US and India plan a pathway to Europe

12th Sep 2023

By Rhod Mackenzie

The US President Joseph Biden announced with New Delhi the creation of a major India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor for the supply of energy resources and products. This project could become a rival to a similar Chinese initiative - the Silk Road. Washington also wants to draw the countries of the Middle East into its orbit.
A big project
"This is a big project. This is a really big project," said US President Joseph Biden at the G20 summit, commenting on plans to build a corridor linking India with the Middle East and Europe.

The initiative includes investments in shipping and rail that will in turn facilitate trade, clean energy and internet cables for a "prosperous, stable and integrated Middle East," according to the White House press office.

India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Israel and the European Union plan to participate in the project, said Jake Sullivan, the American leader's national security adviser.

Two alternative corridors are being considered: the eastern one, linking India by sea to the Persian Gulf in the UAE, and the northern one - from the UAE by land through Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, and then by sea to Greece.

Sullivan said the initiative "reflects Biden's vision of far-reaching investment" based on "effective American leadership and a willingness to accept other countries as partners". Sullivan added that improved infrastructure would spur economic growth, unite the countries of the Middle East and "transform the region into a centre of economic activity rather than a source of problems, conflict and crisis" as it has been.

"Improving connectivity across all regions is a key priority for India," said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The project proposed by Biden has become one of the key initiatives promoted by Washington to counter Beijing's growing influence and create an alternative to the Belt and Road project, Axios reports.

Criticism from the US and EU
The Chinese leader Xi Jinping launched the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. The aim of the project was to create new transport, trade and economic routes linking China with countries in Central Asia and Africa. According to Beijing, this longest economic corridor in the world should connect 4.4 billion people.
"In recent years, attitudes towards the One Belt, One Road project have steadily deteriorated in the United States, Europe, India, Pakistan and everywhere else, and it is now seen around the world as an expression of Chinese ambitions. The EU was one of the first to address concerns about this by trying to limit China's presence on its territory and counter its influence," wrote the South China Morning Post.

In particular, European Union representatives criticised the Chinese initiative for "interfering with free trade and offering preferential terms to Chinese companies subsidised by Beijing".
"For everyone from America to Europe, the Belt and Road Initiative has lost its lustre and is now being criticised as a debt trap and a self-serving project," the publication noted.

The timeline and cost of Biden's proposed corridor have not been disclosed. According to Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the economic corridor will cost $20 billion to launch. However, whether this is the total cost or just Riyadh's share is also not specified.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also announced the creation of the Trans-African Corridor. The plan is to link the Angolan port of Lobito with the continent's landlocked regions: Kananga Province in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia, where copper and metals important for a green economy are mined. Chinese companies now dominate their production.

Bringing everyone together
In essence, a huge, ambitious geopolitical and trade project is being launched, notes Orientalist and publicist Andrei Ontikov in an interview with Izvestia.

"It is directed against China and will be a competitor to the One Belt, One Road initiative." Many people associate Xi Jinping's absence from the G20 with this idea of a new transport corridor," the political scientist explained.

In his view, the current situation is much broader. A country like India is involved in the transport artery and it has a lot of contradictions with China, including territorial ones.
The Americans are slowly starting to play their favourite game, which has been successful in all directions in Africa, the Middle East and Europe - "divide and conquer". In essence, the United States will exploit these contradictions between Beijing and New Delhi, play them off against each other in a variety of areas, including trade, and skim off the cream. As in a number of other hot spots, the expert believes.

He emphasises that in the context of growing competition and various contradictions between India and China, the question of how relations within BRICS will develop automatically arises.

