CSS Pakistan Affairs | CPEC and “Indo-Middle East-Europe” as new war fronts.
The following question of CSS Pakistan Affairs is solved by Ronra Kasi under the supervision of Howfiv’s Pakistan Affairs and Current Affairs Coaches: Miss Iqra Ali and Sir Ammar Hashmir. She learnt how to attempt 20 marks question and essay writing from Sir Syed Kazim Ali, Pakistan’s best CSS and PMS English essay and precis teacher with the highest success rate of his students. This solved question is attempted on the pattern taught by Sir to his students, scoring the highest marks in compulsory and optional subjects for years.
Outline
1-Introduction
2-A Birds Eye View of CPEC and Indo-Middle-East-Europe
3-CPEC & IMEC: As New War Fronts
- 3.1-Corridors Competing: Over the Same Geography
- Case in Point: Both corridors target the Asia-Middle East-Europe axis, competing over the same trade routes, choke-points, and markets, making direct comparison analytically inevitable.
- 3.2-Competing Connectivity: Visions Across the Same Geography
- Case in Point: Multiple peer-reviewed studies frame IMEC as a direct counter to BRI, of which CPEC is the flagship project, making the comparison not incidental but structurally built into IMEC’s design logic.
- 3.3-IMEC Designed: As CPEC Alternative
- Case in Point: CPEC is backed by China; India and Western partners back IMEC. Both embed infrastructure within a wider great-power competition, making them legitimate units of comparison in IR analysis.
- 3.4-Both are Tools in a China-India-US-Gulf Contest
- Case in Point: According to Pakistan’s Margalla Papers, IMEC is an “obvious threat” to CPEC and BRI, and argues it could undermine Pakistan’s economic and strategic interests, confirming that even affected states see the corridors as adversarial counterparts.
- 3.5-IMEC: A Threat to Pakistan’s Interests
- Case in Point: Research on CPEC shows it alters China–Europe and China–Middle East trade route selection; IMEC promises to do the same from India’s vantage point, making them directly comparable in terms of macro trade effects.
- 3.6-Embed Security Dilemmas Alongside Economic Promises
- Case in Point: CPEC is documented as both stabilizing and destabilizing in security terms; IMEC is assessed as potentially intensifying geopolitical competition in the Middle East; both are therefore useful for comparative security analysis.
- 3.7-Geopolitical Re-balancing in the Middle East Needs Both
- Case in Point: Studies on the Middle East’s shifting alignment explicitly use a comparative framework of BRI/CPEC and IMEC together, arguing neither can be understood in isolation from the other in terms of regional power dynamics.
- 3.8- Scholars from four countries agree that neither corridor makes sense alone
- Case in Point: The document’s entire literature base, across Pakistani, Indian, Chinese, and Western-authored studies, consistently treats IMEC’s implications as only understandable in relation to CPEC, confirming broad scholarly consensus that the comparison is productive.
4-Critical Analysis
5-Conclusion
Answer to the Question
Introduction
Throughout history, great powers have used roads, railways, and ports not just to move goods but to move influence. Stephen Walt’s Balance of Threat Theory reminds us that states respond not only to raw power but to perceived intention and geographic reach. Today, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) are doing exactly that: they are not merely trade arteries but instruments through which China, India, the United States, and Gulf states are projecting power, reshaping alliances, and contesting each other’s influence across the same stretch of the world. Comparing them, therefore, is not merely useful; it is analytically necessary. Without placing the two side by side, neither can be properly understood. In a word, CPEC and IMEC are the infrastructure face of great-power competition. One is China’s flagship Belt and Road corridor through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea; the other is a US- and India-backed answer running through the Gulf to Europe. Both target the Asia–Middle East–Europe axis, carry embedded security calculations, and are shaping the geopolitical landscape of the twenty-first century. To put it succinctly, the analysis demonstrates that the comparison is not incidental; it is built into the very design logic of each project.
A Bird’s Eye View of CPEC and IMEC
CPEC, launched under China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2015, is a $62 billion infrastructure and energy network linking China’s Xinjiang province to Pakistan’s Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea. Moreover, it encompasses motorways, railways, energy plants, and special economic zones, making Pakistan the geographic fulcrum of China’s westward connectivity push. At its core, CPEC gives China direct overland and maritime access to the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, bypassing the Strait of Malacca. On the other hand, IMEC, announced at the G20 Summit in New Delhi in September 2023, is a multi-modal corridor linking India to the United Arab Emirates by sea, then onward by rail through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel to European ports. As the situation unfolded, it was positioned explicitly as an alternative vision of Eurasian connectivity, backed by the United States, India, and Gulf partners, one that routes trade and influence outside China’s sphere. To sum up, CPEC and IMEC represent not just competing roads but competing world orders.
