Indian Power Projection in the Greater Middle East: Tools and Objectives

Abstract

India's approach to the Middle East during the Cold War years was weighed down by the partition of the subcontinent and the creation of Pakistan on a religious basis, the dispute with Pakistan over the Muslim majority province of Jammu and Kashmir and its own large Muslim minority. Hence, its policy towards the region tended to be defensive and reactive, and a general policy of support to the Arab causes, particularly that of the Palestinians, and a non-relationship with Israel were considered necessary to serve India's broad interests in the region. India's projection of secularism into the region was meant to prevent Pakistan from organizing an anti-Indian Islamic bloc in the region, and its projection of nonalignment was meant to scuttle the Western attempts to build anti-communist alliances there. However, the transformation in the superpowers relations following the collapse of the Soviet Union, changes in the regional environment in the Greater Middle East (GME) as well as South Asia and changes in India's domestic sphere created a new strategic and economic context for India to pursue its interests in the GME in the 1990s. Th ere is an increasing convergence of strategic interests between the two regions and a growing complementarity of their economies in the post-Cold War world. Iran and Israel have become the two lynchpins of India's policy toward the region and, as an emerging global player, India, unlike during the Cold War, is in a strong position to promote its own interests as well as those of the international system in the region, which largely seem to coincide in the post-Cold War milieu.

Conceptualizing regional powers’ geoeconomic strategies: neo-imperialism, neo-mercantilism, hegemony, and liberal institutionalism

“…Regional powers usually apply economic rather than military means when pursuing strategic objectives on the international stage. Not only do they seldom possess the necessary military power to pursue their foreign policy goals through the use of force but also the security challenges that they now encounter also tend to be of an economic nature and therefore less amenable to military solutions (e.g., Brattberg and Hamilton 2014;Mudiam 2007;Wright 2013). While not displacing military security concerns, economic security has thus been elevated on the scale of strategic priorities to a country's national interests (Hsiung 2009;Zarate 2012).…”

Geoeconomics in the context of restive regional powers

“…Few articles dealing with geoeconomics actually provide a clear definition of the term. A review of recent literature shows that geoeconomics tends to be either juxtaposed with geopolitics, in which case they are seen to offer alternatives to each other (Sparke 1998 andMudiam 2007 The recent discussion on geoeconomics broadly falls into three theoretical approaches.…”