Central Asia Enters the Minerals Race
Central Asia is entering the critical minerals race at a time when deposits alone no longer confer strategic advantage. The Astana Mining & Metallurgy Congress, scheduled for June 11–12 at Hilton Astana, gives the issue operational form: supply chains, investment, and commercial projects. U.S. Under Secretary Jacob Helberg will participate there and in the preceding C5+1 Critical Minerals Dialogue on June 10–11. The Astana agenda also puts Central Asia’s role in global supply chains directly into view. The test is how quickly governments, investors, and industrial buyers can finance, process, move, and purchase minerals before they are locked into industrial supply chains. The G7 is moving in the same direction, but through institutional design rather than industrial action. The group is discussing a permanent critical minerals secretariat to maintain continuity across changing G7 presidencies, possibly at either the International Energy Agency or the OECD. The proposal acknowledges a real deficiency in Western coordination, but it also reveals the larger problem: continuity is useful only if it becomes execution. At the same time, reports have circulated about disagreements over stockpiling and leadership, including European resistance to both a single shared stockpile and a U.S.-led structure. For Central Asia, the practical question is not institutional architecture alone, but whether such coordination produces finance, processing capacity, and long-term offtake. The June dialogue in Astana is part of a wider C5+1 movement from diplomacy toward operational cooperation. Its participants are trying to convert the platform from a talk shop into a vehicle for business transactions. As TCA has reported, U.S. engagement in the region is increasingly tied to business mechanisms, export-credit support, and project finance. Kazakhstan has already moved into this framework track. Kazakhstan and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding on critical minerals cooperation during Tokayev’s November 2025 visit to Washington, and the agreement took immediate shape through the Tau-Ken Samruk–Cove Capital tungsten project. Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry later described the MOU as the first agreement of its kind in Central Asia, providing for processing capacity in Kazakhstan, technology transfer, and expanded access for Kazakh products to the U.S. market. In February 2026, Uzbekistan followed with its own U.S. critical minerals track: TCA reported that Tashkent signed a critical minerals MOU on February 4, and that DFC heads of terms for a Joint Investment Framework followed on February 19. Central Asian governments are not passive terrain for outside competition. Kazakhstan, with Central Asia’s most developed mining and metallurgical base, and Uzbekistan, with a rapidly expanding minerals program, are using minerals competition to attract capital and build processing capacity. They are seeking to diversify partners and move beyond dependence on raw material exports. The regional objective is industrial upgrading while preserving room for maneuver between China, Russia, the United States, Europe, and other partners. The minerals question cannot be separated from the larger Eurasian setting. Central Asia is trying to widen its own field of choice before its options are narrowed by what Hudson Institute senior fellow Ken Moriyasu called, in comments to...
