While the Iran war smolders, Saudi Arabia fights the Houthis and a new rift opens in US-Ukraine relations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio travels on Sunday to Uzbekistan, a nation far removed from the biggest US foreign policy challenges.
The top US diplomat is scheduled to land in Samarkand on Sunday to meet with leaders from the C5+1, a grouping that brings together the United States and the Muslim-majority post-Soviet states of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
US officials have portrayed resource-rich Central Asia — the region between China, Russia and Iran — as worthy of more attention than it received from US President Donald Trump’s predecessors.
Trump hosted C5 leaders at the White House last November, when Kazakhstan agreed to join the Abraham Accords, a series of agreements under which Muslim-majority countries have normalized or deepened relations with Israel. Separately, Trump met with Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev at the United Nations General Assembly last September.
Regional politics aside, the trip fits an emerging pattern in which Rubio often visits regions not at the center of the news cycle, while leaving some more fraught foreign-policy portfolios to other Trump aides, including special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Vice President JD Vance.
For instance, Rubio has not visited Kyiv or Moscow since becoming secretary of state. He was not present for talks between US and Ukrainian officials in Florida earlier this month, when US officials pressed Ukraine to stop hitting Russian refineries. Vance, not Rubio, represented the US in Pakistan during peace talks with Iran in April.
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