Now that BRICS is expanding, it is a very attractive structure for a number of reasons: many countries, including those that have recently joined the union, are trying to balance the excessive American influence on their domestic politics. But there are Chinese-Indian contradictions that the United States will actively work with, including through the creation of this very transport corridor, the analyst believes.
Ontikov stressed that the corridor should also pass through the territory of Saudi Arabia. According to him, one of the difficult problems the Americans will have to solve is the agreements between the Middle Eastern kingdom and Israel. The United States is making great efforts to reconcile the Israelis and the Saudis, and these efforts fit into the idea of a transport corridor. It is not yet clear what form the reconciliation will take, the expert noted.
According to the expert, we can talk about establishing diplomatic relations or concluding some kind of agreement without regulating relations.
Taking into account the fact that there is a prospect of making a profit, agreements specifically on the corridor are quite possible. It's hard to say whether they will turn into something more, a reconciliation like the one between Israel and the United Arab Emirates," the Orientalist concluded.
Not enough money
Alexey Maslov, director of the M.V. Lomonosov Institute of Asian and African Countries at Moscow State University, believes that China is indirectly involved in the initiative.
It has become clear that due to the collapse of the idea of globalisation, individual transport and logistics corridors and some infrastructure projects that unite groups of countries can play a big role today. It was China that was the first to do this by building the One Belt, One Road," the Sinologist explained.
Now that BRICS is expanding, it is a very attractive structure for a number of reasons: many countries, including those that have recently joined the union, are trying to balance the excessive American influence on their domestic politics. But there are Chinese-Indian contradictions that the United States will actively work with, including through the creation of this very transport corridor, the analyst believes.
Ontikov stressed that the corridor should also pass through the territory of Saudi Arabia. According to him, one of the difficult problems the Americans will have to solve is the agreements between the Middle Eastern kingdom and Israel. The United States is making great efforts to reconcile the Israelis and the Saudis, and these efforts fit into the idea of a transport corridor. It is not yet clear what form the reconciliation will take, the expert noted.
According to the expert, we can talk about establishing diplomatic relations or concluding some kind of agreement without regulating relations.
Taking into account the fact that there is a prospect of making a profit, agreements specifically on the corridor are quite possible. It's hard to say whether they will turn into something more, a reconciliation like the one between Israel and the United Arab Emirates," the Orientalist concluded.
Not enough money
Alexey Maslov, director of the M.V. Lomonosov Institute of Asian and African Countries at Moscow State University, believes that China is indirectly involved in the initiative.
It has become clear that due to the collapse of the idea of globalisation, individual transport and logistics corridors and some infrastructure projects that unite groups of countries can play a big role today. It was China that was the first to do this by building the One Belt, One Road," the Sinologist explained.
What seemed unlikely at the time, given the huge capital investment required, now seems quite feasible for the People's Republic of China. But with major shortcomings. According to various estimates, China has invested almost $1 trillion in the construction of the corridor. Izvestiya's interlocutor notes that the United States began to show concern about two or three years ago, when it began to understand that through China's Belt and Road corridors many countries would become part of the larger Chinese macroeconomic region.
The expert adds that the United States is taking advantage of the Chinese idea, trying to create a corridor not so much against Beijing, but by bringing together a number of countries that are beneficial to it.
In other words, the United States is trying to stabilise its macroeconomic region. Formally, this seems to have been done very competently - the Middle East, India. Technically, this could create an alternative to China. But this does not mean that countries that could theoretically join the so-called American corridor will turn away from the Chinese Belt and Road," the analyst emphasised.

According to him, the countries will continue to cooperate. The Chinese corridor is based on several very important points that are now quite difficult for the United States to implement. The first is huge investments without obvious immediate returns, the second is the creation of very large preferential measures for the transport of goods, uniform standards for customs clearance of goods, the creation of logistics facilities," the expert pointed out.
He is confident that China has done this.

For the US, this is only the first stage of the project. There is another very important point: To hedge its own risks, China is taking control of many ports and companies that manage individual routes. For the United States, this is just an idea, and a lot of money will have to be invested in its implementation - hundreds of billions of dollars to push the Chinese initiative into the background," Maslov concluded.