Forget the Red Sea: Trump’s next shadow war is happening on a lake– www.washingtonexaminer.com

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.