WASHINGTON – It’s dealmaking time: despite the roiling geopolitical tensions embroiling Washington on several fronts, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Central Asia’s Uzbekistan Sunday to boost commercial ties and gain an edge over Russia and China.
With the United States mired in its war with Iran, and the conflict in Ukraine showing no signs of abating, Rubio has stepped up his foreign travel with recent trips to Europe and Latin America, smack in the middle of the US midterm election campaign.
He has largely ceded control of the contentious Iran, Ukraine and Gaza situations to US President Donald Trump’s special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
Rubio was instead leading a massive delegation of 200 business leaders to Uzbekistan, where he was to take part yesterday in a ministerial meeting of five Central Asian countries.
Rubio landed in Uzbekistan’s Samarkand, on the historic Silk Road Sunday, according to an AFP journalist.
“This is an important relationship,” he said shortly before his departure, calling the trip a strategic visit. “There’s countries you’d like to get to because we want to build our relationships with them.”
A senior State Department official told reporters on Friday that Rubio was demonstrating Washington’s goodwill toward the “deepening partnership across Central Asia,” especially in the energy sector.
Central Asia is a resource-rich region as vast as the European Union but only boasts a population of about 80 million people.
“We’ve been planning this for several months, and it’s an incredible opportunity to bring the United States into a region of the world that is vitally important,” said a second senior US official, on condition of anonymity.
In Samarkand, Rubio will participate in a C5+1 meeting with ministers from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
In November 2025, Trump welcomed the leaders of those countries to the White House.
The former Soviet republics remain linked to Moscow by energy pipelines, as well as security and migratory networks, but Russian influence has eroded since the start of the war in Ukraine – with China reaping the benefits. Beijing is now the main trade partner of all five Central Asian nations. Chinese companies have signed a number of energy-related deals, seeking to buy natural gas in Turkmenistan, uranium in Kazakhstan and rare earths in Tajikistan.
The United States also has made sourcing rare earths and improving its energy mix key parts of its foreign policy.
The US ambassador to India, Sergio Gor, who also serves as the special envoy for Central and South Asia, has repeatedly emphasized the need for Washington to have better ties across the region.
– Nampa/AFP
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