this competition demands.

IP, Standards, and Protecting American Investment

As American investment in Eurasian mining ventures and processing facilities grows, protecting intellectual property and commercial interests becomes an operational priority, not just a diplomatic talking point. Many Eurasian countries have IP laws on paper, but limited enforcement capacity. The United States should prioritize IP protection in all trade dialogues and capacity-building programs relevant to the mining and processing sector, particularly protecting the proprietary processing technologies, environmental management systems, and operational software that American firms bring to joint ventures.

The Cybersecurity dimension is increasingly important as mining and processing operations become digitally integrated. Modern extraction and refining operations depend on industrial control systems, sensor networks, and data management infrastructure that are vulnerable to cyber intrusion. American investment in Central Asian mining ventures should be accompanied by cybersecurity capacity-building for the facilities themselves, protecting American intellectual property, preventing operational disruption, and ensuring that data generated by these operations is not accessible to third parties without granted access. This is not a secondary concern. It is a core element of making the investment viable and sustainable.

The investment security framework matters as much as the investment itself. American firms need to know that the assets they build and the technologies they deploy are protected against expropriation, that dispute resolution mechanisms function, and that the regulatory environment is stable enough for long-term planning. Working with Central Asian governments on improvements to the investment environment, through MCC-style conditionality, through bilateral investment treaty negotiations, and through sustained diplomatic engagement, creates the conditions under which American private capital can flow at the scale the critical minerals challenge requires. The minerals are there. Building the investment environment around them is the work that determines whether American capital gets access.

Infrastructure is patient. It does not argue, lobby, or hold press conferences. It simply exists, directing the flow of goods, energy, and data along paths set by whoever built it. This is precisely why infrastructure investment is among the most durable instruments of geopolitical influence, and why China's Belt and Road Initiative has been so strategically effective even when individual projects have disappointed commercially. The returns to infrastructure are not measured in a single budget cycle. They are measured in decades of trade flows, energy dependence, and communication architecture shaped by the choices made during construction.

The United States and its allies need to compete on this terrain seriously. Not by replicating the BRI model, that would mean trying to outspend a state-capitalist system that can mobilize government capital at a scale democracies cannot match. The right approach is to offer something genuinely better: infrastructure that is higher quality, more financially sustainable, more environmentally responsible, and more respectful of the sovereignty of the countries it passes through. That is not just a marketing claim. It is an achievable differentiator if the right tools are deployed with the right commitment.

IMEC: The Flagship Opportunity

The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, unveiled at the 2023 G20 summit, is the single most significant opportunity for American infrastructure strategy in Eurasia this decade. IMEC envisions an integrated rail and maritime corridor from India to Europe via the Gulf states and Israel, accompanied by undersea fiber-optic cables and energy infrastructure that would tie multiple economies into a shared logistics and digital backbone.

The strategic logic is compelling on multiple dimensions. Modeling suggests IMEC could reduce transit times between India and Europe by roughly 40 percent compared to the Suez route, with significant implications for shipping costs and supply chain reliability. Unlike BRI, IMEC is a multilateral initiative involving India, the Gulf states, Israel, and European partners, with a governance structure that distributes both ownership and risk rather than concentrating it in a single creditor nation. Every country along the route has a stake in its success. That distributed ownership is not just good governance, it is structural resilience against the kind of political coercion that single-creditor infrastructure enables.

The practical challenge is completion. There is an estimated $5 billion funding gap in IMEC's current financing picture, and geopolitical disruptions have slowed momentum. The United States, holding the G20 presidency in 2026, should use that platform to establish a dedicated IMEC coordination body and direct Development Finance Corporation resources toward the most critical gaps: rail construction through Jordan, undersea cable routing to India, and the energy infrastructure components that give Gulf states a meaningful economic stake in the corridor's long-term operation. Getting IMEC to a functional prototype, goods moving, cables lit, energy flowing, would be one of the most significant American strategic achievements of the decade.

