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Central Asia
The five stans, landlocked between Russia, China, and Iran
Central Asia is the cleanest of the UN's subregions, because for once the boundary is not in dispute: it is the five former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, and nothing else. About 83 million people occupy four million square kilometers of steppe, desert, and mountain, with no coastline anywhere — Uzbekistan is one of only two doubly landlocked countries on the planet. Older and looser definitions of Central Asia reach into Xinjiang, Mongolia, Afghanistan, and northern Iran, and the cultural region certainly does. The UN's version is the post-Soviet one, and it is a category made by an empire's collapse.
Kazakhstan alone accounts for two-thirds of the land, an immensity of flat steppe running north into Siberian forest, and it is the ninth-largest country on earth. To the south the Kyzylkum and Karakum deserts stretch across Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan; to the southeast the ground buckles upward into the Tian Shan and the Pamirs, where Ismoil Somoni Peak in Tajikistan reaches 7,495 meters. Two rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, once fed the Aral Sea; Soviet cotton irrigation drained them, and the Aral has shrunk to a fraction of its former size, an environmental catastrophe visible from orbit. Winters are bitter, summers ferocious, and rain is scarce everywhere.
The Silk Road ran straight through, and Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva grew rich as its waystations, their tiled madrasas still among the finest Islamic architecture anywhere. Turkic and Persian peoples, Mongol conquest, and then Russian and Soviet rule layered on top of each other; the borders the five states inherited were drawn in Moscow in the 1920s and cut through valleys and ethnic groups with a deliberate carelessness. Kazakhstan has oil, Turkmenistan gas, Uzbekistan cotton and gold, and all five are now courted by China's Belt and Road, by Russia, and by the West at once — a position that has become considerably more valuable since 2022.