If anything, the last few years have exposed the fragility of the world’s maritime arteries. First came the Red Sea in 2024, where a sustained campaign of Houthi attacks on commercial shipping pushed Suez Canal traffic down by roughly 90 percent at the peak of the crisis and forced shipping lines onto the long detour around the Cape of Good Hope. Then came the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel carrying roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil, which has become an arena of confrontation between the United States and Iran, with its very status as an open waterway repeatedly thrown into doubt. For India, the world’s third-largest oil importer and a country that still draws the bulk of its crude and gas from the Persian Gulf, these are not distant tremors. They are direct threats to the supply lines on which its growth depends, and they have forced New Delhi into an exacting balancing act among Washington, Tehran, and the Gulf capitals. This turbulence at the chokepoints is also the most powerful argument yet advanced for the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). The corridor was conceived precisely to reduce the strategic dependence on singular, vulnerable chokepoints that the past several months have thrown into such stark relief. Yet the same crisis exposes an uncomfortable truth that the corridor’s champions have been slow to confront. A trade route is only as resilient as the institutions and security arrangements that stand behind it, and by that measure, IMEC remains very much a work in progress.
(Harsh V. Pant, Dharminder Singh Kaleka – Observer Research Foundation)
Can IMEC Survive the Iran War?
