A belt of U.S.-aligned states is taking shape across Eurasia, and President Donald Trump will bring many of its members to Washington on Thursday for the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace.

A bulk of the board’s 27 signatories are from Central Asia, the South Caucasus, the greater Black Sea Basin and adjacent regions of the Middle East and South Asia.

At a Washington seminar hosted Tuesday by the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, Ariel Cohen, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, described the emerging cluster of states as a “big beautiful belt” — a play on the One Big Beautiful Bill that advanced Trump’s tax cuts in July.

Pointing to Morocco, Egypt, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, Cohen said there is “a de facto belt” of U.S.-aligned countries taking shape across Eurasia. “This is a new geopolitical reality,” he said.

While the Board of Peace will begin with discussions on Gaza reconstruction, it is widely expected to take up other geopolitical flashpoints. U.S. Vice President JD Vance told reporters Tuesday that the board will serve as “a new archetype for how to create and maintain peace in the 21st century.”

The meeting caps six months of deepening engagement by the Trump administration with the Eurasian heartland. After bringing together the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan in Washington in August, Trump convened the first-ever White House summit of the C5+1, with the leaders of the Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in November.

This week, Vance became the first sitting U.S. vice president to visit Armenia since independence and also traveled to Azerbaijan, marking one of the most senior engagements with country since Vice President Dick Cheney’s 2008 trip.

TRIPP skirts around the southern edges of Armenia, bypassing Georgia.

Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has proposed holding the next C5+1 summit in Samarkand, the ancient Silk Road hub. If Trump attends, it would mark the first visit to Central Asia by an American president.

Kamran Bokhari, a senior director at the New Lines Institute, said, “The United States, for the first time in its history, is entering the heart of Eurasia.”

He attributed the opening to political instabilities on the north and south flanks of Central Asia — a Russia that is consumed by the war in Ukraine and an Iran facing domestic turmoil.

Bokhari added that Eurasian middle powers such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkey and Azerbaijan are increasingly prepared to take responsibility for regional security rather than rely on Washington. This aligns with the 2026 U.S. National Defense Strategy, which emphasizes partners over dependencies.

“What we’re seeing is a syncing of U.S. strategy and the ambitions of these rising middle powers,” he said.

Logistics is the main driver of U.S. engagement. At the August Armenia-Azerbaijan talks, Trump proposed developing a 32-kilometer corridor linking mainland Azerbaijan to its exclave of Nakhchivan through Armenian territory, branding it the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP).

The corridor would plug into the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route — the Middle Corridor — linking China and Europe without passing Russia or Iran.

Magzhan Ilyassov, Kazakhstan’s ambassador to the U.S., told the forum that transit times along the Middle Corridor have fallen sharply thanks to new infrastructure and streamlined customs procedures.

“Transit times from Western China to the Black Sea have fallen from more than 40 days to as little as 14 days, and continue to decrease,” he said.

He added that the corridor’s importance will rise further as the U.S. seeks to secure critical minerals from Central Asia.

John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Uzbekistan, said successive U.S. administrations have underinvested in a region that directly borders Russia, China and Iran.

“What Trump and his team have done … is comprehensive and geopolitically and geoeconomically very smart,” he said.

The “Big Beautiful Belt” stretching from Morocco to Kazakhstan will likely rival China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has sought to build influence through infrastructure building.

Wesley Alexander Hill, lead analyst for the energy, growth and security program at the International Tax and Investment Center, said China’s strategy is to “hook in” Central Asian economies into the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a 3,000-km network linking the deep-water port of Gwadar in the Arabian Sea to the Xinjiang region in western China through railways and pipelines.

The U.S. should not try to stymie China’s plans, Hill argued, because “this is something that Central Asian countries want.” Instead, the U.S. should offer viable alternative routes so that Central Asian countries can resist Chinese coercion if needed.