The withdrawal of U.S. development efforts from Central Asia will leave an open field for China and Russia.
When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, it ended more than a war—it marked the collapse of sustained U.S. engagement across a key part of Central Asia. Since then, the dismantling of development assistance tools—culminating in the near-elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2025—has opened a dangerous vacuum. Russia and China are filling it with military pacts, surveillance infrastructure, and state-led investment. The United States, by contrast, has retreated from its most effective form of influence: development diplomacy.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan—two nations long seen as critical to US efforts to promote stability, reform, and connectivity across the Eurasian steppe.
Kazakhstan, Central Asia’s largest economy and a strategic energy supplier, has historically sought a “multi-vector” foreign policy to balance Russia, China, and the West. For decades, the United States was a key player in this balancing act. USAID supported institutional reforms in public health, energy, and the environment.
In 2022, for example, USAID’s Power Central Asia initiative helped Kazakhstan’s largest energy company reduce methane emissions under a new memorandum of cooperation. The agency also invested in tuberculosis control efforts through training and technical assistance to Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Health.
Uzbekistan offered an even more promising opportunity. Since coming to power in 2016, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has pursued cautious political and economic liberalization. In response, USAID ramped up programming, from launching a “Tuberculosis-Free Uzbekistan” initiative to helping expand domestic pharmaceutical production. These efforts were more than health-sector interventions—they were part of a broader campaign to strengthen the rule of law, increase private sector competitiveness, and deepen ties to Western institutions.
Yet those ties are unraveling. As part of its government restructuring effort, the Trump administration has folded USAID’s functions into a hollowed-out State Department bureaucracy. Field-based programming has been slashed or frozen, and technical expertise has drained from embassies. According to reporting by The Diplomat, the aid drawdown has had a “devastating” impact across Central Asia, leaving U.S. missions unable to offer meaningful alternatives to authoritarian-backed investments.
Meanwhile, both Russia and China have doubled down. In February 2023, Kazakhstan signed a defense cooperation roadmap with Russia under the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), reinforcing Moscow’s security clout. Beijing, through the Digital Silk Road, has expanded Huawei-built surveillance infrastructure in Uzbek cities and offered soft loans for cloud storage, e-government systems, and AI-enhanced border monitoring.
These are not neutral tools. They encode authoritarian preferences into the digital and institutional architecture of Central Asia. Without sustained U.S. development engagement, local actors have fewer options—and less leverage—to demand transparency, accountability, or democratic safeguards.
Development diplomacy was once the quiet backbone of American influence. It meant more than foreign assistance dollars. It brought technical advisors to ministries, trained judges and local officials, and strengthened civil society. It made the United States a reliable partner for leaders navigating modernization without coercion. But that credibility is now eroding.
The consequences are strategic. Central Asia sits at the intersection of U.S.-China-Russia competition. It hosts key overland corridors, energy exports, rare earth reserves, and growing youth populations. When Washington walks away from the development field, it doesn’t just forfeit goodwill—it cedes the rules of the game to its rivals.
If the United States intends to remain a serious geopolitical actor in the region, it must restore its civilian foreign policy tools. That means reestablishing USAID’s independent capacity, recommitting to long-term partnerships, and rebuilding technical teams in the field. Central Asia does not want to be anyone’s client state. But without American engagement, its choices narrow—and so do ours.
About the Author: Steven E. Hendrix
Steven E. Hendrix is chief executive of Hendrix LLC and senior research fellow at DePaul University College of Law. He is a former career diplomat and Coordinator for Foreign Assistance of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) at the U.S. State Department.
Image: Kosmogenez / Shutterstock.com.
