The corridor can still operate, but the key question is whether it can do so at a cost and with reliability that justifies significant public and private investment.
The confrontation involving the US and Iran has shown how quickly freight rates, war-risk insurance premiums, and routing choices can change in response to geopolitical shocks, emphasising the importance of assessing connectivity projects against crisis scenarios rather than only peacetime forecasts.
In contrast, geographically contiguous overland routes that pass through areas where state capacity and security coordination are improving can reduce modal friction and, by internalising security provision, stabilise insurance profiles and shorten disruption chains.
It is a structural claim that in contested environments, fewer transfer points and fewer chokepoint dependencies generally reduce systemic risk.
Europe should therefore ask a sharper question than whether IMEC is politically attractive.
Which approach offers greater resilience per euro: a multi-stage maritime corridor that implicitly requires continuous naval protection and tends to attract higher geopolitical insurance premiums during crises, or an integrated land-based network that combines transport with existing and expandable energy infrastructure and reduces the number of points where disruption can cascade?
Related
Türkiye as an energy centre
Europe’s connectivity debate cannot be separated from Europe’s energy security architecture.
Türkiye’s official international energy strategy sets an explicit objective, moving beyond a passive transit role toward becoming a regional energy trade centre through route diversification, infrastructure integration and resource aggregation.
Geography underpins this ambition, placing Türkiye adjacent to major hydrocarbon basins and enabling supply convergence.
An energy centre differs from a transit corridor in its aggregation, storage capacity, and shock-management infrastructure.
Expanded LNG capacity, FSRUs, pipeline interconnections, domestic production, and the Southern Gas Corridor (TANAP, TAP) collectively enhance flexibility.
This matters for corridor choices because energy and logistics resilience increasingly converge.
Multi-stage maritime corridors that depend on sequential port handling and multiple transfer points are structurally more exposed to disruption chains.
A connectivity architecture anchored in an energy centre with aggregation, storage and flow-management capacity offers a different resilience profile, based on operational redundancy, rerouting options and crisis-time redistribution.
During episodes of acute regional tension, such as the recent escalation involving Iran, the capacity to aggregate supply, draw upon storage and redirect flows across interconnected pipelines and LNG infrastructure becomes not merely an economic advantage but a stabilising strategic asset.
Europe’s opportunity cost
The Greece-GCA approach has also sought to internationalise its corridor framing through conferences and defence-linked connectivity messaging.
Policy papers and public commentary around EU-India connectivity and IMEC increasingly highlight Greece’s ambition to elevate its strategic position as a link between India, the Middle East and mainland Europe.
In parallel, India-Greece defence-industrial cooperation has moved toward a five-year roadmap, raising the prospect of procurement and technology collaborations that sit outside NATO industrial and interoperability frameworks.
For Europe, EU-India cooperation on maritime domain awareness, hybrid threats and critical infrastructure protection can produce public goods.
The risk is that European strategic resources are captured by a politically exclusionary planning logic that duplicates capabilities rather than diversifying them, and that pushes Europe toward parallel security structures, complicating coordination on NATO’s southern flank.
Europe’s long-term resilience will be measured not by symbolic independence from existing routes, but by the capacity to deliver secure, cost-efficient and resilient supply chains and energy systems.
In a region where chokepoints remain vulnerable and multi-modal designs embed cost and risk, Europe has an incentive to prioritise options that minimise friction and maximise redundancy.
Even if the current escalation subsides, the structural lesson for European planners endures: resilience depends less on symbolic rerouting and more on minimising systemic fragility.
That is why the core issue is not whether Türkiye should be included for diplomatic reasons.
The question is whether Europe can pursue long-term connectivity while discounting energy centres and geographic continuity that provide operational depth.