'Delhi’s strategic dilemma will outlast the war. Relationships have memory': Mohammed Soliman

Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute (MEI), argues that the old ‘Middle East’ lens no longer explains the region. The Iran war has underscored that point. Neelam Raaj speaks to Soliman about his new book, ‘West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East’, and how the region is both shaping Asia and being reshaped by itYour title uses ‘West Asia’, a term more common in India than in the West. Was this a deliberate reframing — and why does India belong in it?The Middle East encodes a worldview in which Europe is the center and everything else is defined by its distance from it. If you begin your strategic analysis from that assumption, you will consistently misread the region because you are looking at it from the wrong direction. ‘West Asia’ urges that the region is being pulled by Asian economic gravity rather than the Atlantic. India belongs to West Asia as a geographic and economic fact. The Indian Ocean connects the Arabian Peninsula to the Indian subcontinent in ways that make any framework excluding India conceptually incomplete. India’s trade with the UAE and Saudi Arabia is approaching what it does with the entire European Union. Over eight million Indians live and work across the Gulf. The India-UAE CEPA and IMEC are the institutional skeleton of a new geoeconomic order that brings the Middle East and South Asia together. West Asia captures this reality.You cautioned against assuming Iran had been strategically weakened after Israel’s actions post–Oct 7. Do recent events validate that warning?They do, and I wish they didn’t. Degrading Iran’s proxies and striking its air defences is not the same thing as dismantling its strategic capacity. Tehran spent 40 years building asymmetric capabilities, embedding itself across multiple theatres, and developing a ballistic missile arsenal designed specifically to overwhelm layered regional air defence. What strikes can do is impose material costs. What they cannot do is resolve the underlying question of Iranian power. The habit of declaring adversaries defeated before the next move has been played is one of the most durable sources of strategic failure in this region.You hoped for a wiser American strategy. That hasn’t materialised with this war on Iran, has it?The book argues for offshore balancing, which uses American power to maintain a favourable regional balance while redirecting its finite strategic resources toward the Indo-Pacific, where the decisive competition of this century is actually being waged. What we are watching is a direct military confrontation with Iran, carrying precisely the escalation risks the West Asia framework was designed to avoid.It also exposes America’s scale problem with munitions. Moving a THAAD battery from Korea is a reactive symptom of a stockpile crisis that this war has dramatically accelerated. And if the outcome is an entrenched regime in Tehran, one that has internationalised the war, weaponised the global economy, and ultimately survived, the uncomfortable reality is that China benefits. There is no other honest way to read it.How will this war change the US relationship with the Gulf states?There will be sharper questions about defence guarantees, technology access, and how far Washington is genuinely willing to go in co-piloting with Gulf allies rather than simply expecting their support. But the core reality hasn’t changed: there is no credible alternative to the US as the region’s ultimate security provider. Russia exposed its limits — and went further, providing targeting coordinates to Iran, a fact Gulf capitals have not missed. China benefits from the war’s disruption but has no interest in a security role that would pull it out of the Indo-Pacific.What did you make of India’s approach to Iran, Israel, and the US during this conflict?Delhi is attempting something genuinely difficult: holding three consequential relationships simultaneously, in the middle of a war, without sacrificing any of them. But the 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 of which create a strategic dilemma for Delhi that will outlast this war. And if it ends with an entrenched Tehran, Iran will not have missed India’s deepening alignment with Israel or its expanding Gulf partnerships. Relationships have memory.How did Shinzo Abe’s ‘Indo-Pacific’ speech in Delhi influence your West Asia framework?Abe’s 2007 address to the Indian Parliament is one of the most underread documents in modern strategic history. At the precise moment Washington was consuming itself in Iraq, Abe stood in Delhi and articulated a vision in which Asia, not the Atlantic, was the center of the coming order. What’s often missed is that he didn’t invent the phrase “confluence of two seas”. He dug deeper into older literary traditions, where the phrase originally described the meeting of the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, and deliberately repurposed it to describe a new geopolitical reality, one centered on the maritime space surrounding Japan vis-à-vis China, and one that brought India out of the confines of Cold War geography.‘West Asia’ makes the case that a similar reframing is overdue: seeing the Middle East not as a fragmented space, but as a system stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. And that India, which sat at the center of Abe’s original conception, is the natural bridge between these two geographies.