Russia’s war in Ukraine accomplished something no American strategy could have engineered on its own: It hollowed out Moscow’s grip on its former empire. The White House noticed and moved. Congress still has not.
The Trump administration has moved at a remarkable pace. In August 2025, Washington displaced Moscow as broker of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, hosting both leaders at the White House and producing the framework that closed out a conflict Russia had spent three decades managing for its own benefit. Out of that came the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, a transit corridor under joint U.S.-Armenian control across southern Armenia that closes the missing link in the Middle Corridor — the trade route that moves goods from Asia to Europe while bypassing Russia and Iran entirely.
Three months later, Central Asia’s five presidents came to Washington and left behind more than $130 billion in commercial commitments. Uzbekistan pledged over $100 billion of investment in the American economy across the coming decade. Kazakhstan signed $17 billion in contracts, including a $1.1 billion tungsten venture in which a U.S. firm, Cove Kaz Capital, took a 70% stake in the Northern Katpar and Upper Kairakty deposits — roughly 1.4 million tons of tungsten trioxide. Tungsten goes into armor-piercing rounds, drill bits, and jet engines, and Beijing has been throttling its exports.
Kazakhstan then announced it would join the Abraham Accords, the first country added in five years. In January, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan signed on as founding members of the Board of Peace.
Congress, meanwhile, has kept two Soviet-era statutes on the books that do nothing except remind these governments that Washington’s goodwill has an expiration date.
The first is the Jackson-Vanik amendment, Section 402 of the Trade Act of 1974, which denied normal trade relations to nonmarket economies that blocked emigration. It had one purpose — forcing the Kremlin to let Soviet Jews leave — and it worked. Then the Soviet Union dissolved and the restriction attached itself to the successor states, none of which restricts emigration. Congress has since graduated Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Ukraine, and, in 2012, Russia. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan are still on the list.
This is not a symbolic problem. Kazakhstan joined the World Trade Organization in 2015, and American companies still cannot fully cash in on that membership, because only Congress can grant permanent normal trade relations. Without it, U.S. exporters get no locked-in tariff commitments and no access to WTO dispute settlement against Astana. Presidents paper over the gap with annual waivers, which is precisely the insult: a country courting American investment is told its trade status renews once a year, at Washington’s pleasure.
The second relic is Section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act, which barred nearly all U.S. government assistance to Azerbaijan over its blockade of Armenia. The blockade ended long ago. So did the war, at a White House ceremony the president himself hosted. Every administration since 2002 has waived Section 907 annually, and each waiver leaves the underlying ban in place, ready to snap back.
Nobody defends either law on the merits anymore. They survive because repeal requires floor time, and floor time goes to bills that move votes in Ohio and Pennsylvania. For decades, that calculation made a rough kind of sense: The region was a Russian preserve, and outside of basing rights for Afghanistan and Chevron’s stake in Tengiz, there was not much on offer. The Middle Corridor and the scramble for critical minerals changed the arithmetic. The components that power advanced weapons, smartphones, and data centers are increasingly mined and processed in places Congress still treats as Brezhnev’s Russia.
The bills are already written. S. 3103 and its House companion, H.R. 5917, would repeal Jackson-Vanik for Central Asia and extend permanent normal trade relations. The sponsors range from Sen. Steve Daines (D-MT) and Jim Risch (D-ID) to Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), about as bipartisan as anything in this Congress. They have sat since last fall. H.R. 6534, filed in December to repeal Section 907 outright, has sat since then.
The administration wants them passed. At a Senate Foreign Relations hearing on June 2, Daines called the restrictions “Soviet-era relic restrictions” and asked whether removing them was a priority for the State Department. Secretary of State Marco Rubio answered: “Yeah, it’s a detriment. We’d like to see it removed.” At his confirmation hearing, he called Jackson-Vanik “a relic of an era that’s past” and noted that permanent removal “will require legislative action.”
DON JR. DIDN’T BREAK THE LAW IN THE BAHAMAS. HE DID SOMETHING MUCH DUMBER
So does the region. Kazakh Deputy Prime Minister Serik Zhumangarin flew to Washington last October to press members of Congress for repeal. Azerbaijani Deputy Foreign Minister Elnur Mammadov raised Section 907 with a visiting House Foreign Affairs delegation in January.
Neither law will decide a single congressional race. But every government weighing Washington against Moscow and Beijing reads them as evidence that American commitments are renewed yearly and can lapse. Russia is pinned down in Ukraine, and that will not hold forever. The executive branch saw the opening and took it. Congress should vote.
Joseph Epstein is the director of the Turan Research Center, which is hosted by the Washington, D.C.-based Yorktown Institute.