August 17, 2026 - Senior Fellow for Eurasia and Director of Programs, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, Laura Linderman was quoted in OC Media [link]
While Georgia has had ties with Central Asia since the 1990s, Laura Linderman, Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and Director of Programmes at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, highlights that ‘for the past 30 years, these ties were thin and episodic and mostly related to the Baku–Tbilisi energy axis’.
Now things are changing.
‘I would encourage readers not to dismiss [these trips] as unrelated bilateral gestures’, Linderman argues, instead referring to them as part of a process of ‘coordinated institutionalisation’.
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For Linderman, the developments are likewise tied to Russia’s declining influence and the room given to smaller Eurasian states to chart new paths forward.
‘The Middle Corridor is one expression of this, and it is real: Trans-Caspian cargo has roughly quintupled since 2018, and Uzbek manufacturers are planning final-stage production in Georgia’s Poti free zone’, Linderman tells OC Media.
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‘Some of the hedging is smart and some is not’, Linderman argues. ‘The Central Asia track is the smart part. Georgia’s most durable asset is its geography, and any Georgian government would be right to build ties with Tashkent and Astana. The mistake is treating the eastern outreach as a substitute for the Western anchor rather than a complement to it’.
