By PEPE ESCOBAR, GEOPOLITICAL ANALYST
The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) is a massive diplomacy operation launched at the recent G20 summit in New Delhi, complete with a memorandum of understanding signed on September 9.
Players include the United States, India, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the EU, with a special role for the three major European powers, Germany, France and Italy. It is a multimodal rail project, along with digital and electric transshipments and auxiliary tracks that extend to Jordan and Israel.
If this works, it will be a very late collective response from the West to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched 10 years ago and holding a Forum in Beijing next month. And it is, above all, another American project to contain China, which can also be claimed, for electoral purposes, as a meager “success” in Biden’s foreign policy.
No one among the Global Majority remembers that Americans came up with their own Silk Road plan back in 2010. State Department official Kurt Campbell’s project was sold by then-Secretary Hillary Clinton as her idea. History is implacable, the project was reduced to nothing.
And no one among the Global Majority remembers the New Silk Road plan promoted by Poland, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Georgia in the early 2010s, with four problematic transshipments in the Black Sea and the Caspian. History is implacable, that project also came to nothing.
In fact, very few among the Global Majority remember the US-sponsored $40 trillion global plan to Build a Better World (B3W), launched with great fanfare just two summers ago, focusing on “climate, health, health security, digital technology, equity and gender equality.”
A year later, at a G7 meeting, the B3W had already been reduced to a $600 billion infrastructure and investment project. Of course, nothing was built. The story really is relentless.
The same fate awaits IMEC, for a number of very specific reasons.
Map of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC)
Spinning into a black void
The entire rationale behind these projects rests on what writer and former ambassador MK Bhadrakumar delightfully described as “evoking the Abraham Accords through the incantation of a Saudi-Israeli tango.”
This tango is Dead from the beginning. Not even the ghost of Piazzolla can resurrect him. For starters, one of the major countries – Saudi Arabia ruled by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman – has made it clear that Riyadh’s priorities are a new and reinvigorated relationship, with China, Iran, Turkey and Syria after its return to the League. Arab.
Furthermore, both Riyadh and its Emirati partner IMEC share immense commercial and energy interests with the People’s Republic of China, so they are not going to do anything to upset Beijing.
At first glance, these projects (PIEM) propose a joint initiative of the G7 and BRICS countries 11. This is the Western trick to seduce India, Saudi Arabia and the United States’ allies, the Arab Emirates, to add to your agenda.
However, the real intention is not only to undermine the BRI but also the International North-South Transport Corridor (INTSC), in which India is a major player along with Russia and Iran.
The game is quite crude and quite obvious: a transport corridor designed to avoid the three main vectors of true Eurasian integration (and the BRICS members, China, Russia and Iran) by dangling a tempting “Divide and Conquer” carrot. that promises things that cannot be fulfilled. .
The American neoliberal obsession at this stage of the New Great Game has to do, as always, with Israel. Its goal is to make the port of Haifa viable and turn it into a key transport hub between Western Asia and Europe. The entire maneuver is subordinated to this Israeli imperative.
The IMEC will, in principle, transit through Western Asia to link India with Eastern and Western Europe, selling the fiction that India is a global pivot state and a convergence of civilizations.
Nonsense. While India’s big dream is to become a pivot state, its best chance would be through the already operational INTSC, which could open markets to New Delhi from Central Asia to the Caucasus. As a Global Pivot State, Russia is far ahead of India in diplomatic terms, and China is far ahead in trade and connectivity.
Comparisons between IMEC and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) are useless. IMEC is a joke compared to this flagship BRI project: the $57.7 billion plan to build a more than 3,000-kilometer-long railway linking Kashgar in Xinjiang to Gwadar on the Arabian Sea, connecting to other land corridors in the BRI that are heading towards Iran and Turkey.
This is a national security issue for China. Therefore, we can bet that Beijing’s leaders will have some discreet and serious talks with the current fifth columnists in power in Islamabad, before or during the Belt and Road Forum, to remind them of the geostrategic, geoeconomic and investment facts relevant.