The Trans-Caspian Middle Corridor

The Trans-Caspian Middle Corridor deserves equal strategic priority. This route, connecting Central Asia to the Caucasus and then to Turkey via the Caspian Sea, has grown dramatically in importance since 2022, as sanctions on Russia have pushed shippers and traders to seek alternative east-west transit routes. The corridor's traffic growth since the invasion of Ukraine has already demonstrated its potential. The bottlenecks are specific and solvable.

Port capacity on the Caspian's Kazakh and Azerbaijani shores is insufficient for the volume the corridor could handle if rail and customs infrastructure along the route were modernized. The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars rail extension needs completion. Customs regime fragmentation across multiple national borders adds unpredictability that commercial shippers find intolerable. Each of these is a solvable engineering and governance problem, not a geopolitical one.

The European Union has committed €10 billion through its Global Gateway program to expand this corridor. The United States should coordinate rather than duplicate, directing DFC capital and Blue Dot Network certification toward segments that European financing does not cover. Upgrading Kazakhstan's Caspian ports, financing the final rail links, and building digital trade facilitation systems along the route would collectively transform the Middle Corridor from a contingency option to a genuine commercial alternative. Every ton of cargo that moves from Central Asia to European markets via this route strengthens the economic independence of states that are otherwise structurally dependent on Russian or Chinese infrastructure to reach global markets.

Quality as a Competitive Advantage

The Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment provides the overarching financing vehicle. PGII has pledged to mobilize hundreds of billions in infrastructure investment by 2027. The question is whether that pledge translates into deployed capital at the pace the competition requires. The history of large multilateral infrastructure initiatives is littered with announcements that were followed by disappointingly modest execution. PGII must avoid that pattern by establishing specific project milestones, transparent financing mechanisms, and accountability structures that create real reputational cost for non-delivery.

One underused tool is the Blue Dot Network certification, an international standard for quality infrastructure that addresses environmental impact, labor practices, financial sustainability, and governance transparency. Projects certified under Blue Dot standards offer something BRI projects frequently do not: auditable assurance that the infrastructure was built responsibly and will not leave host countries with hidden debt obligations or unsustainable maintenance costs. Marketing the difference in this certification is as important as building the projects themselves.

Digital infrastructure is as strategically important as physical roads and ports. The United States should fund fiber-optic cable projects linking Europe and Asia through multiple corridors that do not depend on Russian or Chinese network nodes. A Trans-Caspian fiber link would integrate Central Asia into global internet backbones and reduce these countries' exposure to communications disruption or surveillance from either of their large neighbors. Investing in data centers and cloud infrastructure in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia ensures data sovereignty for partners while creating commercial opportunities for American technology companies operating under strong privacy laws.

The overarching principle is that corridors create constituencies. Every country that develops economically meaningful trade flows through a U.S.-backed corridor has a direct stake in maintaining that corridor, which means a stake in the security and stability frameworks that protect it. Infrastructure is patient. So is the influence it generates.

North-South and the Afghanistan Variable

The north-south dimension of Eurasian connectivity has been neglected and deserves medium-term planning attention. A railway connecting Central Asia to South Asian ports, the conceptual core of proposals such as CASA-1000 energy connectivity and the TAPI gas pipeline, would be transformative for landlocked economies currently dependent on Russian or Chinese transit routes to access global markets. The security situation in Afghanistan makes this a long-term aspiration rather than a near-term project, but the United States should maintain planning capacity and financing readiness for the moment that conditions allow. History rewards the countries that are ready to act when windows open, and dismissing this corridor because it is currently impractical is the kind of short-term thinking that has cost American strategy in the region before.

In the Caucasus, the U.S. can encourage a Persian Gulf-Black Sea corridor via Armenia and Georgia as an alternative route that avoids both Iranian and Russian territory. This involves investment in Georgia's Black Sea port at Poti, road connectivity through Armenia, and the kind of customs harmonization that makes multi-country transit commercially viable. American support for Armenian-Azerbaijani peace efforts creates the security precondition for exactly this kind of corridor development, diplomacy, and infrastructure investment, which reinforce one another in the way that good strategy requires.

