Joseph Epstein

  Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla. How Astana went from a handshake at the United Nations to the front of the line in Trump’s Washington — and why the rest of Central Asia stands to gain from it On July 10, Donald Trump and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev spoke by phone. The Kazakh […]

Uzbekistan’s World Cup debut is no longer a prospect but a fact. In its first match at football’s biggest tournament, it lost 3–1 to Colombia in Mexico City — a defeat, but not an empty one. Abbosbek Fayzullaev scored the country’s first World Cup goal, briefly leveling the match before

When the heads of state of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) convene on May 15 in Turkistan under the theme “Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development,” the central deliverable will be exactly what the title suggests: a coordinated push to build out Turkic cooperation around AI. The venue fits. Turkistan

  As Armenia approaches its June 7, 2026, parliamentary elections, Russia has launched a multi-front campaign to reverse Yerevan’s Western pivot and destroy the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), the transit corridor at the heart of the U.S.-brokered Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal. Moscow is deploying the full spectrum

On Thursday morning, Iranian drones struck the passenger terminal of Nakhchivan International Airport and landed near a school in the village of Shakarabad, injuring four civilians in Azerbaijan’s western exclave. President Ilham Aliyev called it “an act of terror against the territory of Azerbaijan” and placed his armed forcesat full

On February 15, 2026, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Radio Iran’s Pashto service that Kabul would be prepared to cooperate with the Islamic Republic in the event of a U.S. military attack — if Tehran formally requested assistance. He added that Iran had emerged victorious from its June 2025 war

On January 27, 2026, Azerbaijan’s State Security Service announced the arrest of three young men for plotting an attack on a foreign embassy in Baku. The timing was striking: Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar had concluded meetings with President Ilham Aliyev just one day earlier. While Azerbaijani authorities did not

Introduction In January 2025, reports emerged that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had assured U.S. envoy Steven Witkoff that Tehran would not carry out 800 executions of protesters. According to multiple accounts, this assurance may have led President Donald Trump to halt a planned military strike against Iran. The episode

On the day after the Taliban seized Kabul in 2021, a Turkish Airlines flight carrying 234 passengers arrived in Istanbul. Among them was Sarwar Danish, Afghanistan’s Second Vice President, and two members of President Ashraf Ghani’s fleeing cabinet. Danish, became the highest-ranking Hazara official of the Afghan government to flee