Control of cross-border infrastructure has become as central to the contest for influence as military and political agreements.
At the heart of this shift is a web of partnerships linking Israel, India, and the UAE, backed by direct US involvement through the I2U2 framework. Alongside it are other routes where the interests of Turkiye, Pakistan, Qatar, and the Persian Gulf states converge, extending into projects such as the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and Iraq’s Development Road.
The region has not split into two coherent blocs, nor do the states involved share a position on every issue. The more important development is the movement away from conventional military alliances toward networks of economic, technological, and security influence built around ports, railways, energy, and data.
The I2U2 framework
The I2U2 framework is one of the clearest expressions of this shift. Bringing together India, Israel, the UAE, and the US, it began as a vehicle for cooperation in food security, clean energy, technology, trade, and investment. At the first summit of the four countries’ leaders in 2022, they emphasized joint investment and initiatives in water, energy, transport, space, health, and food security.
I2U2’s importance, however, lies beyond its announced projects. It draws together Israeli technology, Indian industrial capacity and markets, Emirati capital and logistics, and US political and strategic power.
The framework connects West Asia to the Indian and Pacific oceans and enables Israel, India, and the UAE to build partnerships that reach beyond their traditional bilateral ties.
The grouping also grew out of the political opening created by the Abraham Accords. Normalization between the UAE and Israel gave Washington a platform through which Indian capital, labor, and industrial capacity could be tied more closely to Israel’s technology sector and the Gulf’s logistics hubs.
Yet its economic language does not erase the strategic purpose beneath it, with defense no longer confined to borders and conventional armies. It increasingly includes supply-chain resilience, ports, digital infrastructure, cybersecurity, and the protection of energy and trade flows.
Ideology oils the machinery
Economic and security interests are accompanied by some overlap in political outlook, particularly toward political Islam and transnational armed groups, although the motives of each state differ considerably.
In the Emirati case, confronting political Islam has become a central part of Abu Dhabi’s view of national and regional security. Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies has described an Emirati religious-political doctrine that presents peace as an Islamic value and a component of national identity.
Abu Dhabi advances this state-directed doctrine against the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi currents, as part of a wider campaign against political Islam across the region.
India approaches political Islam and armed groups from a domestic and regional security perspective shaped largely by its conflict with Pakistan and the dispute over Kashmir. That has supplied further ground for cooperation with Israel and the UAE, particularly in intelligence, cybersecurity, surveillance, and military technology.
Successive Israeli governments, especially those led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have used the confrontation with armed groups and asymmetric threats to market Israel as a technological and security power on which regional states can rely.
The wars and crises of recent years have added pressure for closer defense and technological cooperation among Israel, India, the UAE, and the US.
Yet ideology alone cannot explain these relationships. India does not necessarily share Israel’s position on Iran, while Emirati foreign policy does not simply follow New Delhi or Washington. Overlapping interests allow practical partnerships to advance even where the participating states diverge elsewhere.
India’s pivotal weight
India carries exceptional weight in this equation because of its demographic, economic, and geographic reach. Its population of more than 1.4 billion, expanding manufacturing and technology sectors, and vast diaspora across the Persian Gulf make New Delhi difficult to exclude from any effort to reorganize trade between Asia and Europe.
A Jerusalem Post analysis published in 2022 described an emerging “Indo–Abrahamic alliance” linking Israel, the UAE, and India through maritime security, missile defense, drones, data security, and opposition to Islamist extremism.
India’s significance, however, is not limited to its military role. Its presence in the Gulf and growing trade relations with the UAE and Saudi Arabia give it the ability to redirect part of Asian trade toward routes that do not necessarily pass through the traditional corridors where Pakistan and Iran carry greater weight.
That position also gives India room to hedge. It maintains energy and transport ties with Iran, including through Chabahar, while pursuing the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) with Washington and its regional partners.
New Delhi can therefore participate in competing systems without surrendering its longstanding policy of strategic autonomy, even as its security relationship with Israel continues to deepen.
IMEC’s infrastructure front
Announced at the G20 summit in New Delhi in 2023, IMEC is intended to connect India, the Persian Gulf, and Europe through ports, railways, and energy and communications infrastructure.
The plans encompass a railway link, electricity interconnection, clean hydrogen infrastructure, and high-speed data cables. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented the corridor in 2023 as a way to accelerate trade between India and Europe while opening new connections in energy and the digital economy.