Every physical infrastructure project the United States supports in Eurasia carries a message beyond its commercial value. It says that America is present, that American capital works, and that the American model, quality, transparency, and local partnership, is a real alternative. Corridors are ultimately arguments, made in steel and fiber rather than words. The arguments are more persuasive when projects are completed on time and on budget, and in partnership with the local communities the infrastructure was built to serve.

The most underappreciated fact in American technology strategy is that the United States does not need to build the world's dominant technology ecosystem alone. It already leads one. The opportunity in Eurasia is to extend it deliberately, deepening the technical standards, supply chain links, and co-development relationships that make the American-led ecosystem genuinely competitive with what China and Russia are building, rather than allowing expansion to happen by default or ceding architecture to rivals.

Technology Prosperity Deals are the primary vehicle for this extension. The United States has spent the past several years building them with Japan and South Korea, covering artificial intelligence governance, semiconductor supply chains, quantum computing, 6G telecommunications, and space technology. These agreements are not binding treaties with fixed financial commitments. What they do is align regulatory approaches, coordinate export controls, facilitate researcher exchanges, and create joint working groups that quietly shape global standards before anyone else sets them. They are, in effect, the architecture of a technology alliance, durable, flexible, and extending well beyond the underlying security relationship.

Why the Digital Silk Road Is the Real Threat

The strategic logic for replicating this model across Eurasia is straightforward, but the stakes are higher than most Americans appreciate. China has spent a decade building what it calls the Digital Silk Road: exporting Huawei-built telecommunications networks, Alibaba and JD.com e-commerce platforms, Dahua and Hikvision surveillance infrastructure, and BeiDou navigation systems across Asia, Africa, and parts of Europe. These are not merely commercial products. They are standards embedded in infrastructure, and standards, once embedded, create lock-in that persists for decades.

If the telecom networks in Central Asian capitals run on Huawei 5G gear, those countries will be buying Chinese software updates, maintenance contracts, and equipment upgrades for the next 20 years. That is durable leverage compounding over time. It shapes what data flows through those networks, who can access it, and what surveillance capabilities are built into the infrastructure that governs daily life. The U.S. response cannot simply tell countries to avoid Chinese technology without offering a viable alternative that works, is competitively priced, and comes with credible long-term support. Technology Prosperity Deals, combined with development finance, provide the framework for that alternative.

Building the Co-Innovation Network

Consider the potential of a U.S.-India AI and Quantum Fund. Capitalized at $500 million through contributions from governments, leading research universities, and technology firms on both sides, it could fund joint research projects that leverage Indian mathematical and engineering talent alongside American AI infrastructure and compute resources in ways neither country could achieve independently. The deliverables would be commercially licensable technologies, deepening the supply chain independence that both want. Similar models could be built with Israel targeting cybersecurity and biotech, with Poland and the Baltic states targeting cyber defense and 5G security, and with Singapore targeting fintech and digital governance standards. Each bilateral arrangement is modest in isolation. Together, they constitute a network.

Semiconductors require particular strategic focus. The Chip 4 alliance, the United States, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, coordinates the most advanced portion of the semiconductor supply chain. But the supply chain has vulnerabilities beyond this core. Upstream, the materials inputs for chip manufacturing are geographically concentrated. Downstream, packaging and testing phases are largely located in China and Southeast Asia. The talent pipeline runs overwhelmingly through a small number of institutions.

Expanding the Chip 4 architecture to incorporate India and Vietnam through chip design centers, engineer exchange programs, and co-investment in packaging and testing facilities would distribute risk while deepening U.S.-led integration. India has both the technical talent base and the governmental ambition to become a serious semiconductor node. Vietnam has already demonstrated that it can absorb advanced manufacturing at scale. American investment in both trajectories would accelerate a supply chain transformation already underway, but it needs deliberate acceleration to outpace Chinese alternatives.

Telecommunications and the Open RAN Moment

Telecommunications is where the stakes are most visible and the window for action most limited. The Open RAN model, an approach to radio access network architecture that disaggregates hardware and software, enabling interoperability among multiple trusted vendors, offers a credible alternative to monolithic Chinese telecom infrastructure. But Open RAN needs scaled deployment to prove its commercial viability. Pilot projects in ASEAN, financed through U.S. development tools and coordinated with Japanese and European partners who share the same concerns about Huawei dependency, would generate the proof-of-concept evidence that skeptical procurement officials need before their decisions lock in Chinese alternatives for a generation.

