West Asia: A New Strategic Lens for the Region and India's Role in It
Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute (MEI), presents a compelling argument that the traditional 'Middle East' perspective has become obsolete in understanding the region's dynamics. The recent Iran war has starkly highlighted this inadequacy. In an exclusive conversation with Neelam Raaj, Soliman delves into his groundbreaking book, 'West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East', exploring how the region is both influencing Asia and being transformed by it.
Reframing the Region: From Middle East to West Asia
The deliberate use of 'West Asia' in the title, a term more prevalent in India than the West, represents a conscious strategic reframing. Soliman explains that the term 'Middle East' inherently encodes a Eurocentric worldview, where Europe is the central reference point and all other regions are defined by their distance from it. This perspective, he argues, consistently leads to misreading the region because it starts from the wrong directional assumption.
'West Asia' fundamentally shifts this paradigm, emphasizing that the region is increasingly being pulled by Asian economic gravity rather than Atlantic influences. This reframing isn't merely semantic; it reflects a profound geopolitical reality where India's position becomes central rather than peripheral.
India's Inevitable Place in West Asia
Soliman asserts that India belongs to West Asia as both a geographic and economic fact. The Indian Ocean creates vital connections between the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent, making any regional framework that excludes India conceptually incomplete. The numbers substantiate this claim:
- India's trade with the UAE and Saudi Arabia is approaching parity with its trade with the entire European Union
- Over eight million Indians live and work across the Gulf region
- The India-UAE Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) represent the institutional foundation of a new geoeconomic order that integrates the Middle East and South Asia
West Asia captures this emerging reality far more accurately than the outdated Middle East framework, Soliman emphasizes.
Iran's Strategic Resilience and American Miscalculations
When questioned about whether recent events validate his warning against assuming Iran had been strategically weakened after Israel's actions post-October 7, Soliman responds affirmatively. "They do, and I wish they didn't," he states, highlighting the distinction between degrading Iran's proxies and striking its air defenses versus dismantling its fundamental strategic capacity.
Tehran has spent four decades developing asymmetric capabilities, embedding itself across multiple theaters, and building a ballistic missile arsenal specifically designed to overwhelm layered regional air defense systems. While military strikes can impose material costs, they cannot resolve the underlying question of Iranian power. Soliman identifies "the habit of declaring adversaries defeated before the next move has been played" as one of the most persistent sources of strategic failure in the region.
Flawed American Strategy and China's Advantage
Soliman's book advocates for offshore balancing—using American power to maintain a favorable regional balance while redirecting finite strategic resources toward the Indo-Pacific, where he believes the decisive competition of this century is actually occurring. Instead, what has materialized is a direct military confrontation with Iran, carrying precisely the escalation risks the West Asia framework was designed to avoid.
This conflict has exposed America's munitions scale problem, with moves like transferring a THAAD battery from Korea revealing reactive symptoms of a stockpile crisis that the war has dramatically accelerated. Most significantly, Soliman argues that if the outcome is an entrenched regime in Tehran that has internationalized the war, weaponized the global economy, and ultimately survived, China emerges as the primary beneficiary. There is no honest alternative interpretation, he contends.
Shifting Gulf Relationships and India's Delicate Balancing Act
The war will inevitably prompt sharper questions from Gulf states about defense guarantees, technology access, and the extent to which Washington is genuinely willing to co-pilot with Gulf allies rather than simply expecting their support. However, Soliman notes that the core reality remains unchanged: there is no credible alternative to the US as the region's ultimate security provider. Russia has exposed its limitations, even providing targeting coordinates to Iran—a fact Gulf capitals have not overlooked. While China benefits from the war's disruption, it has no interest in assuming a security role that would pull it away from the Indo-Pacific.
Regarding India's approach to Iran, Israel, and the US during this conflict, Soliman observes that Delhi is attempting something genuinely difficult: maintaining three consequential relationships simultaneously during wartime without sacrificing any of them. However, this balance is becoming structurally harder to sustain. The war is producing outcomes that advantage China, distract the US from the Indo-Pacific, and deliver energy shocks to Asian economies—all creating a strategic dilemma for Delhi that will outlast the current conflict. If the war ends with an entrenched Tehran, Iran will not have forgotten India's deepening alignment with Israel or its expanding Gulf partnerships. "Relationships have memory," Soliman reminds us.
Abe's Vision and the West Asia Framework
Soliman reveals how Shinzo Abe's 2007 'Indo-Pacific' speech in Delhi significantly influenced his West Asia framework. He describes Abe's address to the Indian Parliament as "one of the most underread documents in modern strategic history." At the precise moment Washington was consumed with Iraq, Abe stood in Delhi and articulated a vision where Asia, not the Atlantic, was the center of the coming order.
What's often overlooked, Soliman notes, is that Abe didn't invent the phrase "confluence of two seas." He delved deeper into older literary traditions where the phrase originally described the meeting of the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, deliberately repurposing it to describe a new geopolitical reality centered on the maritime space surrounding Japan vis-à-vis China—a reality that liberated India from Cold War geographical confines.
'West Asia' makes the case that a similar reframing is overdue: seeing the Middle East not as a fragmented space, but as a cohesive system stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. And India, which sat at the center of Abe's original conception, emerges as the natural bridge between these two geographies in this new strategic understanding.