In 2025, the European Commission separately advanced the EU–Africa–India Digital Corridor within the wider IMEC framework. The initiative centers on an 11,700-kilometer subsea cable system linking Europe and India through the Mediterranean, West Asia, and East Africa, with the stated aim of providing secure, high-capacity data connections.
Corridors are increasingly becoming integrated systems carrying goods, energy, and data. The states able to secure or influence these networks acquire a form of strategic power once associated primarily with control of ports and straits.
The project, however, remains exposed to politics and war. IMEC depends on an overland passage through Saudi Arabia and Jordan to Israel’s Haifa port. The Gaza genocide and the absence of Saudi–Israeli normalization have left its political foundations uncertain, prompting growing questions over its viability.
Gwadar and the Development Road
CPEC and Iraq’s Development Road should not be treated as one project or as pieces of a unified alliance led by Turkiye, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. They belong to different networks, but each helps prevent a single route from monopolizing regional trade.
CPEC is the Pakistani arm of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), connecting China with Pakistan and Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea. Pakistan’s CPEC Secretariat lists a network of port, free-zone, road, and logistics projects around Gwadar. Among them is the Gwadar Eastbay Expressway, built to connect the port and its free zone to Pakistan’s national highway network.
Iraq’s Development Road is a separate undertaking, but Iraq’s location between the Persian Gulf, Turkiye, and Europe gives it particular importance. In April 2024, Iraq, Turkiye, Qatar, and the UAE signed a memorandum on the project, which is designed to connect the Grand Faw Port to the Turkish border through roughly 1,200 kilometers of roads and railways across Iraq.
The planned investment is around $17 billion, with implementation divided into three stages. Qatar’s Ministry of Transport says the first is scheduled for completion in 2028, followed by phases in 2033 and 2050. Baghdad presents the Development Road as a competing east–west trade corridor linking the Persian Gulf to Europe.
This participation complicates any attempt to divide the contest into Israel, the UAE, and India on one side and Turkiye, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. The UAE is part of the Development Road alongside Turkiye, Qatar, and Iraq.
Ankara and Riyadh hedge
Turkiye holds a particular place in this equation. It is a NATO member with economic ties spanning Europe, Russia, the Persian Gulf, and Central Asia, while its political and military reach extends from Syria and Iraq to the Caucasus. For Ankara, the Development Road offers an opportunity to reinforce its position as the overland bridge between the Persian Gulf and Europe.
Saudi Arabia is harder to place within a fixed bloc. Riyadh is an IMEC signatory but has also deepened relations with China, Russia, Turkiye, and Pakistan. It shows little appetite for a closed regional alignment, preferring to turn its geographic and economic position into leverage across several centers of power.
Major regional states increasingly avoid choosing between two camps. They seek a place in multiple networks, using one partnership to strengthen their bargaining position in another.
This is less a stable balance than a permanent hedge. A railway, port investment, defense agreement, or energy partnership may bind two states on one file while leaving them opposed on another.
The Levant left outside
The competition is also reshaping the Eastern Mediterranean. The Syrian and Lebanese coastlines are more than sites of military confrontation. They occupy ground where potential energy, transport, and communications routes between the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, and Europe could converge.
For Israel, stronger links with the Persian Gulf, India, and Europe assign the eastern Mediterranean a new role within trade and energy networks. For Turkiye, any corridor connecting the Persian Gulf to Europe while bypassing Turkish territory would erode the value of its location.
The Development Road instead offers Ankara the role of terminal and gateway for traffic arriving from the Persian Gulf through Iraq.
Lebanon and Syria face the danger of moving from the center of strategic geography to the margins of new transport and investment networks. Ports, roads, railways, energy links, data networks, and political stability are all required to turn geography into economic power.
Beirut has already shown interest in joining the Israel-centered IMEC route, despite the political and security contradictions such a move would entail. Syria, meanwhile, remains constrained by war damage, sanctions, and fragmented infrastructure, leaving both countries at risk of being bypassed by corridors drawn around them.
Power flows through the network
The emerging map does not show two opposing blocs in the old sense. It marks a transition from rigid alliances to overlapping networks.
Israel, India, the UAE, and the US cooperate where technology, security, and trade converge, while Turkiye, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq participate in other networks that repeatedly cross the first.
The next contest will therefore extend beyond borders and political influence to control over the movement of trade, energy, and information.
Ports and straits were among the principal instruments of power in the 20th century. In the 21st century, subsea cables, data centers, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity systems, rail networks, and hydrogen pipelines have joined them.
West Asia’s future will be shaped by military power, but also by the states capable of making themselves indispensable nodes in these new systems.
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