Will IMEC Go the Way of the Baghdad Pact?

In September, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced that normalization with Israel is not possible without the establishment of “an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.” The statement came at an annual speech to the advisory Shura Council after months of affirmation from U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken that U.S.-Saudi pacts, including KSA’s normalization with Israel, could be “weeks away” from completion. The Saudi stance is a blow to the region-wide arrangements preceding the war in Gaza, in which Riyadh sought to forge ties with Israel and extra-regional powers to alter the obsolete security arrangements that had failed to deter Iran. Furthermore, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), cannot risk an unpopular normalization, which members of the Saudi foreign policy blob publicly denounced.

The pre-war trajectory culminated in the announcement of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), backed by the United States, as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The memorandum of understanding was signed less than a month before the October 7 attacks. The corridor aims to connect India to European markets through land routes across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel. IMEC is meant to accelerate the Saudi economic transformation envisioned by MBS. It will position the kingdom at the heart of an industrial and digital supply chain that combines Indian labor and industrial expertise with Emirati logistical capabilities and Israeli technology. 

Meanwhile, (although it is unmentioned in the agreement) the joint interests of IMEC’s parties would bring them closer together in countering Iran, including New Delhi, which has historically maintained a balanced relationship with Tehran. The capital injections expected from the Gulf countries to turbocharge the Indian industrial base would undoubtedly compel India to utilize its rising maritime power and checkmate its partners’ enemies from the East—or at least this is how the thinking goes.

However, with the eruption of the war in Gaza, IMEC seems to have joined a list of failed attempts by Washington to implement an offshore balancing strategy in the Middle East and rightsize its footprint. The prolonged conflict has pushed IMEC’s parties to jump off a sinking boat. Last May, and despite major hurdles to the project, India signed a ten-year deal to operate Iran’s Chabahar Port to compete with Pakistan’s nearby Gwadar Port, built and operated by China. Abu Dhabi chose to diversify its bets by joining the Türkiye-Iraq Development Road. 

Simultaneously, the U.S.-Saudi talks intended to lure Riyadh away from its popular commitment to Palestinian rights stumbled. Blinken emphasized that “none goes forward without the others,” meaning that U.S. support for the Saudi military capabilities is not possible without normalization with Israel. On the other side, MBS reiterated that normalization with Israel is not possible without an independent Palestinian state, elusive, to say the least, in light of Israel’s rightist politics.

IMEC vs. The Baghdad Pact

One need not go too far back in history to see an insightful parallel. When the UK and the United States sought to counterbalance communist incursions into the Middle East in the 1950s, they formed the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), known originally as the Baghdad Pact. The organization brought together Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan to act like a NATO-like military alliance in the Middle East. The pact faced furious domestic opposition in the early post-colonial era, with national movements rising in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. The fragile UK-leaning regimes could not stand the internal pressure after the UK led a tripartite aggression along with France and Israel against Egypt in 1956 with the aim of re-occupying the Suez Canal. It was a nineteenth-century response to Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. According to the U.S. State Department, “The outcome of the incident was a profound loss of British prestige in the region, which in turn damaged its position of leadership in the Baghdad Pact.” British official accounts also mark the event as a humiliating confirmation of the UK’s decline to a “second tier” power.

Many analogies can be drawn between IMEC and the Baghdad Pact. While the former’s partners may not share the same cultural alignment as the latter’s, the Indo-Abrahamic construct behind IMEC has emerged as a geo-strategic framework that unites an assertive India under the BJP with the Islamic conservative monarchies in the Gulf and the Jewish state. The UAE has invested in promoting interfaith dialogue, not only between the followers of Abrahamic religions but also Hindus, who represent nearly 10 percent of its population. After signing the Abraham Accords, Abu Dhabi viewed itself as a bridge between South Asia and the Middle East—or rather, West Asia. With passages to India, the Middle Eastern parties of IMEC can address their demographic shortages, especially with military personnel and labor pools, and secure the bloc’s influence over West Asia and further to the Indian Ocean.

Although the UK was the guarantor and actual member of the Baghdad Pact, Washington was the architect. By allying “the line of countries that formed a border between the Soviet Union and the Middle East,” the UK-led Islamic alliance would be a bulwark against communist expansion. Likewise, IMEC is meant to act as a bulwark to the Chinese expansion westwards to the Indian Ocean and the Middle East while checking Beijing’s ally, Iran. The Baghdad Pact was supposed to connect the southernmost member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Turkey, with the westernmost member of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), Pakistan. Meanwhile, IMEC would connect the Westernmost member of the Quad, India, with the Mediterranean through Israel. Other players like Turkey wondered why the scheme did not include northern players if the target is the European market. The explanations for that could range from Washington’s unflinching ideological commitment to Israel or that the corridor’s implicit security rationale precedes the geo-economic one.

