Patrick Wood’s recent white paper advances a thesis as seductive as it is simple: the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, launched on 28 February 2026 under Operation Epic Fury, is not about nuclear weapons, Iranian aggression, or liberation. It is about the IMEC corridor — the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor, a multi-trillion-dollar system of rails, ports, fibre optics, and energy pipelines stretching from Mumbai to Marseille. Whoever controls that architecture controls the flow of goods, energy, data, and money across three continents. The Strait of Hormuz is the chokepoint Iran holds. Remove Iran, and the corridor opens.
The argument is elegant. The Middle East has been making elegant arguments look foolish for the better part of a century.
The motive is real — the master plan is not
The IMEC corridor is real, funded, and under active construction. Key rail lines, ports, and highway segments broke ground in April 2025, with Saudi Arabia committing $20 billion to the project. Jared Kushner — Trump’s son-in-law, former White House senior adviser, and now private equity principal at Affinity Partners — manages billions in Gulf sovereign wealth, the same sovereign wealth that funds the corridor’s infrastructure. He designed the Abraham Accords framework. Wood documents that Kushner now sits on the Board of Peace, the governance body overseeing post-war Gaza, whose permanent membership costs $1 billion and whose charter was signed at Davos. Whether one accepts the full architecture of Wood’s argument or not, the concentration of financial interest and governance power in a single individual is not a detail. It is the argument.
And yet the existence of a commercial motive does not establish the existence of a coherent plan. Kushner’s positioning proves that powerful people stand to profit from the corridor’s success. It does not prove that a war of this scale, with these cascading consequences, unfolded on schedule. One can hold both thoughts simultaneously: that the IMEC corridor created incentives strong enough to reshape U.S. foreign policy, and that the execution has the hallmarks of improvisation dressed as strategy.
The U.S.: corridors by design, stability by accident
The IMEC corridor requires, above all else, a stable Gulf. The war has produced the precise opposite. Oil crossed $100 a barrel within days of the opening strikes. Washington found no coalition partners for Hormuz escort operations — a failure that Xinhua described, with some accuracy, as reflecting “the limitations of U.S. mobilisation capacity on the international stage.” Public rifts between Washington and Tel Aviv over targets, duration, and strategic objectives widened visibly in the war’s first three weeks.
The United States can design corridors. It has not recently demonstrated the ability to stabilise the regions they depend on. American post-9/11 wars consumed an estimated $8 trillion and produced the Taliban’s return to Kabul and chronic instability across Iraq. The Toda Peace Institute concludes that the Iran conflict “accelerates regional destabilisation and undermines United States strategic coherence.” A prolonged war does not secure the corridor — it puts the project on indefinite hold and simultaneously hands Russia a $120-a-barrel budget windfall that the Kremlin did not have to ask for.
India: the art of being on both guest lists
India’s position is, by some margin, the most analytically revealing in this conflict. In February 2026, Prime Minister Modi addressed the Knesset, declared India stands with Israel “firmly, with full conviction,” signed defence and AI agreements with Netanyahu, and elevated bilateral ties to a “Special Strategic Partnership.” Days later, Iran named India a “friendly country” — permitted passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Two Indian-flagged gas tankers had already transited. Both hosts are still serving drinks, and New Delhi has not spilled a drop.
India imports 85% of its oil, and roughly half of those supplies pass through Hormuz. The stakes are not abstract. And yet New Delhi received no advance briefing on the strikes: Israeli Foreign Minister Saar confirmed that the final decision came on Saturday morning, hours before the bombs fell. In the war’s first two weeks, Foreign Minister Jaishankar spoke three times with his Iranian counterpart — not to express solidarity, but to protect Indian shipping lanes. Critics at The Diplomat argue that India “limited its room for manoeuvre by moving too close to one camp.” The evidence from Hormuz suggests the opposite. India holds an active strategic partnership with Israel, declines to condemn the strikes, and still collects safe-passage clearance from Tehran. New Delhi has, quietly and methodically, kept every door open while the house burns around it.
China: the investor who reads the room
China condemned the strikes. China did not act. Beijing evacuated 3,000 nationals from Iran, declined Trump’s request to help protect the Strait, and characterised its response as “cool economic and geopolitical pragmatism” — not ideological alignment with Tehran. The distinction matters enormously, and the Western press has been slow to make it.
The structural irony that Wood’s framework misses is considerable: China is already embedded in the IMEC corridor’s own infrastructure. A Chinese company operates Khalifa Port — the designated IMEC hub in the UAE. China invested in the Etihad Rail project connecting Fujairah to Saudi Arabia, a critical corridor segment. Beijing holds stakes in Oman’s Duqm and Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Gateway Terminal. The corridor’s supposed geopolitical rival is, in practical terms, one of its landlords. Meanwhile, Bruegel concludes the Iran conflict is a “net negative for China, but not by much” — Goldman Sachs projects 4.8% Chinese growth in 2026 regardless. China collects discounted oil, condemns the strikes on state television, and waits. Beijing has seen this film before, and knows how it ends for the leading actor.
The Gulf: multi-alignment has a price
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are simultaneously members of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and signatories to the IMEC corridor MοU — and see absolutely no reason why they should have to choose. Both have spent a decade positioning themselves as indispensable transit hubs regardless of which infrastructure project eventually dominates global trade flows.
The war, however, has introduced costs that no hedging strategy fully absorbs. Iranian drones struck Qatari gas facilities. Emirati infrastructure came under direct threat. The corridor’s architects anticipated the Hormuz vulnerability and built alternative port capacity at Duqm, Salalah, and Sohar — but whether those bypasses can absorb disruption at scale remains unanswered. The Gulf states are not passive staging grounds for American strategy. They are actors with acute exposure to the consequences of a fire they did not start and cannot extinguish.
BRICS: one voice, zero presence — zero voice, ships in the Strait
This comparison deserves far more honest scrutiny than it receives. NATO has communiqués, integrated command, and a unified public posture. It has contributed nothing to the military balance in the Gulf. BRICS issued no joint statement on a war against one of its own full members — yet Indian tankers transit Hormuz, China imports Iranian crude, Russia provides satellite intelligence to Tehran, and Iran’s list of “friendly countries” reads like a BRICS attendance register.
The standard critique — that BRICS “failed” because it issued no declaration — applies Western institutional logic to a structure that was never designed to operate that way. BRICS functions as a network of distributed national interests, not a collective security architecture. Each member maintains deniability, avoids sanctions exposure, and protects its own priorities. The aggregate effect is the gradual erosion of the Western blockade — without a single press conference. NATO speaks with one voice and is absent from the theatre. BRICS says nothing and has ships in the water. The question of which of the two is actually functioning deserves a more honest answer than it currently gets.
What the corridor cannot price in
The IMEC corridor was conceived as an architecture of order: routes mapped, risks priced, dependencies managed. It assumes that geography can be stabilised long enough for infrastructure to harden into power. The war has exposed the fragility of that assumption. The Strait of Hormuz remains a lever no blueprint can neutralise; regional actors are not variables to be optimised but independent centres of decision. What is taking shape is not a system under construction, but a field of competing timelines — investment horizons colliding with military escalation, logistics with retaliation cycles, design with improvisation. In that environment, coordination becomes episodic, alignment transactional, and control — if it exists at all — temporary and local.
Control is not being exercised. It is being improvised, moment by moment. And what cannot be controlled cannot be engineered — only survived.