The USA and India will build a corridor to Europe

US President Joe Biden on September 9, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Delhi, announced his intention to create an railway and maritime corridor (IMEC) that would connect India, the Middle East and Europe. According to the text of the memorandum of understanding published on the White House website, IMEC aims to stimulate economic development by expanding connections and integration between Asia, the Gulf countries and Europe. The project provides for two alternative corridors: the eastern one will connect India by sea with the Persian Gulf in the UAE, and the northern one will connect the Persian Gulf from the UAE by land through Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel and then by sea to Greece.

Along the planned railway route, they plan to lay cables for power supply and digital communications, as well as a pipeline for pumping green hydrogen (obtained from water using electricity from renewable energy sources) hydrogen. According to the text of the memorandum, the corridor will ensure the security of regional supply chains and simplify trade interaction between the participating countries. In addition, the United States announced support for a plan to develop roads from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia, where copper and metals important for the green economy are mined, to the port of Lobito in Angola. Now Chinese businesses dominate the mining of these metals there.

At the moment, this looks like a political project, and not only because its implementation requires serious investments in the creation of new infrastructure, says General Director of Infoline Analytics Mikhail Burmistrov. The expert explained that in addition to the financial aspect, attention should be paid to infrastructure limitations. “In Greece, for example, railways are very poorly developed and, in fact, there is no single network. Saudi Arabia and the UAE will require the construction of a railway network in the desert,” says Burmistrov. He also emphasized that the speed of rail container transportation in Europe is 2–2.5 times lower than container trains on the Russian Railways network. “Even without taking into account geopolitical risks, it will take years to create infrastructure; design alone will take at least two years,” concluded Burmistrov.

The benefit for the participating countries is not fully clear, since they use the Suez Canal and, in general, it is more convenient for them to work with sea routes, says Gleb Makarevich, junior researcher at the Center for the Indian Ocean Region of the IMEMO RAS. But we cannot exclude the desire of some countries to enlist help in developing their own ground infrastructure. The expert also emphasized that, given the mentioned approximate scale of the project [предположительно $20 млрд], it is not comparable in scale to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. At the same time, Makarevich noted that, from the Indian point of view, even a declaration of intent to implement such a project is a great success in the Middle East within the framework of India’s “act in the West” policy.

African countries, including Zambia, DRC and Angola, are not “clients” of China or the United States; they are trying to pursue a multi-vector policy, so it is possible that they will be interested in participating in the Western project, says Andrey Maslov, director of the Center for African Studies at the Higher School of Economics. . The expert also noted that some of the countries of the continent, for example Zambia, are not going through the best period in relations with China, and the United States is trying to take advantage of this. “The United States has a weak position in East Africa, therefore, including through interaction with India, Washington will try to resist Beijing,” Maslov explained. At the same time, as the expert noted, the prospects for the African corridor remain distant due to the imbalance in the infrastructural development of the countries in the region.