The Digital Connectivity and Cybersecurity Partnership, a State Department program, should be dramatically scaled up across Eurasia. Its core functions, financing fiber-optic cable deployment, expanding rural broadband, and training officials on cybersecurity best practices, are exactly the kind of soft infrastructure investment that builds lasting alignment. Countries whose digital backbone was built with American financing, using American-standard architecture, and staffed by officials trained in American cybersecurity frameworks are embedded in the American-led technology ecosystem, regardless of whether they ever sign a formal alliance.

Technology as Governance

The deeper argument is about what technology choices mean for governance. Technology is not politically neutral. The choice of a telecom vendor, a data center operator, a cloud services provider, or an AI governance framework is simultaneously a technical and a geopolitical decision. Countries that adopt open, interoperable, privacy-respecting technology standards are countries where democratic governance is structurally easier to sustain. Countries that adopt surveillance-capable, centrally controlled technology standards are countries where authoritarian consolidation faces fewer technical obstacles.

This is not an abstraction; it plays out in every election cycle and every protest movement. The question of whether a government can track its citizens in real time, censor their communications, and identify dissidents is substantially shaped by whose technology infrastructure underpins the country's digital economy. America's technology offer to Eurasia is not just a commercial proposition. It is a vision of what kind of societies these countries can become. That is both its greatest competitive advantage and the responsibility it carries.

A Eurasian digital landscape that runs on American-standard, open-architecture infrastructure is a landscape more compatible with the democratic governance that American strategy is ultimately trying to support. Getting there requires sustained investment in the co-innovation network that Technology Prosperity Deals make possible. The framework exists. The question is whether the United States uses it consistently enough to make a difference.

Talent Pipelines and the Long Game

A long-term element of technology cooperation that often receives insufficient attention is investment in people. The United States should expand programs that bring Eurasian students, scientists, and entrepreneurs to American institutions and, vice versa, bring American students, scientists, and entrepreneurs to Eurasia. A special "Eurasia Tech Fellows" program for graduate studies in STEM, funding for bi-national research centers, an AI lab jointly run by American and Indian universities, a quantum computing center with joint European and American faculty, and entrepreneurship programs that connect Central Asian startup founders with American investors and mentors would build human capital and pro-American professional networks that persist for decades.

Over five to ten years, thousands of alumni of such programs can become innovation leaders in their home countries, familiar with American approaches and predisposed to American partnerships. This talent pipeline is crucial for sustaining co-development in sensitive fields like quantum computing, advanced biotechnology, and next-generation semiconductors, where trust and shared values are as important as technical skill. Intellectual property protection, research ethics, and security protocols are much easier to manage with partners who were trained in the same frameworks.

The strategic return on investment from education and talent programs is among the highest available in the policy toolkit, and it compounds over time in ways that are difficult to quantify but impossible to miss. The United States built much of its postwar influence in Asia and Europe through exactly this kind of educational investment. Reviving it as a deliberate, well-resourced program rather than an afterthought would yield strategic dividends that persist well beyond the current competition. The Tech Prosperity Network is ultimately a network of people as much as institutions, and building it requires investing in both.

Strategy without a map is just ambition. Before the United States can pursue coherent engagement across Eurasia, it needs clarity on who its friends are, who might become friends, and who it is actively competing against. That assessment is more differentiated than the broad strokes of "the free world" versus "the authoritarian axis" would suggest, and the differentiation matters enormously for policy design. Treating all Eurasian relationships through the same lens produces the same outcome: generic approaches that satisfy no one and accomplish little.

The landscape falls into three broad tiers. The first tier includes America's treaty allies and de facto partners, with deep cooperation in trade, technology, and security. The second tier contains warm partners, countries that are not alliance-bound but maintain significant cooperation and are generally open to American engagement. The third tier contains the difficult cases: adversaries, estranged states, and countries where relations are burdened by fundamental disagreements. Each tier requires a different posture and different tools.