Washington’s Anti-Strategy

For such a security architecture to emerge, great powers recruit middle powers and provide financial and technical support and strategic advisory. However, IMEC is more strategically sound than the Baghdad Pact. Rather than being only security-oriented like the Baghdad Pact, IMEC has an economic component that appeals to the United States and the corridor’s parties. From Washington’s view, the corridor would be self-funded, given the capital reserves available for immediate disbursement from the Gulf countries. Therefore, the United States would avoid over-stretching itself further financially after high costs and poor results in the Middle East. On the other hand, the corridor’s parties who would bear the cost know very well that they would be rewarded economically and, more importantly, strategically. The promises of the scheme were too many and too alluring to its parties’ needs that they neglected its deeply entrenched geopolitical vulnerabilities.

First of all, the United States has ignored other parties in the region who are less powerful economically and militarily than Washington but can exercise their agency when their threat perception is high. This applies to Iran, which would be blockaded militarily and economically, and Pakistan, which would be disassociated from trade routes with its Chinese Gwadar Port. The same extends to Egypt, where land routes throughout Jordan and Israel crowd out the over-150-year-old Suez Canal.

In addition, Turkey historically views itself as the bridge between Asia and Europe and has a strong posture in Central Asia and the Mediterranean. Therefore, Ankara refuses to be surpassed by exclusive blocs in the region. More significantly, counter-blocs are emerging with the recent rapprochement between Ankara and Cairo. After decades-long tensions, the two Mediterranean powers forged a regional agenda that would be consequential in Libya and the Horn of Africa. Both Cairo and Ankara are alert to the cost of being alienated by new trade routes. They remember how the European discovery of the route around the Cape of Good Hope in the fifteenth century contributed to the waning of the Muslim empires in the Mediterranean by cutting them off from the global economy for almost three centuries.

Second, over the eight years preceding IMEC, the United States emboldened Israel’s ill-advised and illegal misadventures. By moving the embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing the Golan Heights, and being silent on the settlers’ violence in the West Bank and Israel’s far-right politicians’ threats of its annexation, Washington had its cake and ate it, too. The United States shouldn’t hope for a rewarding exit plan from the Middle East combined with any party’s security supremacy. This works against the simple logic of balancing. Nevertheless, normalization with Israel thrived in light of the Israel-favorable developments leading to the Abraham Accords from the UAE and Bahrain and openness to talks from Saudi Arabia.

IMEC’s Lure and the Sunk Cost Trap

Believing in IMEC’s returns on their economy and security, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE continued exercising self-restraint even when witnessing the Gaza tragedy. More importantly, they already broke away from their previous regional security partnerships, limiting their bets only to IMEC and its success. Therefore, they were compelled to hang on to the scheme, hoping a ceasefire could be reached soon and that public pressure against regional powers would be eased to resume the pre-war arrangement. They experimented with the land routes intended for IMEC to help Israel avoid the Houthi blockade at the Bab Al-Mandab strait. This effort should be perceived as a sunk cost trap rather than concessions. Both countries invested time, diplomacy, and public relations campaigns in the new trajectory.

A similar case from the Baghdad Pact’s history is Pakistan and Turkey’s commitment to the alliance for twenty years after its demise. Specifically, Islamabad was a staunch ally of the UK and the United States in an attempt to hedge itself against postcolonial Nehru-India. In 1956, Pakistani Prime Minister Suhrawardy reiterated the need for the alliance even after Nasser’s victory in the 1956 war against Britain, France, and Israel. It took a revolution in Iraq in 1958, the end of the Eisenhower Administration’s military assistance for the Baghdad Pact members, and the Iranian revolution in 1979 for Pakistan to realize that the pact was ineffective and agree to its formal disbandment.

No Offshore Balancer on the Horizon

The war in Gaza reversed the auspicious pre-war scheme at least ten years ago, and the United States has much to repair before crafting a better, more effective, and rewarding exit strategy. Ironically, it is Washington who opposed the obsolete colonial practices of the UK and France during the 1956 Suez War. Washington went even further to threaten London with bankruptcy by selling the U.S. bonds of pound sterling, as it viewed that the tripartite aggression disregarded U.S. and Soviet opinion. More importantly, Egypt was crushed militarily in nine days, and Israel occupied Sinai for four months in 1956 before Nasser emerged victorious to dominate Middle Eastern politics and empower the Soviet Union in the region in the following decade. In other words, counting only on military tools in the Middle East does not guarantee strategic success for Washington or Tel Aviv. The huge loss of IMEC cannot be compensated by whatever death toll or physical loss for its enemies.

In the absence of a peaceful prosperity plan, the pursuit of offshore balancing in the Middle East will remain unfulfilled. A new scheme must consider the influential powers in the region and constrain the disruptive players. Otherwise, the United States risks the Middle East’s exposure to incursions by rival global powers in an era of great power competition.

Islam Alhalawany is a strategic analyst and business consultant. He previously worked as an Assistant Professor and an Assistant Dean for International Collaborations at Jindal Global University in India. He earned his master's degree with distinction in Development and International Business at Queen Mary University of London. Islam is a Chevening Scholar with an interdisciplinary professional background combining international relations, development policy, and international political economy. He has also worked as a senior research Analyst for Standard & Poor's (S&P) in London.

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