Dana Masalimova
When President Donald Trump welcomes the leaders of Central Asia to Washington for the C5+1 summit—the first ever to be held at the White House—he will mark the framework’s first decade with a distinctly transactional twist: minerals. The meeting offers Washington a chance to secure a strategic foothold in a region that sits atop some of the world’s richest reserves of critical minerals yet has long been caught between Moscow and Beijing.
This summit comes on the heels of Trump’s recent Asia tour, during which he sealed critical minerals partnerships with Australia, Japan, Malaysia, and Thailand—each deal aimed at reducing Beijing’s dominance of global mineral processing and securing access to materials that power advanced manufacturing, electric vehicles, and defense systems. The logical next step is to extend this effort to Central Asia and make Kazakhstan a founding member of America’s critical minerals club.
Kazakhstan is the natural anchor. It is the world’s top uranium producer and holds an estimated 2.6 million tons of rare earth elements, with a recently identified major deposit potentially vaulting it to third place globally, behind only China and Brazil. The country holds half of the 50 designated as “critical” by the US government and already produces 19 of them. Kazakhstan’s industrial base can already support full-cycle production for several advanced materials, and the government is actively courting Western partners through reforms such as a new subsoil code modeled on Western Australia’s and digital licensing. However, its broader investment regime is still a work in progress.
The Trump administration has pursued two models for critical minerals cooperation in Asia: advanced frameworks with established allies like Australia and Japan, and basic MOUs with emerging partners in this sector, such as Thailand and Malaysia. The advanced framework is the one that suits Kazakhstan: the country’s mining maturity, legal reforms, and political will position it well beyond entry-level cooperation, for a high-impact framework that combines financing, offtake guarantees, and technology transfer.
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