The Tyranny of the Landlocked

The Iran crisis did more than rattle oil markets. It exposed Central Asia’s deepest vulnerability—and revealed an opportunity Europe would be unwise to ignore. 

When the bombs fell on Iran in February and the Strait of Hormuz went still, the world watched the price of oil. A fifth of the world's seaborne crude and gas moves through that narrow channel, and for months, it scarcely moved at all. The deeper lesson of this crisis is not about a single waterway, nor even about a war that, despite a contested ceasefire signed in June, had yet to reach a durable resolution. It is about what happens, in an age of fragmentation, when a nation's options narrow to a single point of failure. And some of its least expected tremors landed 2,000 kilometres to the north, in the landlocked heart of Eurasia. The headlines fixed on molecules. The real story was options. 

Hostage of Geography 

Central Asia ships almost nothing through Hormuz, and yet the war struck it precisely where it is most exposed. Geography bestowed the region with abundance but withheld something rarer: freedom of movement. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan are republics whose wealth in oil, gas, uranium, metals and water has always had to reach the world through someone else's territory. For three decades, their statecraft has rested on a balancing act—multi-vector diplomacy mainly between Russia and China while keeping a third door open. The arithmetic is brutally simple: a country with one route is a hostage; a country with several acquires agency. The Iran crisis closed a door and narrowed the arithmetic. 

Consider Kazakhstan, the clearest case. Its oil—the lifeblood of its economy—reaches Europe through a single artery: the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which carries more than 80% of Kazakh crude across Russian soil to the Black Sea. That dependence became visible recently, as Ukrainian drones struck the pipeline's Russian infrastructure, reminding Astana that its road to market runs through a war zone. Its eastern corridor to China—the Kazakhstan-China oil pipeline and the Central Asia-China gas pipeline—provides an important alternative, but one that deepens reliance on a single buyer rather than diversifying its options. The southern option through Iran was a different kind of corridor: not another route for hydrocarbons, but the promise of a path to the Gulf, the open ocean, and the markets of India, beyond the reach of Moscow and Beijing. A modest trade route in volume, but a vital strategic one, and a form of geopolitical oxygen in waiting. The war foreclosed it: Kazakhstan froze its projects with Iran, the rail links of the International North-South Corridor stalled, and the one genuine alternative to its northern and eastern dependencies slipped away. The same befell Turkmenistan, whose efforts to swap its gas out through Iran stalled as the crisis closed that door. For a country that already sells most of its gas to a single buyer in Beijing, with its long-hoped-for western outlet to Europe still unbuilt, the failure of the southern route was not a lost opportunity, but a tightened leash. 

For the doubly landlocked Uzbekistan and Tajikistan—nations that touch no coastline and border no country that does—the loss cut deeper still. Both had looked to the Iranian port of Chabahar as their narrow window onto the Indian Ocean; both now find it painted shut. For Uzbekistan, the exposure is concrete: as much as 60% of its cargo to and from Türkiye and Europe has moved through Iranian seaports, a lifeline the crisis has thrown into doubt. For the mountain republics, the bind takes another form: Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are rich in hydropower yet short of power when their rivers run low, forced to import electricity from their lowland neighbours. Their vulnerability is not Hormuz but geography itself—the same tyranny of dependence, in another key—and the kind that an age of cascading shocks can turn from a manageable burden into a chokehold. Across the region, the damage was not really about commerce with Iran itself (Central Asia’s economies are not structurally bound to Iranian goods) but about the route through it. What it destroyed was the option, the slow, costly alternative to dependence, lost just as it was beginning to take shape. 

What emerged from the crisis was a scramble for optionality under pressure. Kazakhstan moved to scale up a western route, shipping oil across the Caspian to Azerbaijan's Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline, aiming to cut the share that crosses Russia to perhaps two-thirds. But the alternative is constrained: a handful of small tankers on the Caspian, limited ports, and costs that are several times higher. The danger is the path of least resistance. With the southern door shut and the western one half open, the gravitational pull shifted back toward Russian transit routes and Chinese corridors—the very dependencies the region has spent a decade trying to loosen. A crisis meant to be survived risks becoming a tilt: Central Asia drawn deeper into the orbits of Moscow and Beijing by the foreclosure of alternatives. 

Europe’s Mirror 

This is where Europe should lean in, because Central Asia's predicament mirrors its own. Europe, too, is a kind of landlocked power: not for want of coastline, but for want of options. It burns energy it does not produce, builds alternatives with minerals it does not own, and assembles its transition from supply chains that run through one country—China, which commands more than 90% of the world's rare-earth processing and increasingly supplies the clean technologies Europe needs for its clean energy leap, such as batteries, inverters, and power electronics. Dependence seldom arrives dramatically. More often, it appears quietly, disguised as convenience, until one day choices narrow and geography begins to dictate politics again. Brussels discovered this brutally in 2022 and has assembled its own “Liberation Day”—not Washington’s tariff theatrics, but the slower work of industrial sovereignty. The Clean Industrial Deal, the Critical Raw Materials Act, and the forthcoming Industrial Accelerator Act are, beneath the policy language, an admission that energy security, industrial strength and strategic autonomy have become one pursuit: the pursuit of options. The relationships Europe needs should therefore be measured by the slow construction of industrial ecosystems capable of weathering shocks. 

