A major sticking point at the G20 Leaders Summit in New Delhi was whether India will be able to achieve a consensus on the G20 declaration. While it was a significant moment when it was adopted with full consensus, the announcement of the game-changing India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, or the IMEEC, stole the show.
The greatest highlight of the G20 summit in New Delhi unexpectedly turned out to be the announcement of a US-backed economic corridor running from India through shipping lanes into the United Arab Emirates, across the Arabian Peninsula via rail linking UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, and then from Israel to Europe again through seaports. All regional stakeholders, including India, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Europe along with the US, have signed the deal to bring this revolutionary plan to fruition.
Birth of historic ‘spice route’ in modern times
The IMEEC is a massive transcontinental infrastructure project that will connect India with Europe through seaports and rail links in West Asia cutting across the Arabian Peninsula. This is the birth of a historic “spice route” in the modern-day, which will cut transit time by about 40 percent as opposed to the traditional route via the Suez Canal that passes through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait near the Horn of Africa and Suez Canal connecting the Mediterranean Sea and Red Sea.
These chokepoints are also vulnerable to geopolitical and logistical calamities. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a crucial choke point in the maritime trade route between Asia and Europe, is strategically vulnerable to the conflict between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The Suez, one of the world’s busiest waterways, is a narrow bottleneck that tends to get choked by increasing traffic.
The IMEEC will serve as a faster, more stable and safer alternative, especially for the transportation of energy. It will safeguard supply chains and create new jobs in West Asia. It will also tie the region together promoting peace and stability with the involvement of Israel in the project, which is a precursor to an impending normalisation of ties between Riyadh and Jerusalem.
American President Joe Biden said it was a “real big deal” that will bridge ports across two continents and lead to a “more stable, more prosperous and integrated Middle East”.
Massive geopolitical coup against China
The economic corridor is a massive geopolitical coup against China. Not only is it a new and alternative trade route at the heart of energy exporting behemoths, but it challenges China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) rendering President Xi Jinping’s grand plan for world domination toothless and irrelevant even before it takes off.
An infrastructure project with “Chinese characteristics” like the BRI challenged western powers to follow a more constructive and democratic approach to counter Beijing’s tactics. And, in this case, western powers have followed India’s lead. Sources said India’s national security adviser is the man behind the concept of this grand strategic infrastructure project. India and the US have successfully come together to challenge China’s rising influence in West Asia, all the while charting out a plan to safeguard crucial energy supply chains.
Compared to a China-backed BRI, an alliance of financial heavyweights like India, US, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Europe also raises the IMEEC’s chances of success. And China’s woes do not end here. Following the announcement of the corridor, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni privately apprised Chinese Premier Li Qiang that Italy will be exiting the BRI.
The extent of damage to Xi’s ‘Silk Road’ ambitions is bound to worsen as Chinese investments at the Piraeus port in Greece and Ashdod in Israel may eventually fall prey to heightened geo-economic competition from India and the US. Israel’s Haifa port, the largest in the country, has been acquired by Indian company Adani Ports in a consortium with Israeli company Gadot Group. China has eyed this port for years, but the US raised the alarm.
It substantially cuts through China’s plans to lay a string of naval bases to check India’s navigational capacity in the busy sea routes of the Arabian Sea and Red Sea. The relevance of the Chinese naval base in Djibouti will be significantly hit as the new and faster route, alternative to the Suez Canal, emerges. In the event of a conflict, Djibouti, which also houses French, American and Japanese bases, will not be in a position to hold the movement of logistics and trade hostage. The port of Gwadar in Pakistan, which is being militarised by China, will also be bypassed – with Pakistan being completely overlooked by Saudi Arabia and US.
Pushback against China’s debt-trap diplomacy
The Gwadar-linked China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which passes through the Pakistan-occupied Gilgit-Baltistan region of Jammu and Kashmir, is facing enormous political turmoil. This raises questions on the feasibility of the project, which is already marred by sluggish progress, corruption, near-impossible debt obligations for Islamabad and security threats from the secessionist movement in Balochistan.
Further, the Strait of Malacca will continue to be a vulnerable choke point for China. India is further upgrading its presence in the strategically advantageous Andaman and Nicobar Islands at a time when China is reportedly building a spy base on Myanmar’s Great Coco island.
China is also pushing for a canal on the Kra Isthmus in Thailand, which will bypass the Strait of Malacca. This proposal, however, is still facing roadblocks and is likely to come up against tremendous pushback from regional powers including India.
Xi’s highly ambitious BRI, worth over trillion dollars, has been losing steam amid global pushback against China’s debt-trap diplomacy. It has run into unsustainably high costs, poorly planned projects, lack of transparency, economic infeasibility and lack of local job creation, which has made other countries question the benefits offered by Beijing.
China’s ulterior motives became clear when it sought to expand its influence through government corruption, political interference, debt trap diplomacy and by pushing Chinese workers and Mandarin onto countries that agreed to the BRI project. You may remember the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota, which fell prey to the Chinese to service the debt burden faced by Colombo.
All in all, China’s plans to protect its hegemony when it comes to global supply chains are now at a risk of failing. As the IMEEC takes shape, China’s once-hyped BRI will further slide into irrelevance. Its bases in Djibouti and Pakistan will be drastically devalued and its hunt for seaports as well as overseas naval bases has received a major setback.
(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views)
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