As intense great power rivalry sweeps the international system, middle powers increasingly tend to find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Ulugbek Khasanov explores how Uzbekistan maintains equilibrium in its foreign policy and strikes a balance between external powers seeking influence in Central Asia.
In the fifth book of his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides describes the negotiations between Athenian envoys and the inhabitants of the island of Melos in 416 BC, an episode that has gone down in history as the “Melian Dialogue”. This episode has also come to be remembered as an early example of coercive diplomacy. The neutral island was ordered to submit, and in return offered only appeals to justice and invocations of the gods. The proud Athenians held their ground: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”, and, true to their word, they put the male population of Melos to the sword, consigned the women and children to slavery, and repopulated the island with Athenian colonists.
In contemporary international relations, the Melian Dialogue is frequently misread as a “law of international politics”, whereby force determines the outcome and principle amounts to mere rhetoric. This reading has also gained considerable currency in the political rhetoric of the Trump administration, which invokes the principle of might makes right: in January 2026, National Security Adviser Stephen Miller declared openly that the world is “governed by force” and that this is “the iron law of the world since the beginning of time”.
The eminent scholar Jonathan Kirshner, in a recent article in the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs, observes rather pointedly that this understanding of the laws of politics distorts present–day reality and has become highly contentious. The Athenians’ words are not Thucydides’ own judgement, but a line delivered by politicians whose arrogance leads inexorably to catastrophe. The true lesson of the History is addressed, in fact, not to the weak but to the great power being destroyed by hubris, or overweening pride. In the ancient Greek historian’s account, both the “law of force” and “hubris” appear at the very moment of a state’s greatest power and, paradoxically, coincide with the loss of its former authority and its subsequent decline. The events surrounding Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland and many others amply confirm the American scholar’s argument.
Let us put the question differently: what logic governs those who are neither Athens nor Sparta? What happens when small and medium–sized states refuse to remain passive objects of great–power competition and instead forge their own model of collective agency? In working out its own answer to this highly topical question, Central Asia becomes a significant case study for understanding present–day trends in world politics.
The logic behind the region’s response to security challenges is straightforward: if the problem is structural rather than merely psychological, then the response must be institutional too. In this logic, structural power derives not from the size of an army or the volume of GDP, but from the quality of a state’s institutional architecture. The contemporary system of international relations—with its financial markets, technological interdependence, global supply chains and digital infrastructure—magnifies this dependence many times over and turns institutional connectedness into an independent source of influence. It is in this context that Central Asia’s experience acquires real significance, all the more so because it extends well beyond the local setting.
This is not another iteration of multi–vector diplomacy, nor simply a matter of individual states balancing between great powers, but a qualitatively different strategy altogether. It involves building regional collective agency through internal institutionalisation and integration into a range of parallel structures of international cooperation. This is precisely what the region’s successful engagement with the major players of world politics demonstrates—within the EAEU, the CIS, the SCO, the Belt and Road Initiative, the WTO, the EU, the UN, the OTS, the OIC, the collective ‘C5+’ dialogue format, and many others, across the full spectrum of regional and international security issues.
On 16 November 2025, Tashkent hosted the Seventh Consultative Meeting of the Heads of State of Central Asia, chaired by the President of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev. The summit concluded with the adoption of a Joint Declaration, agreement on a regional security concept, and the approval of a catalogue of risks for 2026–2028. The central substantive message was the Uzbek leader’s proposal to transform the consultative dialogue into a strategic format—the “Central Asia Community”—complete with a permanent Secretariat, an upgrading of the status of national coordinators to special representatives of the heads of state, and the establishment of its own platform for multilateral meetings.
In this context, the Tashkent initiative illustrates a logic of collective agency through institutionalisation that neither classical realism nor liberal institutionalism, in their standard forms, fully captures. Viewed through a realist lens, the states of Central Asia ought to have found themselves in the position of Melos, forced to choose a patron. The combined gross domestic product (GDP) of the region’s five states, measured at purchasing power parity, stands at roughly 700–750 billion dollars, and not one of them possesses nuclear weapons or holds a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
The Tashkent summit demonstrated that something different had occurred. Since 2018, when the first Consultative Meeting was held in Astana, the five countries have been steadily building an architecture of intraregional cooperation. Border disputes have been successfully resolved (in March 2025, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan concluded the Treaty on the Tripoint of their Borders), and long–term priorities for economic cooperation have been agreed. Strategies under the “Central Asia—2040” Concept (Astana, 2024) are advancing transport connectivity, energy integration, and the harmonisation of digital standards. In contemporary politics, this phenomenon is described by the term collective agency—that is, the capacity of a group of states to act as a single actor, to shape a common agenda, and to project it into the foreign–policy process with a qualitatively different negotiating weight than that carried by each state’s position individually.
Central Asia is not seeking to become an alternative pole of power, nor is it building a bloc against any particular player. It is steadily moving from being a passive object of competition to the status of an actor whose negotiating position is defined not by the individual resources of each state, but by the quality of the shared institutional architecture. The logic of the multi–vector foreign policy that Uzbekistan has consistently pursued since late 2016 is now acquiring a genuinely collective, regional dimension.
The Central Asian experience of the past decade can be understood in a new light: not as a denial of the asymmetry of power, but as its institutional reinterpretation. In an age of global turbulence, one of the most important sources of influence for medium–sized and small states is no longer the build–up of material power or the search for an external guarantor, but the institutionalisation of regional collective agency—that is, the creation of mechanisms that raise the quality of collective security and reshape the terms on which external counterparts engage with the region. For it is precisely the potential for multi–vector hedging, and for participation in several complementary segments of the modern architecture of international cooperation, that makes their model not an antithesis of Thucydides’ concept, but an example of how the very nature of international agency is undergoing systemic transformation.
