Just a week after his Tokyo summit with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, U.S. President Donald Trump will host the C5+1 Summit with Central Asian leaders this week in Washington, marking the 10th anniversary of the forum designed to strengthen U.S. strategic partnerships in the region.
The C5 -- Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan -- concerns Japan more directly than seems immediately obvious. Like Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, Takaichi's foreign-policy team should embrace and support the Central Asian "Stans," in particular the Turkic ones, to help build a counterbalancing strategic bloc against both Russia and China in the superpowers' mutual blind spot. The wealthier and more unified that region gets, the more backward distraction it creates for the two giants away from their outward focus on Europe and the Indo-Pacific, respectively.
The most promising shortcut to that outcome is the pan-Turkic project already gathering pace, essentially a restoration of the Silk Road artery to the world effectively blocked since Moscow conquered the region starting circa 1800.