So what is left for Indian trade in all this? Bit. They already use the Suez Canal, a direct and proven route. There is no incentive to even begin to contemplate the possibility of becoming trapped in black voids in the vast desert expanses surrounding the Persian Gulf.
One obvious problem, for example, is that almost 1,100 km of railway tracks are “missing” from Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates to Haifa, 745 km are “missing” from Jebel Ali in Dubai to Haifa and 630 km are “missing”. from Abu Dhabi to Haifa.
If all the missing links are added, there are still more than 3,000 kilometers of railway to be built. The Chinese, of course, can make this for breakfast and for a penny, but they are not part of this game. And there is no evidence that the IMEC gang plans to invite them.
All eyes on Syunik
In the Transportation Corridor War that we trace in detail to The Cradle In June 2022, it became clear that good intentions rarely meet reality. These big projects are about logistics, logistics, logistics, and of course, intertwined with the other key pillars: energy resources, labor, manufacturing, and balanced trade rules.
Let’s examine an example from Central Asia. Russia and three Central Asian “stans” – Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – are launching a multi-modal Southern Transport Corridor that will bypass Kazakhstan.
Because? After all, Kazakhstan, along with Russia, is a key member of both the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
The reason is that this new corridor solves two key problems for Russia that arose with the Western sanctions hysteria. It bypasses the Kazakh border, where everything going to Russia is scrutinized in excruciating detail. And an important part of the cargo can now be transferred to the Russian port of Astrakhan, on the Caspian.
Therefore, Astana, which under Western pressure has played a risky hedging game against Russia, may end up losing the status of a transport hub in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea region. Kazakhstan is also part of the BRI; The Chinese are already very interested in the potential of this new corridor.
In the Caucasus, the story is even more complex and, once again, it is Divide and Conquer.
Two months ago, Russia, Iran and Azerbaijan committed to building a railway from Iran and its ports in the Persian Gulf through Azerbaijan, which would connect to the railway system between Russia and Eastern Europe.
This is a project on the scale of the Trans-Siberian, which will connect Eastern Europe with East Africa and South Asia, avoiding the Suez Canal and European ports. INSTC on steroids, in fact.
Guess what happened next? A provocation in Nagorno-Karabaj with the lethal potential of involving not only Armenia and Azerbaijan but also Iran and Turkey.
Tehran has been very clear in its red lines: it will never allow a defeat of Armenia, with the direct participation of Turkiye, which fully supports Azerbaijan.
Added to this incendiary mix are the joint military exercises of the United States with Armenia – which happens to be a member of the Russian-led CSTO – which have been presented, for public consumption, as one of those apparently innocent “partnership” programs of the NATO.
All of this details an IMEC subplot aimed at undermining the INTSC corridor. Both Russia and Iran are aware of the endemic weaknesses of the former: political problems between various participants, those “missing links” in the road and all the important infrastructure yet to be built.
The Turkish sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for his part, will never abandon the Zangezur corridor that crosses Syunik, the southern province of Armenia, provided for in the 2020 armistice, and that links Azerbaijan with Turkey through the Azeri enclave of Nakhitchevan, passing through Armenian territory. .
Baku threatened to attack southern Armenia if Yerevan did not facilitate the Zangezur corridor. So Syunik is the next big unresolved issue in this enigma. It should be noted that Tehran will do nothing to prevent a runner Turkish-Israeli-NATO isolate Iran from Armenia, Georgia, the Black Sea and Russia. That would be the reality if this NATO-tinged coalition takes over Syunik.
Today, Erdogan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev meet in the Nakhchivan enclave between Turkiye, Armenia and Iran to start a gas pipeline and open a military production complex.
The sultan knows that Zangezur could finally allow Turkiye to link with China through a corridor that will pass through the Turkish world, in Azerbaijan and in the Caspian. This would also allow the collective West to be even bolder in its Divide and Rule strategy against Russia and Iran.
Is PIEM another wild fantasy of the West? Before answering you have to look at the place called Syunik.
