India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor: Securing Europe's Energy Autonomy and Trade Resilience Against Polycrisis Risks
- Energy & Climate, Foreign Affairs, Trade & Competition
- September 24, 2026
Executive summary
Announced at the 2023 G20 summit in New Delhi, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) is a multimodal network of rail links, ports, hydrogen pipelines, electricity grids and digital cables connecting India to Europe via the Arabian Gulf, Jordan, Israel and the Mediterranean ports of Piraeus, Marseille and Trieste. This paper argues that IMEC is strategic for the European Union: it advances the Global Gateway, deepens the partnership with the Gulf, offers an alternative to the Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab chokepoints, and complements the Middle Corridor through Central Asia. Drawing on Spykman’s Rimland theory, it reads IMEC as a Western attempt to secure control over Eurasia’s coastal belt in competition with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, with Mediterranean hubs as the key interfaces between sea and land. The paper sets out three recommendations for the EU: accelerate hydrogen and energy links to diversify imports, harmonise logistics and military mobility standards with partners, and build EU-India-Gulf alliances and monitoring capacity. It concludes that, with phased risk mitigation starting on the India-Gulf leg, IMEC could turn Europe’s exposure to polycrisis into strategic autonomy, provided the Gaza conflict stabilises.
Author:
Andrea Perrone
Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Geography at Link Campus University, Rome. He holds a PhD with a dissertation on the origins of Italian geopolitics, and his research focuses on the history of geographical thought, the epistemological foundations of geography, and contemporary geopolitical dynamics.