The Tier 1 Alliance Base

Start with NATO. The alliance gives the United States an extraordinary foundation across the western third of the Eurasian landmass. Germany, France, and Poland anchor European defense and economic integration in ways that have no equivalent in any competing framework. The United Kingdom remains a premier partner in finance, intelligence, and innovation. These are not passive allies waiting for American direction. They are active contributors to the shared strategic agenda, and in some cases, particularly on regulatory standards and digital governance, they are leading it.

The U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, which coordinates approaches to AI governance, chip supply chains, and digital standards, is among the most consequential bilateral economic forums operating today. It rarely generates headlines because its work is technical and incremental, but it shapes the standards that govern global technology markets in ways that will matter for decades. The TTC deserves more political investment from both sides, not less.

Turkey occupies an uncomfortable position within NATO. Its geography, astride the Bosphorus, bridging Europe and Asia, bordering both the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, makes it indispensable to any serious Middle Corridor or Black Sea strategy. But the relationship has been fraying for years over the S-400 procurement, divergent positions on Syria, and an increasingly independent foreign policy under Erdogan. The United States signed an MOU with Ankara on critical minerals cooperation, which represents the right approach: engaging Turkey on specific issues where interests converge, without pretending that the broader relationship is what it was during the Cold War.

Further east, Japan and South Korea are the linchpins of the Indo-Pacific alliance structure and, increasingly, America's most sophisticated technology co-development partners. Japan is a technology peer in the fullest sense. The U.S.-Japan Technology Prosperity Deal covers AI standards, semiconductor fabrication, quantum research, 6G telecommunications, and space. Bilateral trade runs at roughly $300 billion annually. South Korea brings advanced semiconductor manufacturing and 5G infrastructure expertise that make it irreplaceable in any serious supply chain strategy. The KORUS free trade agreement provides a robust commercial baseline, and both countries have deepened cooperation as shared exposure to Chinese economic coercion has become undeniable. Together, these two relationships represent the most sophisticated technology co-development architecture America has built with any foreign partners.

Israel rounds out the Tier 1 picture as a major non-NATO ally with irreplaceable capabilities in cybersecurity, AI, and defense biotechnology. The U.S.-Israel technology relationship is uniquely deep, built on decades of intelligence sharing and joint R&D, and it provides a critical node in the Middle Eastern dimension of Eurasian strategy.

The Tier 2 Opportunity Set

The Tier 2 partners are where the real strategic opportunity concentrates for the next decade. India is the most consequential single relationship in this category. With a GDP approaching $3.5 trillion and a growth trajectory that makes it among the fastest-growing large economies on earth, India is simultaneously the world's largest democracy and the most important swing state in the global technology competition. The Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership and India's membership in the Quad provide institutional scaffolding for the relationship. The harder work is building the economic connective tissue, there is no U.S.-India free trade agreement, and the two countries have historically struggled to align on trade policy despite deep strategic alignment on every other dimension. Progress on semiconductor collaboration and defense co-production is real but remains well below what the strategic relationship could bear.

Vietnam is a model of what sustained bilateral engagement can produce when maintained across multiple administrations. Upgraded to a Comprehensive Strategic Partner in 2023, Vietnam has become a critical node in supply chain diversification away from China, with firms like Intel anchoring high-tech manufacturing in the country. The growth of U.S.-Vietnam economic ties illustrates what a determined bilateral strategy can deliver over years of consistent follow-through.

Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE each carry distinct strategic profiles. Singapore is an advanced partner on digital trade and cybersecurity with governance standards that match or exceed American expectations in many areas. The Gulf states bring capital, energy relationships, and growing ambitions for technology investment under Vision 2030 frameworks. Central Asian states bring critical minerals and the geopolitical significance of being the geographic heart of Eurasia; they are countries that both China's BRI and Russia's EAEU are actively competing to lock in through infrastructure, financing, and institutional membership.

