IMEC: India's answer to China's Belt and Road

At the G20 summit it hosted in New Delhi in 2023, India joined the United States, the European Union, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to announce the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor, or IMEC. The plan is to link India to Europe through a chain of ports and railways running across the Gulf and into the Mediterranean — a single connectivity corridor that combines shipping and rail to move goods faster and more cheaply than today's sea route.

The strategic subtext was hard to miss. For more than a decade China has been building ports, roads and power plants across Asia and Africa under its Belt and Road Initiative, extending its economic and political influence along the way. IMEC is widely read as a democratic, market-based answer to that push — one backed by Washington and Brussels rather than Beijing.

For India, IMEC fits a broader foreign-policy style often described as multi-alignment: working simultaneously with the United States, the European Union and the Gulf monarchies without being locked into any single bloc. The corridor also deepens India's stake in West Asia, a region that supplies much of its energy and hosts millions of Indian workers.

Geography explains much of the appeal. Today most India–Europe trade sails through the Suez Canal, a narrow Egyptian waterway that becomes a costly chokepoint whenever conflict or congestion strikes. By shifting part of that flow onto land routes through the Gulf, IMEC promises resilience. Progress slowed after the 2023 conflict in West Asia, but India, the EU and Gulf partners reaffirmed their commitment to the project in 2026.