In contrast to Turkey’s “bridge between Europe and Asia” image, Iran is rarely conceived of as an interregional junction. Yet the Iranian plateau is at the crossroads between the Middle East and Central and South Asia. This remains underappreciated in part due to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s ongoing intraregional geopolitical entanglement with, and adventurism in, the Middle East making frequent headlines. Tehran’s relations with other geographically adjacent (sub)regions, such post-Soviet South Caucasus and Central Asia (“Central Eurasia” hereafter) as well as South Asia, are noticeably less turbulent.Footnote 1
Iran’s northwestern and northeastern neighbours—that is, the three South Caucasian and the five Central Asian republics respectively—contrast with both of the aforementioned southwestern and southeastern counterparts by their belated geopolitical opening.Footnote 2 Direct diplomatic and trade relations could be actively pursued from 1991 onward, following more than a century of rule over these territories by the European-Russian imperial core. This foreign domination had obfuscated and downplayed the salience of the strong historical, linguistic, cultural, and religious links that these territories share with their southern neighbours, chiefly Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan.
This piece argues that the three-and-a-half decades since the collapse of the USSR have been marked by sustained self-interested efforts by Iran’s foreign policy establishment to erode the conventionally conceived boundary between the Middle Eastern and the (once Russian-dominated) Eurasian regional complexes. Connectivity has been the cornerstone of said efforts. The proliferation of material connectivity in the form of physical linkages between Iran and Central Eurasia took place alongside a region-wide reacquaintance with the substantial immaterial links that had been forged over millennia of common ethnolinguistic, religious, and political developments. As far as these shifts are concerned, Tehran has been more reactive than proactive. Particularly in the past decade, said regional-order realignments have been a function chiefly of more broadly Eurasian developments exogenous to Iran.
International order refers to a set of structured relationships defined by formal institutions, trade links, and cultural ties. Features of specifically “regional” order include interdependence, mostly in the economic and security realms; a shared transnational identity; shared institutions; and a degree of predictability within said regional complex. The present piece first examines the trends in Iran’s foreign policy elite attitudes vis-à-vis subregions hitherto locked behind the local iteration of the Iron Curtain, quickly moderated by pragmatism vis-à-vis the arrival of larger Eurasian players on the scene. It subsequently contrasts the varying degrees of accommodation by the Central Eurasian partners of these Iranian overtures and the broader exogenous sea change.
Much of the consolidation of a nascent wider Eurasian regional order is taking place under the radar, warranting an academic investigation of this understudied topic. Recent enlargement of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to now include India, Pakistan, and Iran, attests to this tectonic shift. Aside from substantial aforementioned cultural capital shared in an intersubjective manner between Iran and post-Soviet Central Eurasia, both also share substantial hydrocarbon resource endowment. They are likewise endowed with a geographical centrality along most East–West and North–South transport axes, providing overland links between the Indo-Pacific and Europe: two of the three zones accounting for the lion’s share of the world’s economic output.Footnote 3
The Day after the Collapse of the USSR
The emergence of three independent republics in the South Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan) and five in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) in 1991 fed hopes within the foreign policy establishment in Tehran of an Iran no longer relegated to the periphery of an essentially Arab Middle Eastern regional order. Instead it would ostensibly find itself at the core of its own defined-by-historical-civilization regional order, in which much of day-to-day religious terminology, Hanafi Sunni (before Safavid Iran’s conversion to Twelver Shiʿism) and Jaʿfari Shiʿi jurisprudence, and broader cultural reference points would be subject to substantial broadly Iranian cultural mediation.Footnote 4 New Persian also left an imprint, even in places where it is no longer widely understood, on local vernaculars and their literary standards, most notably Urdu and varieties of Turkic. These early ambitions are exemplified by the now largely irrelevant Economic Cooperation Organization. Set up on Tehran’s initiative in the late Cold War period, it was subsequently enlarged from its core founding members of Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan to also include Azerbaijan, the five post-Soviet Central Asian republics, and Afghanistan. The exclusion of Christian-majority Georgia and Armenia hints at Tehran’s conscious aspiration to prioritize ties with fellow Muslim-majority countries over other considerations.Footnote 5 Due to the Karabakh war shutting down the sole railway connecting Iran with the post-Soviet space, proactive Iranian efforts had been undertaken to complete road, rail, and pipeline links elsewhere to tangibly reconnect Iran with its “northern civilizational kin.”Footnote 6 Although some economic interdependence ensues, in the case of the South Caucasus it is admittedly more a function of exceptional wartime constraints.Footnote 7 The high-water mark of this early period was the opening of the Khorasani Sarakhs–Tejen rail link on the Iran–Turkmenistan border in May 1996, attended by the heads of state of virtually all of the countries discussed up to this point.Footnote 8 This linkup of Central Asia’s Soviet-era railway and road networks with Iran’s served a critical role for Uzbekistan, which desperately sought a Russia-circumventing alternative export route for cotton, its main cash crop.Footnote 9