CPEC & IMEC as New War Fronts: Why Comparison is Analytically Inevitable
- 3.1 Corridors Competing Over the Same Geography
The most immediate and undeniable justification for comparing CPEC and IMEC is purely geographic. For instance, both corridors target the Asia-Middle East-Europe axis, that compete over the same trade routes, maritime choke-points, and consumer markets. CPEC moves goods from Chinese factories through Pakistan to the Gulf and then to Europe. IMEC moves goods from Indian ports through the Gulf and to Europe. Both are fighting over the same commercial arteries. As scholars of geoeconomics have consistently observed, when two infrastructure projects contest the same geographic axis, comparative analysis is not a choice; it is an analytical obligation. In short, CPEC’s geostrategic reach into the Middle East, the very zone IMEC also targets, makes the geographic overlap impossible to ignore
- 3.2 Competing Connectivity Visions Across the Same Geography
Beyond geography, the two corridors embody rival visions of how Eurasian connectivity should be organized. CPEC reflects China’s model: state-directed investment, bilateral financing, and infrastructure built on Chinese terms under BRI protocols. One must not overlook the fact that a project born to counter another can only be properly evaluated in relation to what it was designed to oppose. IMEC reflects the Western-Indian model: market-friendly corridors, multilateral financing, and infrastructure integrated with democratic partners. As an illustration, according to Third World Quarterly, IMEC is framed as a direct counter to BRI, of which CPEC is the flagship project. Therefore, the comparison is not incidental but structurally embedded in IMEC’s design logic from its very inception.
- 3.3 IMEC Designed as a CPEC Alternative
IMEC was not born in a geopolitical vacuum. American and Indian policymakers designed it with an explicit awareness of BRI and CPEC. Moreover, the Biden administration’s Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), of which IMEC is the most prominent expression, was framed as the democratic world’s answer to China’s infrastructure diplomacy. In particular, CPEC is backed by China; India and Western partners back IMEC. Compounding this further, CPEC’s documented geopolitical paradigms confirm its role as far more than an economic project; in fact, India’s strategic calculus around CPEC predates and partly explains its IMEC engagement, showing the rivalry has deep historical roots. Stemming from this reality, Indian strategic planners viewed IMEC as an opportunity to deepen Gulf relationships and create an overland route to Europe that neither depends on Pakistan nor passes through Chinese-controlled or Chinese-financed territory. IMEC is therefore CPEC’s structural rival by design, not by coincidence.
- 3.4 Both Are Tools in a China-India-US-Gulf Contest
CPEC and IMEC cannot be understood outside the wider China-India-US triangular rivalry that defines contemporary geopolitics. In no uncertain terms, CPEC deepens Pak-China strategic ties, advances China’s access to the Indian Ocean, and positions Beijing as the indispensable patron of South Asian connectivity. Now, withstanding this, IMEC operationalises the India-Gulf-US alignment, legitimises the Abraham Accords framework, and creates economic interdependence that implicitly constrains Chinese influence. Pakistan’s vulnerability to alternative connectivity frameworks around CPEC is further reinforced by multiple analyses of CPEC’s exposure to rival projects. Undeniably, both corridors are foreign policy instruments disguised as trade. The inescapable conclusion is that, when infrastructure becomes statecraft, the corridors must be evaluated as units in a great-power contest and compared accordingly.
- 3.5 IMEC: A Threat to Pakistan’s Interests
In addition to the above, from Pakistan’s vantage point, IMEC is not merely a rival corridor; it is a strategic threat. Moreover, a corridor studied in isolation cannot reveal the full map of the economic and political realignments it is producing. For instance, according to Pakistan’s Margalla Papers, published by the Islamabad Policy Research Institute, IMEC has been characterised as an “obvious threat” to CPEC and BRI, arguing that it could divert Gulf investment away from Pakistan, undercut Gwadar’s commercial ambitions, and deepen India’s strategic footprint in the Arabian Gulf at Pakistan’s expense. Pakistan’s geographic centrality to CPEC and its exclusion from IMEC mean that if IMEC succeeds in routing Asian-European trade through India and the Gulf, Pakistan risks becoming a strategic bypass in Eurasian commerce. Hence, this perspective confirms that even directly affected states recognise CPEC and IMEC as adversarial counterparts.
