Central Asia—encompassing what are now Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, plus Azerbaijan—was the very center of the Eurasian landmass that one of the fathers of modern geopolitics, Halford Mackinder, in a famous address to the Royal Geographical Society in 1904, had identified as the “geopolitical pivot of the world”—the “heartland.”
