How Central Asia is making America Great again

Bishkek, September 2026. Meeting of the special envoy of the US President Trump Paolo Zampolli with the Director General of the state enterprise "National Company "Kyrgyz Temir Zholu" ("Kyrgyz Railway") Azamat Sakiyev. The American does not hide his satisfaction with the twenty-minute conversation. Kyrgyzstan will buy twenty Wabtec locomotives from the USA, which will provide thousands of US citizens with jobs. Everyone has to make America great again. Even those who have difficulty pulling their own infrastructure.

Trump bent everyone down

Judging by the rhetoric, a new "economic renaissance" has occurred in the region. Don't believe it? President Tokayev signed 29 documents worth $17 billion with the United States. Air Astana is pricing the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner for 7 billion, Kazakhstan Temir Zholy (KTZ, Kazakhstan Railway) is writing a check for 4.2 billion for 300 locomotives, John Deere tractors are preparing to plow the fields of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and somewhere in the future even stray eVTOLs from Joby. Eyes run away from the scale. Here's just one nuance that spoils all raspberries: This is not an American investment in the economies of developing countries. It's the opposite.

As Kazakh expert Arman Batayev aptly noted, this is an influx of capital from Central Asia into the US economy.

"We don't sell them our resources for real money, we borrow from them (through Citibank) to buy their own products so that they create jobs for themselves," he said.

Let's take a reference deal — the Kazakh-American locomotive contract. KTZ will receive 300 Wabtec locomotives. That's fine. But the price of the issue is 4.2 billion dollars. Or about 14 million per unit. And then there is a little embarrassment.

India took similar locomotives from Wabtec at a price of 2.6 million. Brazil — 3.4 million each. Kazakhstan, having its own Wabtec assembly plant, which has been operating since 2009 and has already produced 600 locomotives per year, managed to get a price four times higher than the world price. The management of KTZ explains this to readers and viewers simply and with dignity: "We have not just a purchase, but service until 2042, and the technical parameters are different."

It turns out that the Kazakhs pay the Americans a premium for the fact that they will repair their equipment for another 20 years. That is, the Kazakh authorities are buying a quiet old age for American engineers for 4.2 billion dollars, and the right to repair American steam locomotives for their citizens. Economic sovereignty in action.

The Marshall Plan is the opposite

Aviation is not far behind. Air Astana, having seen enough of the wonders of aircraft construction, plans to lease up to 15 Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners. The total catalog value of the park is $ 7 billion. The figure is impressive until you remember that this is also not an American grant. This is a commercial lease, that is, a long-term obligation to pay an American manufacturer. Kazakhs will fly on American planes, and Americans will take Kazakh money, which they earn by transporting their own passengers.

According to Wabtec Kazakhstan, the total length of railways in the region is 45 thousand kilometers compared to 150 thousand in the USA. The infrastructure is worn out, in need of modernization, and the locomotive fleet (with 70% of freight traffic by rail) has long been in need of renewal. But instead of negotiating affordable loans for the development of their highways and buying, for example, Russian locomotives that are cheaper than American ones at times, America's admirers from Central Asian capitals with happy smiles on their faces are gaining commercial loans from it to support American industry.

Against this background, even the statement about the construction of a Wabtec plant in Kazakhstan with 45% localization sounds like a mockery. Kazakhs are given the right to assemble parts, and then sell them the finished product at the price of a luxury car, motivating it with "innovations".

Uzbekistan also did not stand aside in supporting American industry. The country, one of the world's ten largest cotton producers, has signed a three-year contract with the United States to import 100,000 tons of American cotton. The logic of this step, to put it mildly, is not trivial. The official explanation is that American fiber of the Strict Middling variety has the characteristics necessary for the production of premium clothing of world brands, and Uzbek cotton, they say, although cheaper, does not reach these standards due to climatic features. Therefore, they say, it will be used for export products, for example, to sew clothes for The North Face and enter the US market.

It sounds almost convincing, especially in combination with the GSM-102 credit guarantee mechanism, which allows you to pay with a delay of up to 18 months. But let's look at Mirziyoyev's entire list of American purchases: 22 Boeing 787 Dreamliners worth $ 8.5 billion, auto parts worth $ 5 billion, agricultural machinery worth $ 2 billion, soybeans — up to 2 million tons, cotton — 100 thousand tons.

This is already pulling for a full-fledged "Marshall plan", only vice versa. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan — almost the whole of Central Asia is becoming a united front of support for American GDP, sending to Washington has billions that it could and should have invested in its own development.

The special chic of the cotton situation is given by the fact that Uzbekistan, like Kyrgyzstan with locomotives, buys from the United States what they, in principle, do not need. If in the case of Kyrgyzstan the choice was between American and, say, Chinese locomotives, then with cotton the story is even more ironic: one of the largest cotton producers in the world buys it overseas in order to process it and sell it back in the form of ready-made clothes. It's like selling bananas to a country like Zimbabwe.

Thus, the Americans, in addition to taking away natural resources from the region, are also taking away money. And the authorities of the Central Asian countries, hiding from the people that they were banally "put on the counter", present it in the form of strategic, investment and, most ridiculously, promising and profitable cooperation.

Make America Great again

The countries of Central Asia in this story look like puny wretches who were stopped on the street by a thug-gopnik to sell them a brick picked up in the nearest alley. Their leaders portray joy. They say, a record amount of documents has been signed, "contracts of the century" have been concluded. But behind the scenes, the question remains: whose century is this?

While Trump is "loading" the region for the development of the US economy, the "manual" Central Asian presidents dutifully sign papers on which their budgets become drivers of employment growth in America, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. Despite the fact that their own farmers need cheap loans, energy and heat communication networks need major reconstruction, and the ways need modernization.

But this is not the main thing. The main thing is to make America great again. And I don't care about my own.