- 3.6 Both Embed Security Dilemmas Alongside Economic Promises
Hand in hand with this, a defining feature that makes CPEC and IMEC comparable is that both corridors are dual-use instruments; moreover, they carry economic promises alongside embedded security dilemmas. CPEC has been documented as simultaneously stabilising, through infrastructure investment and job creation, and destabilising, through the militarisation of corridor routes, the presence of Chinese security personnel, and Balochistan insurgency dynamics. For instance, IMEC passes through the Middle East in the throes of post-Abraham Accords realignment and was significantly complicated by the October 2023 Gaza conflict, which disrupted the Israel-Arab normalisation framework that IMEC depended upon. Both corridors are therefore security architectures as much as trade architectures, and both are best understood through comparative security analysis.
- 3.7 Geopolitical Re-balancing in the Middle East Requires Both
Above all, the new political geography of the Middle East, where Gulf states are simultaneously appearing in Chinese, Indian, and Western connectivity frameworks, cannot be mapped accurately unless CPEC and IMEC are analysed together as competing forces shaping the same regional realignment. CPEC deepens China’s Gulf access; at the same time, IMEC deepens US and Indian access; neither corridor can be understood in isolation from the other. In particular, according to the analyses published by the Gulf Research Center, they explicitly use a comparative CPEC/BRI and IMEC framework, arguing that the Gulf’s hedging strategy is only intelligible when both corridors are placed side by side. Therefore, the Middle East is the geographic terrain on which CPEC and IMEC contest each other, and that makes their comparison indispensable for regional analysis.
- 3.8 Scholars from Four Countries Agree Neither Corridor Makes Sense Alone
All things considered, the most compelling argument for the comparison is the breadth of scholarly consensus behind it, where Pakistani, Indian, Chinese, and Western researchers all treat IMEC’s significance as comprehensible only in relation to CPEC and BRI, and this cross-national consensus carries a weight that no single national perspective could provide alone. When analysts working from entirely different strategic interests and different academic traditions arrive at the same methodological conclusion, that convergence is itself the strongest possible evidence that the comparison is not just useful but necessary. Across the literature, no serious study treats IMEC in full isolation from CPEC, and the comparative framework appears consistently regardless of which country the researcher writes from. In a word, even Indian scholarship treats the IMEC-BRI comparison as its default analytical frame, confirming that the consensus holds even among researchers with a strategic interest.
Critical Analysis
While the case for comparison is analytically robust, three critical caveats must temper any simplistic framing of CPEC versus IMEC as a clean binary contest. First, IMEC’s viability is genuinely uncertain. The October 2023 Gaza war disrupted the Israel-Arab normalization framework that IMEC requires to function. Without Saudi-Israeli normalization, the IMEC rail link cannot be operationalized. Hence, IMEC remains, as of the time of writing, more a geopolitical signal than a functioning corridor, whereas CPEC, whatever its difficulties, has already built roads, power plants, and ports in Pakistan. Comparing an operational corridor with an aspirational one requires analytical care. Second, framing both corridors purely as “war fronts” risks overstating their adversarial character. Gulf states, notably Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have simultaneously invested in BRI projects and expressed support for IMEC. The Middle East is not choosing sides; it is hedging. Thus, the corridors operate in a space of competitive coexistence, not simple binary confrontation. Third, Pakistan’s challenge is not simply that IMEC exists; it is that CPEC’s own delivery has fallen short of its promises. Debt burdens, delayed SEZs, the stagnation of Gwadar’s development, and persistent security challenges along the corridor have weakened CPEC’s geoeconomic standing. Pakistan’s strategic vulnerability to IMEC is as much a function of CPEC’s internal weaknesses as of IMEC’s external competition.
Conclusion
In conclusion, CPEC and IMEC are not merely worth comparing; they demand to be compared. They contest the same geographic axis, embody rival connectivity visions, were built in explicit awareness of each other, and are tools of the same China–India–US–Gulf great-power competition. Pakistani scholars characterize IMEC as a threat to Pakistan’s strategic interests; Western and Indian analysts frame IMEC as a counter to BRI; and researchers from four adversarial research traditions agree that neither corridor makes analytical sense without the other. The comparison is not an academic exercise; it is the only lens through which either corridor can be properly understood. To borrow from the language of Stephen Walt: states, and the corridors they build, must be evaluated not in isolation but in relation to the threats and balancing acts they are designed to produce. CPEC and IMEC are, above all, a geopolitical conversation.
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