The Caspian Sea, the world’s largest lake, is fast becoming one of the most important trade arteries on the planet. Covering 143,000 square miles, an area larger than Germany, the Caspian is the salty remnant of an ancient sea, the Paratethys, cut off from the world’s oceans more than 5 million years ago. Today, it carries the Middle Corridor, the rail-and-ferry route that links China and Central Asia to Europe while bypassing both Russia and Iran. With Russia under sanctions, the Strait of Hormuz closed by war, and the Red Sea menaced by the Houthis, the route across the Caspian has become one of the few reliable paths between East and West. Washington should secure it by deepening its partnership with the two countries that anchor the corridor on either shore, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.
The world’s largest economies have noticed. China is building a railway through Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan that will feed its freight into the corridor. The European Union and international lenders committed over $11 billion to the route in 2024. The United States brokered the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, a transit corridor through southern Armenia that secures a crucial link on the route between Azerbaijan and Turkey. The traffic is following the investment: Freight on the corridor rose 22% in the first eight months of this year, and east-west transit jumped 55%. Kazakhstan, which shipped roughly 94% of its oil exports last year through a pipeline to Russia’s Black Sea coast that Ukrainian drones have repeatedly struck, now plans to send more crude across the Caspian to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline.
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Russia and Iran have found their own uses for the Caspian. With the U.S. Navy blockading Iran’s southern ports, Tehran has shifted trade north, and Russia has used the same waters to rearm it. NBC News reported in August that more than two dozen ships had carried ammunition, drone components, and explosives across the Caspian to replenish Iranian stockpiles, and in July, Ukraine struck a vessel there that it said was carrying Russian military cargo. Russia’s Caspian Flotilla has fired Kalibr cruise missiles at targets in Syria and Ukraine. The sea’s legal regime compounds the danger. The 2018 Caspian convention bars the armed forces of outside powers, so the U.S. Navy cannot patrol the corridor, and its security rests on the states along its shore.
Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are arming for that responsibility. Baku has acquired Israel’s Ice-Breaker anti-ship missile; co-produced Shaldag patrol boats with Israel; built the SALVO, an armed uncrewed vessel with Turkey’s Dearsan shipyard; and developed its own KAYRA kamikaze boat. The two navies have drilled together with increasing ambition. After the Khazri-2023 exercise, Kazakhstan hosted Birlestik-2024 at Aktau with Azerbaijan and three other Central Asian states, pointedly leaving out Russia and Iran. Caspian Breeze-2025 followed, focused on protecting offshore economic facilities, naval bases, and shipping. This month, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan held Power of Unity-2026 in Azerbaijani waters, rehearsing the defense of maritime and coastal infrastructure.
Washington has taken important steps. At the White House in August 2025, President Donald Trump hosted the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia, launched the TRIPP, and suspended Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act, which restricts U.S. aid to Azerbaijan’s government. At the C5+1 summit that November, Kazakhstan signed a $1.1 billion tungsten deal with an American firm, announced $17.2 billion in agreements with U.S. companies, and said it would join the Abraham Accords.
Two outdated laws still stand in the way. The Jackson-Vanik amendment, written in 1974 to punish the Soviet Union for restricting Jewish emigration, still denies Kazakhstan permanent normal trade relations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called it “an absurd relic of the past,” and a bipartisan Senate bill would repeal it. Section 907, passed in 1992 over a blockade of Armenia that ended long ago, is held in check only by waivers a future president could decline to renew; H.R. 6534 would repeal it. Congress should repeal both. As long as these laws remain on the books, Astana and Baku have reason to doubt that American commitments will outlast the current administration.
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Skeptics argue the corridor may never live up to its promise. The Carnegie Endowment has warned that the Caspian is dropping by up to a foot a year, that Georgia has stalled its Anaklia deep-sea port, and that the route still handles only a small fraction of the traffic moving through Russia. Each of these problems can be addressed with dredging, port construction, and new ferries, precisely the kind of projects American development and export financing is designed to support. Washington’s investment would also give it influence over how the corridor grows.
Russia is tied down in Ukraine, and Iran is weaker than it has been in decades. Neither can stop Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan from binding themselves more closely to the West. By repealing two obsolete laws and backing the corridor’s security and infrastructure now, the U.S. can secure a stake in the trade route that runs across the world’s largest lake.
Joseph Epstein is the director of the Turan Research Center, which is hosted by the Washington-based Yorktown Institute.