The Tier 3 Difficult Cases

The Tier 3 states, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Belarus, and Syria, require differentiated management rather than a uniform adversarial posture. China is a strategic competitor and simultaneously America's second-largest trading partner; the relationship requires careful navigation rather than the kind of comprehensive confrontation that would produce economic damage on both sides. Russia is an adversary in Europe with potential, however distant, for selective cooperation on arms control and Arctic governance. Iran has a population broadly sympathetic to American culture, even as its government is hostile to American interests. Each requires a tailored approach, which subsequent articles in this series address directly.

The key insight from this mapping exercise is straightforward: the United States has extraordinary alliance assets in Eurasia that China and Russia cannot replicate. No competitor can match the depth, geographic breadth, or technology sophistication of the alliance network America has built over the past eight decades. The task is not to build a coalition from scratch. It is to activate what already exists, deepen the relationships that are working, invest in the partnerships most likely to grow in strategic importance over the coming decade, and manage the difficult cases with realism about what is and is not achievable.

The map is favorable. The question is whether America uses it.

Working with the Tier 3 States

The difficult cases deserve more than dismissal. China requires a competition framework that is sharp on technology and supply chains while preserving the commercial relationship. Russia requires firm management in the short term, competition for influence across the EAEU periphery in the medium term, and institutional capacity to build better relations when conditions permit. Iran, Belarus, and North Korea each require differentiated approaches calibrated to what is actually achievable, which is more than zero engagement in most cases.

The deeper insight across all three tiers is that the United States benefits from treating its Eurasian relationships as a portfolio rather than as a set of independent bilateral cases. The signal that American engagement sends in one country is received in others. When the U.S. follows through on a commitment to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan takes note. When a Technology Prosperity Deal with Japan demonstrates results, India becomes more interested in negotiating one. When IMEC makes tangible progress, Gulf states see American capability and commitment in action. The portfolio logic argues for visible success in a few marquee relationships that create confidence in American partnership more broadly.

The map is favorable for the United States in ways that are sometimes undersold in strategic discourse. No competitor has the alliance network, technology leadership, and capital ecosystem that American strategy can bring to bear across Eurasia. The task is not to build from scratch. It is to activate what already exists with the consistency and strategic coherence that the competition requires. That starts with knowing who your friends are, and this article has tried to establish exactly that.

There is a tendency in American strategic discourse to treat the Indo-Pacific as a maritime problem. It is a problem of carrier groups and island chains, of Taiwan Strait crossings and freedom-of-navigation operations. That framing is not wrong. It is incomplete. The real competition for influence in the 21st century runs not along the water's edge but through the interior of the largest landmass on earth: Eurasia.

Eurasia spans roughly 21 million square miles. It includes the world's three largest economies after the United States, China, Japan, and Germany, along with emerging powerhouses such as India, South Korea, and the Gulf states. It holds the bulk of the world's hydrocarbon reserves, the majority of global rare earth deposits, and more than 70 percent of the world's population. Whoever shapes how Eurasia connects, trades, and governs its own technology has structural leverage over the global economy for the foreseeable future. That is not a theory. It is arithmetic, and the United States has been slow to act on it.

China understood this early. The Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013, was many things simultaneously: an infrastructure program, a debt instrument, a standards-setting exercise, and a strategic communications campaign. It told 150 countries that Beijing was willing to show up with money, engineers, and long-term commitment. It filled a genuine vacuum. The Asian Development Bank has estimated that developing Asia alone needs $26 trillion in infrastructure investment by 2030. China did not invent the need. It simply answered it when no one else would.

Russia's play is different but no less deliberate. The Eurasian Economic Union, formally launched in 2015, is less a genuine economic bloc than a sovereignty-preservation mechanism for Moscow. By integrating Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan into a common customs arrangement, Russia created structural dependencies that make exit costly. The EAEU has not produced spectacular growth for its smaller members; most economists would say the opposite, but it has produced alignment, and alignment is the currency Russia is trading in across post-Soviet space. Alignment, once built into economic architecture, is extraordinarily durable.

