Uzbekistan can’t win the World Cup. But it’s already won Washington’s attention.

This post was originally published on Politico.

Uzbekistan’s team will head home after its final group-stage match today, against the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the country has worked to use its début World Cup performance — the first ever by a Central Asian nation — to help Washington policymakers put a face to a geographical name once recognizable.

Before the team’s match against Portugal this week, a group of ambassadors, policymakers and government officials met in Houston to discuss the United States’ burgeoning reliance on the “Central Five” nations — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — for critical minerals. The only one of those so-called