And the answer may lie just beyond the Black Sea, in the very region the war has shaken. The endowment reads like an inventory of the coming century: 19 of the 34 raw materials the EU calls critical are produced in Kazakhstan alone, alongside a rare-earth discovery that may rank among the world's largest, and some of the planet's largest uranium reserves, of which Kazakhstan already supplies roughly a quarter of Europe's imports. Brussels has taken note: the EU International Partnerships Commissioner, Jozef Síkela, has suggested that more than 40% of Europe's strategic minerals could one day come from the region. Above ground, the wealth is greater still: the wind that scours the Kazakh steppe, the sun that floods the deserts of Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan—a solar and wind potential running into the thousands of gigawatts, many times the region's own demand—and the great rivers of the Tajik and Kyrgyz mountains, whose hydropower could form a whole system, even as a warming climate puts those rivers at risk. 

From Molecules to Systems 

For a century, security was counted in barrels and cubic metres. That age is giving way to one in which it is measured less in molecules than in systems—in grids, transmission, storage, and the flexibility to balance them. As Europe electrifies more of its economy—cars, heating, industry, and the data centres it plans to triple in pursuit of digital sovereignty—the intermittency of wind and sun becomes the central problem of the transition. The answer is not storage alone but reach: the ability to draw clean power across a continent, smoothing the troughs at home with surplus from far away. Cross-border interconnectors both unlock vast pools of renewable generation that would otherwise remain stranded and allow a wider system to lean on that diversity to balance itself. 

Much of the connectivity debate fixates on the Middle Corridor, the trans-Caspian route racing to carry containers from China to Europe while bypassing Russia. But the more consequential corridor may not move goods at all. It may move power. This is the promise of the proposed Caspian–Black Sea green-energy corridor carrying Central Asian wind and solar beneath the Black Sea into the European grid. It promises to be the longest and deepest subsea cable ever laid. The line would be a strategic asset for balancing and flexibility: Central Asian sun, hours ahead of Brussels, stands high as Europe stirs at dawn; Kazakh wind, blowing when Europe’s has dropped, can steady the dreaded Dunkelflaute. Transmission, in other words, does more than move electrons. It is optionality written in wires: balancing, flexibility, resilience. 

Yet none of this can be built on sand. Central Asia's own grid is a Soviet relic. It is an “electricity ring” wired in the 1970s to run the republics as one machine, since fractured by independence and chronically strained. In January 2022, it collapsed, blacking out much of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan in an afternoon. A region cannot bridge clean power westward while its grid buckles at home; modernizing it is its first need, and exactly where Europe's expertise, capital, and technology have most to offer. 

This is not aid, but strategy for both sides. It involves the pursuit of options, which is precisely why it can hold. Russia offers proximity; China offers scale and capital. Europe’s distinctive asset is neither; it is the ability to integrate partners into one of the world’s largest clean industrial markets. That means strategic investing not only in extraction, but in processing, manufacturing, grid infrastructure, and industrial capabilities that link Central Asia to European value chains. Not "Made in Europe" for Europe, but "made with a selected group of trusted partners" for Europe and for them. It is an offer neither Moscow nor Beijing has consistently prioritized, and therefore the one thing that can give Central Asia a reason to look west. For the region, it means more routes, greater value capture, and industrial upgrading; for Europe, resources, resilience, new markets for its clean tech, and a neighbourhood anchored westward through mutual interdependence rather than drifting east. 

Realism is the price of being taken seriously, and here Europe must be as vigilant as it is ambitious. At the first EU–Central Asia summit in 2025, it pledged EUR 12 billion and the language of strategic partnership with the “beating heart of Eurasia,” but superlatives are not projects, and Europe is not the only suitor. Washington has convened its own Central Asian summit and signed its own mineral deals. The obstacles are formidable. Financing must be found rather than announced, grids are not yet synchronized with Europe's, and the Black Sea contains drifting wartime mines that have threatened shipping since 2022, and where the cable would itself be a target for sabotage and cyber-attack. 

There is, too, the awkward fact that these are not liberal democracies; a partnership of interests will sit uneasily beside a rhetoric of values, and the honest course is to pursue them plainly. And Europe should harbour no illusion that the region will choose it alone: Central Asia wants partners, not patrons, and will continue to take Russian transit and Chinese credit alongside European investment. But that is the nature of optionality—it is never exclusive. 

Autonomy, Engineered 

The Strait of Hormuz will fully reopen, and the headlines will move to the next emergency. The lesson will not move with them. Geography never disappears; it merely retreats from view until a shock brings it back—and the war in Iran has done precisely that. For Central Asia, the warning is stark: dependence begins where options end.

Europe often speaks of strategic autonomy as though it were a destination. It is not. It is a condition, built slowly: through cables and corridors, through skills and capabilities, through the quiet accumulation of trusted relationships. It is not self-sufficiency—it is optionality. For the landlocked nations and the import-dependent continent alike, the real resilience is no longer simply the gas in the ground, the metal in the seam, or the sunlight on the steppe. It is the number of ways you can access and/or carry them to market. In that sense, the two are engaged in the same search: both are looking for room to manoeuvre in a world where it is steadily shrinking. 

Central Asia has just been reminded how quickly options can vanish. Europe should remember how rarely they come knocking. Each holds a part of what the other lacks. The only question is whether they will build it together or leave the ground, once again, to those already standing on it. For strategic autonomy, in the end, cannot be decreed. It must be engineered wire by wire, corridor by corridor, partner by partner. In an age of fragmentation, that may be the only freedom that lasts. 

Yana Popkostova is founder of the European Centre for Energy and Geopolitical Analysis.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of IISD.