Central Asia’s Middle Corridor Expansion: Opportunity for China and Iran

Bottom Line

• The sustained attacks on merchant shipping in the Red Sea have given a fresh boost to a budding Central Asian trade network known as the Middle Corridor, whose participant countries recently met to discuss the development of two new transit-trade routes: the Turkmenistan-Uzbekistan route and a second linking the former to Iran.

• Combining the two transit-trade routes could offer Iran an economic lifeline and a closer link to China, its most important great-power ally.

• The combination of the routes could also enable China to…