Facets of the post-Soviet regional order bleeding into the Middle Eastern regional order and vice versa were not deemed an unalloyed good. The threat of the ethno-territorial conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis spilling over to the adjacent northwestern provinces of Iran was taken very seriously.Footnote 10 This in part informed Iran’s unsuccessful attempts to get more involved in Nagorno–Karabakh peace mediation.Footnote 11 This conflict instead became Ankara’s main source of leverage in the South Caucasus, to the extent of elevating—much to Tehran and Moscow’s dismay—NATO-member Turkey into the position of the de facto kingmaker in the subregion. Another intersection of security considerations for both sides of the former Soviet border was the 1992–97 civil war in Tajikistan, which pitted an alliance of opposition forces against the older Soviet-era elite. Partially due to concerns about conflict spillover exacerbating the concurrent civil war in Afghanistan, and partially as an opportunity to engage with a Persian-speaking kin state, Tehran played a major constructive role in bringing the warring parties to a negotiating table.Footnote 12 One can speculate how more recent involvement of broadly Eurasian players in the peace processes in Syria (with Kazakhstan having presided over the now-obsolete Astana Process), and in the Persian Gulf (with Beijing, and Baghdad, facilitating the normalization of relations between Tehran and Riyadh), indicates the erosion of the boundary between the broader Eurasian and the Middle Eastern security complexes and regional orders.Footnote 13
Pragmatism All Along?
With hindsight, one can characterize Tehran’s regional leadership aspirations within a reconstituted West Asian–Central Eurasian regional order as never having been particularly realistic. Hard structural limits of political and economic constraints had been reached. This should not obscure the profound alterations to the regional subcomplexes at hand. The drive toward additional economic and political interdependence has been gaining some renewed vigour in the past dozen years. In 2013, there was the opening of a second railway link between Iran and Turkmenistan, this time along the eastern edge of the Caspian, after almost two decades of stagnation.Footnote 14 Construction also has now started along the southwestern edge of the Caspian, with the ambitious Rasht–Astara railway project promising to once again reconnect Iran’s railway network with that of the South Caucasus and beyond.Footnote 15 Much of the drive behind this new wave of overland connectivity proliferation is admittedly exogenous to Iran and its immediate neighbourhood. The funding sources of many of the newer projects come from Beijing and Delhi, as both rising global powers have a strategic interest in diversifying and connecting their markets with those of Europe along an East–West (with the Belt and Road Initiative) and a North–South (with the International North-South Transport Corridor) axis, respectively.Footnote 16 Although this is a far cry from the lofty aspirations of Iran’s endogenous power projection within post-Soviet Central Eurasia, pragmatism dictates embracing said projects.
Another challenge for Tehran has been one of reassuring South Caucasian and Central Asian capitals that its northern geopolitical designs are pragmatic and reasonably benign. The Soviet-era elite socialization of the nominally Muslim secular leadership of the subregions, as well as Washington’s sustained messaging, made the former reflexively distrustful of a nominally theocratic regime next door. More than three decades of largely peaceful coexistence and the absence of any large-scale instances of ideological subversion at the hands of Tehran (with Azerbaijan a moderate outlier) appear to have resolved this dilemma.Footnote 17 Iran, in turn, has been able to satiate its stated ideological commitments in its relations with Central Eurasia in resisting US, and more broadly Western, hegemony over the international order. Although not a single post-Soviet Central Eurasian republic shares this hostility vis-à-vis the United States, this has not been a deal breaker in their relations with Iran.Footnote 18 Diplomatic support of Iran’s civilian nuclear programme and opposition to anti-Iran sanctions reveal a pragmatic manoeuvring space available to said republics.Footnote 19
The Iran–Central Eurasia relationships touch the very core of Iranian identity and those ambitions associated with Iran’s geopolitical trajectory that are likely to persist independently of who is at the helm. The Iranian elite framing is one of parts of the Iranian-Islamic civilizational core that was arbitrarily cleaved by Russian imperialism and sequestered by Soviet rule. The moral imperative for Iran was helping to rectify this state of affairs following the Soviet collapse and healing said rupture.Footnote 20 The rationale of Iran’s alignment with Eurasia is also ego-syntonic with the Islamic republic’s ideological commitments. Many of the institutional structures in place, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, have a clear component of forming a counterbalance to US hegemony and helping to usher in an international order characterized by multipolarity.Footnote 21 The last key motivation rooted in Tehran’s often-surprising pragmatism could plausibly be a strategy of regional partner diversification. The Syrian state falling to the hands of a Sunni Muslim pro-Turkey opposition and the substantial weakening of Hezbollah will doubtlessly have a deleterious long-term effect on Iran’s power projection in the entire Levantine subregion in ways that are likely to benefit Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. An underappreciated aspect of these policy vectors has been the dominance of nonelected power centres, such as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, over the bulk of foreign policy vectors in the Gulf and the Levant–Iraq regional subcomplexes.Footnote 22 A resulting northward and eastward pivot could plausibly empower Iran’s foreign ministry and its elected executive and legislative branches more broadly. A multiplicity of US sanction regimes also bring Tehran closer to Moscow.
