Kazakhstan's President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev attends a dinner with leaders of Central Asian countries and President Donald Trump, Thursday, at the White House. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) |
The huge Central Asian state of Kazakhstan is patently not in the Middle East. With Russia, it shares the world’s longest continuous land border — a sprawling some 4,750 miles — and another 1,000 miles of boundary lines with China to the east. It does not have the same history of Arab enmity toward Israel as many nations in the Jewish state’s neighborhood. Indeed, it has had formal ties with Israel since 1992, just months after it declared its independence amid the breakup of the Soviet Union. So the news Thursday that Kazakhstan would be the latest state to join the Abraham Accords — the U.S.-brokered normalization deals between Israel and a clutch of Arab states — furrowed many eyebrows. Why was Kazakhstan doing this now? What did it mean to be making “peace” with Israel when you’re already diplomatic partners? Was resource-rich Kazakhstan going to play a more substantive role in support of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation? I put these questions to Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev during a brief interview before he headed to a Thursday evening summit with President Donald Trump and other Central Asian leaders at the White House. Tokayev, a veteran diplomat and politician, spoke carefully. He said the move was Kazakhstan’s “modest contribution to what is happening in the Middle East,” describing it as a “follow up” to his country’s broader policy of facilitating dialogue and peace. Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, gave its name to a political process launched in 2017 by Russia, Turkey and Iran to find a solution to Syria’s civil war. More recently, the city has been floated as a site where Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could meet for face-to-face talks. Kazakhstan also played a key role in helping along the rapprochement between longtime foes Armenia and Azerbaijan, for which Trump claimed credit at a White House signing ceremony in August. In this context, Tokayev told me that “it’s quite natural, it’s quite normal that Kazakhstan decided to become part of this,” though he admitted his country’s participation in the Abraham Accords may not be about “practical results.” |
![Trump, joined by lawmakers and members of his administration, delivers remarks to leaders of Central Asian countries during the dinner on Thursday. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)]() |
Trump, joined by lawmakers and members of his administration, delivers remarks to leaders of Central Asian countries during the dinner on Thursday. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) |
In reality, Kazakhstan’s entry into the pact, which could formally happen in December, appears to be more about courting Trump with a symbolic gesture than forging Middle East peace. The Abraham Accords, envisioned by successive U.S. administrations as a path toward integrating Israel into the Middle East while deepening U.S. ties with the region’s wealthy monarchies, have been drifting toward irrelevance in the shadow of Israel’s devastating war in Gaza. The shocking Palestinian death toll in the conflict has animated the Arab street, while Israel’s September strike on Qatari capital Doha convinced many regional policymakers that they need to come up with security plans that hedge against a potential Israeli threat. Even the United Arab Emirates, Israel’s most active and significant partner within the Abraham Accords, signaled that it could withdraw altogether from the pact if Israel’s right-wing government pressed ahead with its annexation agenda in the West Bank. Tokayev expressed minimal concern when I asked if the expulsion of Palestinians from war-ravaged Gaza or formal annexation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank would compel Kazakhstan to also pull out of the accords. “Nothing serious or terrible is going to happen that will make us change our decision,” he told me. “Our assessment on the Abraham Accords is absolutely firm and irreversible.” Kazakhstan is pursuing a more pragmatic goal. “Tokayev is seasoned enough to know Kazakhstan has zero leverage in the crowded theater of Middle Eastern diplomacy,” Eldar Mamedov, a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute, a Washington think tank, noted on social media. “Joining the Abraham Accords is a low-cost, high-yield signal to the US/Trump. The main goal: diversify geopolitical dependencies away from Russia.” |
![Trump at a dinner with the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, at the White House, Thursday. (Nathan Howard/Reuters)]() |
Trump at a dinner with the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, at the White House, Thursday. (Nathan Howard/Reuters) |
Trump’s Thursday summit with Central Asian leaders was a signal that the United States is keen to help that diversification. The format of the so-called “C5+1” was introduced under President Barack Obama, but Trump has dispensed with previous administrations’ efforts to address human rights in a region run by autocrats. Instead, he is more focused on his broader global strategy of building up new supply chains of critical minerals in a market dominated by China. Tokayev touted a package of deals involving his country and the United States that’s worth more than $17 billion. These include agreements from Kazakh companies and ministries to buy new Boeing airplanes, new John Deere agricultural machinery and even cutting-edge AI chips in partnership with U.S. giants OpenAI and Nvidia. There were U.S. investment deals in Kazakhstan’s reserves of tungsten, a metal that’s used in myriad industrial processes, as well as a memorandum of understanding over the development of the country’s vast trove of untapped critical minerals. Kazakhstan’s president demurred when asked if these initiatives should be seen as a bid to diminish Russian and Chinese influence. “We feel very much comfortable,” Tokayev told me. “We have a strategic partnership with Russia. We have ‘eternal friendship’ with China. Our trade is thriving with both of them … and Kazakhstan is very important for both of them, because we are on the crossroads of Eurasia.” Analysts see more pronounced tensions between Astana and Moscow, stoked, in part, by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. There’s speculation that Russian operatives are trying to stir unrest in Kazakhstan’s majority-ethnic Russian north, and nationalist Russian media have accused the Kazakh government of “Russophobia.” In an echo of his revanchist rhetoric about Ukraine, Putin has in the past questioned the validity of Kazakh statehood. Officials in Tokayev’s delegation dismissed these concerns and hailed their nation’s multiethnic harmony, but their presence in Washington sent its own message. “Even in just going to the White House, you are signaling to the Kremlin you have independent agency,” Gerard Toal, a professor of government and international affairs at Virginia Tech, told the New York Times. The accession to the Abraham Accords is also part of that project. “Sandwiched between Russia and China, Kazakhstan wants as many partners as it can get, and in particular Astana wants a more active relationship with the United States and Europe,” Andrew D’Anieri, associate director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, wrote. “Joining the Abraham Accords is a smart pragmatic step to get positive attention from Washington.” |
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