The new great game of corridors will be decided in Haifa

The Hormuz blockade has opened the era of corridor geopolitics: whoever draws the route commands the trade. In this contest, the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC) is the free world's only project on the scale of the century, and its Mediterranean anchor must not be left to the balance of power of the moment, writes Frank Melloul, Ambassador for Haifa Bay and NextBay 53 - City Alliance.

For more than a hundred days, the world held its breath over a strip of sea thirty kilometers wide. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, triggered by the late-February strikes against Iran, deprived the global economy of a passage through which one-fifth of the world's oil transits. Hundreds of thousands of containers stranded in Gulf ports, Suez traffic already halved by Houthi attacks, freight rates that, despite the June 17 accord and the strait's reopening, have still not come down: the lesson is brutal. World trade has become a weapon, and chokepoints instruments of deterrence. Strategists have a word for it: the “securitization” of trade.

This securitization has set off a competition reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Great Game, except that rails and submarine cables have replaced the Afghan passes. China opened the game a decade ago with its Belt and Road, which buys allegiance through debt and wraps Eurasia in a web of infrastructure whose strings it holds. Russia is pushing its North-South corridor toward Iran and India. Turkey is promoting its Development Road from Iraq and dreams of becoming the unavoidable crossroads between Asia and Europe. Every route traces a sphere of influence; every terminus is a bridgehead. In the century now taking shape, the map of corridors will be what the map of alliances was to the last one: the true frontier between blocs.

Faced with these hegemonic designs, the free world has only one answer at scale: the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor. Launched at the New Delhi G20 in 2023 by India, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, the United States, France, Germany, Italy and the European Commission, IMEC is not one logistics project among many. It is the geoeconomic architecture binding together the three strategic masses on which the century's equilibrium will depend: an Indian democracy on its way to becoming the world's third-largest economy, a Gulf seeking to convert its rents into connective power, and a Europe summoned to reduce its dependencies. Where China lends and owns, IMEC associates and shares: public-private partnerships, common standards, interoperability. And it has passed the trial by fire: during the Hormuz crisis, flows shifted of their own accord onto the land axis across the Arabian Peninsula, cutting transit times to Europe by up to 40 percent compared with Suez. Geography voted before the chancelleries did.

The keystone of this architecture lies in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia is today playing the subtlest hand in the Great Game: it temporizes on the original alignment, lets alternative routes through Syria and Turkey gather momentum, and suspends its commitment on regional balances, with the Palestinian question first among them. But the Hormuz crisis reshuffled the cards for the kingdom itself. When the strait closed, it was Jeddah and Yanbu that absorbed the flows diverted from the Gulf, handing Riyadh what Vision 2030 has pursued for a decade: a full-scale demonstration of its vocation as a logistics hub between two seas. Its North-South railway now reaches the Jordanian border. Its future, which lies in selling its hydrogen to Europe, monetizing its position as a land bridge and attracting the investment it lacks, runs through open corridors, not through bypass routes that would lock it into the role of a mere transit station. The kingdom's objective interest converges with IMEC, and IMEC in return gives regional normalization its most concrete content: no longer a diplomatic precondition, but the logical consequence of an interdependence already in motion. The corridor is not waiting for Saudi Arabia; it is drawing her in.

There remains the question no one wants to ask out loud, though it will decide everything: where does this corridor touch the Mediterranean? Make no mistake: the battle for the gates of Europe has already begun. Every littoral power is pushing its port, every diplomacy its candidates, and in the name of a conveniently defined “resilience” one can see routes taking shape that would run the vital artery between India and Europe through failed states, shores under militia influence, or zones whose stability rests on balances a single attack could overturn. Has the lesson of Hormuz been forgotten already? You do not cure the vulnerability of a strait by creating that of a terminus. A corridor designed to bypass zones of coercion cannot end in one of them.

The geopolitical answer exists, and the G20 gave it already: Haifa. Not out of pro-Israel sentiment, but out of cold strategic analysis. Haifa is the corridor's only Mediterranean outlet located in a democracy with established military superiority, the rule of law and an institutional continuity that no regional actor can hold hostage. It is the only port whose operator, India's Adani Group, belongs to the very power that is the corridor's raison d'être: India already has its Mediterranean bridgehead there. And it is the only candidate terminus that is itself a twenty-first-century center of power: NVIDIA is building there its second-largest campus after Silicon Valley, at the heart of an artificial-intelligence ecosystem anchored by the Technion. The corridors of tomorrow will carry fewer containers than data, decarbonized energy and technology: across the three dimensions of transport, digital and energy, Haifa is the only gate that opens onto all three at once.

There is more. At its birth, IMEC carried an explicit political design: to extend the Abraham Accords and consolidate the axis of the powers of stability against the arc of destabilization. Haifa Bay and its neighboring regions are its living prefiguration: 53 cities, 27 of them Arab, where Jews and Arabs build shared prosperity together. In the geopolitical grammar of the Gulf, where the fight against radicalization has become a question of regime survival, this laboratory of coexistence is not a public-relations argument: it is a strategic guarantee. To anchor the corridor at Haifa is to give the Arab monarchies, India and Europe a shared material stake in the success of normalization, that is, to turn a diplomatic armistice into irreversible interdependence.

None of this exempts us from lucidity. Israel and Jordan must be formally anchored in the corridor's memorandum; the missing Jordanian rail link must be completed; the redundancy rightly recommended by the best strategists must be built: multiple entries, multiple exits. A network, yes. But a network has a center of gravity, and centers of gravity are not decreed: they are observed. The Hormuz crisis has closed the happy parenthesis in which trade could be believed separate from power. In the world now coming, nations will not merely choose routes: they will choose sides. Europe, which speaks so much of strategic autonomy, holds here the occasion to turn it into policy. The road from India to Europe will pass through the Eastern Mediterranean; the only question is whether it will anchor in stability or in hazard. Geography, economics and the G20 have already answered: it will anchor in a bay where the East meets the Mediterranean, and where two peoples prove, every day, that the road of tomorrow can also be a project of peace.