Gedaliah Afterman and N. Janardhan
Amid the debate surrounding the changing global landscape and future of diplomacy in a Covid- and post-Covid world, a 2021 announcement by the United States, United Arab Emirates, India, and Israel offers a new template. This new grouping is expected to hold their first in-person meeting of foreign ministers in March 2022, which will focus on collaborating in technology and infrastructure projects, enhancing political and economic cooperation, and maritime security issues.
While recent more tentative diplomatic templates in the region like the UAE’s and Saudi recalibration bids with Qatar, Turkey and Iran, are focused on tension management, the most promising is the ‘partnership for the future’ also referred to as the ‘new quad’. However, this nomenclature is misleading. This US-UAE-India-Israel bloc, unlike the original quad is rooted in increasing regional cooperation, rather than competition with China.
The visit of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to Abu Dhabi and the impending visit of Indian Premier Narendra Modi may not have been deliberately scripted but they are furthering the collective interests of this new grouping. Further, they hold the promise of opening potentially new opportunities with their common strategic partners, especially in Asia.
While the United States is the chief unifier in the club, the three others in this group are striving ‘middle powers’. India’s ‘strategic’ ambition gels well with that of ‘startup’ Israel and ‘scale-up’ UAE. They are capable of forging their own trilateral partnerships and expanding them into other ‘minilateral’ or ‘plurilateral’ mechanisms, with their partners, especially Japan and South Korea, among others.
Happy 73rd Republic Day to my great friend Prime Minister @NarendraModi and the wonderful people of India.
Warm greetings to you all on this special day!
May India be blessed with continued peace and prosperity.
🇮🇱 ❤️ 🇮🇳 pic.twitter.com/ZQMeGodRHp— Naftali Bennett בנט (@naftalibennett) January 26, 2022
This stems from several factors. First, power in the 21st century is no longer determined by military prowess alone, but through technology, connectivity and trade components. Second, new relations are more partnerships and coalitions than alliances, driven by strategic autonomy. Lastly, such partnerships are rooted in economic pragmatism rather than political ideology.
With bilateralism inching towards a saturation point and multilateralism yielding limited results, the idea of minilateralism or plurilateralism has gained traction in recent years. It is a narrower – and usually informal and adaptable – initiative to address specific problems with fewer countries sharing the same interest; they are in essence, ‘task-oriented’.
It is in this spirit that a UAE-Israel-India trilateral agreement was signed in May 2021 with an Israeli company producing an innovative water-free robotic solar cleaning technology in India for a project in the UAE. With the three governments confident of replicating such collaboration in other sectors, the innovation and international business potential of the UAE-Israel-India trilateral is pegged at $110 billion by 2030.
Other trilateral partnerships, which include a combination of these countries, continue to develop re-enforcing cooperation between the core grouping. For example, the UAE, India and France are joining hands to spearhead the International Solar Alliance and are conducting joint naval exercises. The UAE and India are also collaborating to set up an ICT centre in Ethiopia, as are the ‘UAE and Israel Uniting with Africa’.
Within the grouping, specific bilateral mechanisms could bolster plurilateral cooperation. The UAE and India are likely to sign the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) in 2022, which foresees deals and investments in a range of sectors – construction, clean energy, logistics, hospitality, services, tourism, healthcare, cybersecurity, education, space, advanced technologies, and food security. CEPA is expected to double bilateral trade to about $120 billion in five years.
Israel’s strategic cooperation with India especially around technology, innovation, education, and health is meanwhile pushing ahead following Modi’s visit to Israel in 2017 – the first by an Indian prime minister – and by Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar in 2021.
This coincides with the potential for further UAE-Israel cooperation as the two nations have recently begun talks to establish a free trade agreement. After normalizing diplomatic relations in 2020, bilateral trade crossed $700 million in 2021, a significant uptick from the $125 million in 2020. UAE Minister of Economy Abdulla bin Touq Al-Marr said that he was hopeful of $1 trillion of economic activity over the next decade with Israel. A step towards facilitating this was the launching of free trade agreement talks in late 2021.
The synergies of these middle power groupings could provide a base for a modular arrangement by adding or replacing one with another country based on both strategic and economic cooperation. To facilitate this expansion, diplomatic and defense meetings could be broadened to economic agencies, as well as high-level business roundtables.
The world has been on a geostrategic reset mode over the last two decades. It is currently in between orders, with foreign policies drifting and unravelling. These trends have been accelerating over the past decade, and particularly over the past few years with the acceleration of superpower competition.
The changing geostrategic landscape globally and in the Middle East provides new opportunities for cooperation between middle powers in Asia and the Middle East. The example set by the UAE, India and Israel paves a promising path forward.
(Dr Gedaliah Afterman is the head of the Asia Policy Programme at the Abba Eban Institute for International Diplomacy at Reichman University (IDC Herzliya), Israel, and Dr N. Janardhan is Senior Research Fellow, Gulf-Asia Programme, Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, Abu Dhabi. The article first appeared in The Jerusalem Post and is being republished with the permission of the authors)
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