Aside from some asymmetrical economic interdependence hinging on relatively short transport links and pipelines, Iran has exhausted the endogenous tools of its northern policy vector. It is therefore now pragmatically accommodating, albeit in junior capacity, the convergence, and possible eventual merger, of the Middle Eastern and the broader Eurasian regional orders. A contention of this piece is that the further geographically and culturally removed a specific post-Soviet republic is from Iran, the more strongly material (and in the converse case immaterial) considerations factor in.Footnote 23
Agency on the Post-Soviet Side of the Iran–Central Eurasia Equation
Iran–Azerbaijan relations have been the most complex and frequently fraught. Shiʿi Islam, the majority denomination of both countries, something that under different circumstances could be a vector of political convergence, is deemed a strategic vulnerability by the post-Soviet elite in Baku. This is undoubtedly coloured by Iran’s more militant track record in the Middle East.Footnote 24 Furthermore, an undercurrent of pan-Turkism reframes the historical legacies Azerbaijan shares with its neighbours, excepting Turkey, as a zero-sum game. This explains Azerbaijan’s crude historical revisionism, such as the Iranian diplomatic objections–provoking removal of original Persian-language inscriptions from medieval poet Nizami Ganjavi’s mausoleum in favour of inauthentic Oghuz Turkic ones at the turn of the millennium.Footnote 25 The aforementioned bilateral relations have been further complicated by the Nagorno–Karabakh conflict. Despite Tehran paying lip service to the inviolability of Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized borders, Baku’s elites perceived Iran to be siding with the “Armenian foe.” There had been an associated sensitivity to perceived snubs at the hands of Iran’s political establishment following Azerbaijan’s military defeat of Armenia in the autumn of 2020.Footnote 26 Last, but not least, elements of Iran-favouring asymmetrical interdependence in the areas of transport and energy infrastructure (analogous to that which Iran has developed vis-à-vis Armenia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) is securitized right from the onset; decision-makers in Baku have been framing it as a major strategic vulnerability.Footnote 27 It is in this context that one must view the desire, bolstered by the aforementioned victory, to gain access to a transport corridor linking the two non-contiguous parts of Azerbaijan via Armenia.Footnote 28 Such implicitly-hostile-to-Iran efforts to diversify transport routes—mostly via Turkey—still pull Azerbaijan and the rest of the region geopolitically southward; they advance the pooling of their regional order considerations with those of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East to the exclusion of Russia.