The Inconsistency Gap

The United States has not been absent from Eurasia. But its presence has been inconsistent in ways that competitors have systematically exploited. Washington announces initiatives and then fails to fund them at scale. It launches frameworks without follow-through. It treats economic engagement as a secondary instrument relative to military posture, whereas in much of Eurasia, it is the only instrument that matters in day-to-day relationships between governments and populations.

The countries of Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East are not primarily looking for security guarantees from Washington. They are looking for investors, trading partners, and technology allies. They want to know whether the United States will still be engaged in their economies five years from now, or whether American attention will have shifted to the next crisis. Every government that has watched the United States make ambitious promises and then disengage, in Afghanistan, in parts of Africa, in the Middle East, carries that memory into its calculations about how much to rely on American partnership.

The consequences of this gap in consistency are not abstract. Every year that American engagement lags, Chinese and Russian economic architecture gets more deeply embedded in Eurasian markets. Every BRI railway that is completed, every Huawei 5G network that is deployed, and every Chinese state bank loan that is signed narrows the window for competitive American engagement. Infrastructure is not politically neutral. It creates dependencies, shapes trade flows, and embeds the standards of whoever built it for decades after construction is complete.

The Assets America Has and Underuses

This series argues that the United States must compete more effectively in Eurasia, and that the tools to do so already exist. The Development Finance Corporation, the Export-Import Bank, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation provide a financing toolkit that no other democracy can match. The G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment has pledged to mobilize hundreds of billions in capital with a focus on quality, sustainability, and transparency. These tools exist precisely for this competition. Using them consistently and at scale is a choice.

Beyond financing, the United States has bilateral technology agreements with Japan and South Korea that are actively reshaping semiconductor supply chains, AI governance, and quantum research. It has a network of treaty allies across Eurasia, from NATO's eastern flank through the Indo-Pacific, that China and Russia cannot replicate. And it has something that China and Russia fundamentally cannot offer: a model of partnership that does not require political subordination as the price of entry.

Countries that partner with the United States do not have to change how they govern internally, endorse American positions in international forums, or suppress domestic opposition as a condition of receiving investment. That model, partnership among equals, as imperfectly as it is sometimes executed, is genuinely attractive to governments navigating great power competition from a position of limited leverage. The contrast with Chinese and Russian models is real, and it matters to decision-makers who have experienced both.

There is also the innovation dimension. Aligning with the United States means access to the world's most productive innovation economy, Silicon Valley, Route 128, Research Triangle, and the university research complex that feeds them. For a young entrepreneur in Tashkent or a government official in Kuala Lumpur considering where to anchor their country's technological future, access to the American innovation ecosystem is a genuinely compelling proposition that Chinese or Russian alternatives cannot match on their own merits.

The Decade That Decides

The next five to ten years will determine whether these assets are deployed with strategic coherence or squandered through inattention. A Eurasia that runs on Chinese digital infrastructure, on Chinese financing terms, and on Chinese technology standards is a Eurasia structurally tilted away from American interests for a generation. A Eurasia that is genuinely multiconnected, where U.S.-backed corridors compete on quality, U.S. tech standards are embedded in digital architecture, and American capital flows through responsible development finance, is a Eurasia where no single power can dominate.

This series moves through four major themes. First, the alliance landscape: who America's actual friends are across Eurasia, from the NATO heartland through the Indo-Pacific technology democracies to the warm partners in Central Asia and the Gulf. Second, the economic strategy: how to sequence trade deals, technology co-development, and infrastructure investment into a coherent regional approach. Third, the hard cases: Iran, Russia, the EAEU periphery, and the Central Asian states navigating between great powers. Fourth, the capital question: how can public and private financing be mobilized at the scale this competition requires?

There is a recurring assumption in American policy circles that the United States is playing from behind in Eurasia and must therefore settle for second place. This series rejects that assumption. The United States has an alliance network, technological leadership, a capital base, and a model of partnership that are superior to those of China and Russia. What it has lacked is the consistency and strategic coherence to deploy those advantages. That is a correctable problem.

Difficulty is not the same as impossibility. The Eurasian gambit is winnable, and this series is about how to win it.