When US President Donald Trump unveiled his Gaza-focused “Board of Peace” on a Davos stage, the message was clear and unmistakeable: Washington’s centre of gravity is shifting inland, away from existing treaty allies and towards a loose arc of Eurasian middle powers designed to complicate the ambitions of the CRINK bloc: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

The guest list told the story before Trump even took his seat as Nikkei Asia reported. One by one, representatives from Bahrain, Morocco, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Hungary, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Mongolia were called forward. Only after that procession did Trump appear, king-like, and positioned firmly at the centre.

What emerged was not a traditional alliance but a geopolitical belt of sorts - a near-continuous stretch running through Central Asia, the South Caucasus, the Middle East and into the Balkans. At the same time, Western European nations, and East Asia allies, long the pillars of US power projection around the world, were largely absent.

Belgium was the lone Western European member on paper according to the report, but did not attend. Egypt was also listed. Another no-show.

Similarly, none of America’s main five Asia-Pacific treaty allies including Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Thailand, participated.

China and Russia, while invited, but skipped the melodramatic opening.

Director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute, Michael Doranm cited by Nikkei Asia, referred to the reason for the gathering as “The competition with China, like the Cold War before it, is fundamentally a struggle over Eurasia.”

Doran framed the problem starkly: stopping a hostile alignment from locking down the world’s largest landmass. In a Trump-world, that alignment increasingly goes by a shorthand - CRINK - grouping China and Russia with India’s strategic autonomy and North Korea’s outright hostility.

“America's traditional allies in Europe and East Asia remain essential over the long run, but they have limited capacity to shift the balance of power where the contest is most active,” Doran said – meaning the same “Eurasian middle belt is where influence can still be contested -- and that's where Trump is concentrating his efforts” he added

The strategy is already visible on the ground. Brenda Shaffer, a Caspian region specialist, also speaking to the paper, argues that building up states wedged between major powers is the cleanest way to blunt CRINK pressure without provoking direct confrontation.

“One of the best ways to contain China without direct confrontation with Beijing is strengthening the states of Central Asia and Azerbaijan,” she said.

The same logic underpinned Trump’s decision last summer to bring Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to the White House, in the process extracting a commitment to end decades of conflict. The talks led to the establishment of the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), a far off goal planning to knit rail, road and energy corridors through southern Armenia, linking Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan exclave to the mainland.

An unprecedented White House summit with the leaders of five Central Asian states, it was a subtle but pointed signal in a region where CRINK influence is rising.

“Of all of Trump's peace initiatives, the Armenia-Azerbaijan track is the biggest success,” Shaffer continued. “It will enable huge geopolitical changes in the greater Caspian region and increase US presence in the region that borders China, Russia, Iran and Turkey.”

Diplomats from long-standing US allies meanwhile have been openly sceptical. Some question the board’s legitimacy. Others, particularly those in Europe, baulk at Russia’s inclusion. East Asian governments, perhaps as a result of cultural norms in terms of respect of authority, prefer to go through the existing but increasingly sidelined United Nations rather than off the cuff bodies gravitating around Trump’s personal authority.

The countries that did sign up see it differently, the Nikkei adds. For them, the Board of Peace is less about Gaza than positioning themselves as carrying authority in a region and world increasingly shaped by CRINK.

Realisation of these desires will be hard to achieve, however. Beijing’s Belt and Road engines are already humming across the region, with China dominating trade networks in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and the smaller ‘stans’.

For now, Trump’s transactional peace gambit, intent on hemming in the CRINK axis by stitching together the vast, contested spaces in between, lacks the infrastructure heft and trade glue CRINK member nations now wield - and in Central Asia, where pipelines and railways mean more than think-tank pronouncements, Beijing and its partners are winning by default.