In stark contrast to Azerbaijan, the elite of Uzbekistan, another populous Turkic majority–speaking state of Central Eurasia, have consistently framed both the cultural capital shared with non–Central Asian states such as Iran and the southward reorientation of major transport links as a positive-sum game: a single export outlet, namely the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, is used for the bulk of Uzbekistan’s cotton and has little acknowledged strategic vulnerability associated with it.Footnote 29 For doubly-landlocked Uzbekistan, the imperative appears to be a further diversification away from an inherited dependency on Russian territory and a broader diversification of partners.Footnote 30 Uzbekistan’s foreign policy establishment dismisses maximalist overtures to either ethnolinguistic affinity, neutralizing both Ankara’s Turkic identity–based messaging and Tehran’s civilizational affinity–based regionalist overtures. Tashkent instead appears to prioritize its relations with its Central Asian neighbours, including non-post-Soviet Afghanistan. Other broadly Eurasian partners, Iran included, are a distant second here.Footnote 31
Tajikistan is a tiny regional player by any metric, yet its ethnolinguistic links with both Iran and Afghanistan set it apart from the otherwise Turkic-speaking republics of post-Soviet Central Asia. Because of historical dominance by polities conflated with the modern-day Uzbek nation, a substantial share of Dushanbe’s ambitions to build a close relationship with Tehran is framed as counterbalance to Tashkent’s regional influence. In ever-less-sophisticated iterations of nation-building discourse, the increasingly narrow ruling elite (now consisting of a single family) frames Tajikistan’s assertions of independence as a perennial Aryan Iranian versus Turkic struggle.Footnote 32 The arbitrary power of the Rahmon clan, as well as Riyadh’s overtures to Dushanbe, also render Iran–Tajikistan relations particularly volatile.Footnote 33 Iran nevertheless gained a reputation among educated Tajikistanis of stepping in early, before any other regional player would do so for the then still war-torn country.Footnote 34 An early example of Tehran’s help in Tajikistan was building the first tunnel under the Anzob pass, enabling a year-round road link between the north and the south of the country.Footnote 35 The remainder of the republics have entertained pragmatic bilateral relations with Iran, unencumbered by romantic notions of religious or civilizational kinship. It is likely precisely due to the lack of deeper identity-related compounding variables that these relations have relied on a simpler cost-benefit analysis.
Main Takeaways
Rather than facilitating close bilateral relations, deep connections to Iran and broadly Persianate elite cultural legacies have frequently complicated regional relationships since the collapse of the USSR. The clearest example has been Azerbaijan, where the Shiʿi Muslim creed of the majority of the population is deemed by the secular elites in Baku fertile ground for the Islamic republic’s ideological subversion. There is little willingness in the republics’ capitals to reconceptualize post-Soviet South Caucasus or Central Asia as a geopolitical or civilizational extension of the Middle East, be it Anatolia or the Iranian plateau. Any fundamental alteration to the regional order would likely be one of subsuming parts of the Middle East into a Beijing-dominated (with Moscow and Delhi playing distant second fiddle) Eurasian complex instead. Iran’s cultural and ideological messaging has largely fallen on deaf ears. Notions such as the “axis of resistance” are utterly meaningless to the Central Eurasian republics’ elites. It actually appears to have been counterproductive within the region, as Iran’s image among the younger, more devout cohorts of Sunni Muslims has recently suffered by virtue of its military support of the Assad regime. The aforementioned elites in Baku, Tashkent, and Dushanbe scarcely want to be dragged into an explicitly anti-Western club. They are nevertheless less opposed to the prospect of a nascent broadly Eurasian regional order that facilitates the consolidation of a multipolar international system.
The broader regional developments of the past five years—the second Taliban takeover of Kabul in the summer of 2021, the weakening of Hezbollah by Israel over the course of 2024, the fall of the Assad regime in December of 2024, the Twelve-Day War between Iran and Israel in June 2025, and the August 2025 US-backed peace deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia following the latter’s military defeat of the former some five years prior—have not necessarily turned out in Tehran’s favour. Western scholarship speaking of a distinctly post-Soviet regional order that places the South Caucasus in its constituent subcomplex, ostensibly isolated from developments in Turkey and Iran, is increasingly untenable. Conversely, China having become the uncontested number one economic and number two military partner of all of post-Soviet Central Asia reveals the futility of insisting on a conception of post-Soviet matters as pertaining to a distinct regional order from the non-post-Soviet remainder of the Eurasian landmass, namely East Asia, South Asia, and (the northern tier of) the Middle East.
Decision-makers in Tehran are likely well attuned to the new reality of an early-stage regional realignment that, although not placing Iran at its geographic and civilizational core, offers Iran a junior partnership vis-à-vis Russia and, a fortiori, China, conferring mid-level regional power status upon Iran.Footnote 36 It also would be conducive to a continued convergence with its northwestern and northeastern neighbourhood. The material core of these ongoing relationships is unlikely to be in the remit of bilateral trade, as the hydrocarbon-centred economic models and trade patterns of Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan have generally implied competition, rather than complementary relations.Footnote 37 The main benefit of cooperation in the economic sphere between Iran, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia is instead in letting third parties invest in the development of Eurasia-spanning transport corridors within their territories. Integrating neighbouring countries and subregions should nevertheless be understood as a welcome by-product, rather than a central aim of the exogenous backers, all of whom have the bigger strategic picture of Eurasia-spanning connectivity in mind first and foremost.
