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Under the banner “Conservative Values, Pragmatic Solutions,” a panel of European conservatives sat down in Romania to answer a deceptively simple question: when the trade routes of the twenty-first century are drawn, will Europe be holding the pen or simply be living on the map that others draw? The panel titled “Capital, Corridors, and Cooperation: Europe, the United States, and the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor”, was hosted by the European Conservatives and Reformists, with ECR Secretary General Antonio Giordano and ECR vice-president George Simion among the organizers. Its subject was IMEC, the corridor meant to link India through the Gulf to the Mediterranean and on toward the United States.
Moderator Bill Cortese, of the Trieste Summit advisory board, set the tone by reaching back 2,300 years to Alexander opening the routes to India, to a Roman Empire that could pay its legions from the taxes of Indian trade, to the largest hoard of Roman coins ever found sitting not in Europe but in India. His point was not nostalgia. The pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the chaos in the Red Sea had each exposed the same fragility: supply chains with no redundancy. IMEC, he argued, is the West’s attempt to build resilience back in and the questions worth asking are who pays for it, and what the proper roles of states and the private sector should be.
The bluntest intervention came from Dan Dungaciu, University of Bucharest professor, head of the Black Sea University Foundation and prime vice-president of Romania’s AUR. He turned the famous Clinton-era slogan on its head. It is not the economy, he insisted, it is geopolitics, stupid. His warning was historical. China’s Belt and Road, he reminded the room, began life as an economic project and became, over a decade, a Chinese geopolitical one. IMEC will be read by rivals through exactly that lens, so Europe had better stop pretending it is merely about freight and accept that it is in a geopolitical competition aimed squarely at Belt and Road. His sharpest line cut at European pretensions: Europe “is not a nation,” he said, but “a geography in terms of security.” Alongside America, China and Russia, Europe is a metaphor. From this followed his refrain, echoed by others all afternoon: without the United States, these projects are nothing. He was sober about Romania’s own constraints (the Black Sea half-closed by the 1936 Montreux Convention, US vessels limited to 21 days) and described the Three Seas Initiative as a civilizational project that still cannot move without Washington. As a politician, he was optimistic. As a professor of international relations, not necessarily.
Where Dungaciu diagnosed, Antonio Giordano, Italian MP and the ECR’s Secretary General, built. He borrowed his central image from the birth of the internet: a network designed so that if one line breaks, the signal simply routes around it. That, he argued, is the real infrastructural purpose of IMEC: a web of connections resilient enough that no single chokepoint, no Hormuz and no Suez, can strangle global trade again. “If you do not take care of a problem,” he warned, “the problem will take care of you.” IMEC is already real, he argued, because Saudi Arabia has committed to its Vision 2030 build-out. Italy is the natural platform in the middle of the Mediterranean. Trieste, the northernmost Mediterranean port, is the fastest gateway into central and eastern Europe, and Rome has already named a special envoy for the corridor. His ambition was frankly stated: to make the Mediterranean great again, opening to North Africa and threading a high-speed link from India to southern Europe and onward to the United States. On Brussels he was blunt: too much regulation, too many people avoiding decisions, too few proposing anything. But he insisted Europe can still work when it chooses to.
The American thread ran through every contribution. Małgorzata Samojedny, of Warsaw’s Opportunity Institute, gave the readout from the recent Three Seas summit in Dubrovnik, where US Energy Secretary Chris Wright appeared, and recalled how Donald Trump’s 2017 Warsaw summit had helped kickstart regional infrastructure funding. She mapped the region’s three gateways, the Black Sea middle corridor, the Baltic, and IMEC via the Adriatic, arguing the right ports could cut days off the journey to central Europe.
But Dungaciu named the discomfort no one else quite did. IMEC was conceived under the Biden administration, when the prevailing vision was NATO and EU enlargement. The current US security posture reads very differently, with America drawing hard assets back from Europe. The implication hung in the air: this is an American-anchored project at the very moment its American anchor is shifting.
Croatia’s Nikola Grmoja, of Most, spoke on his country’s statehood day about sovereignty hard-won in war, and cast the Adriatic not as Europe’s edge but as one of its gateways: the meeting point of the Three Seas and IMEC.
Poland’s Mateusz Berger drew the COVID lesson plainly: a Europe that could not manufacture even face masks learned the true price of dependence.
And Sweden’s Jacob Hagnell offered the panel’s dissenting caution: deepening integration with a billion-strong India risks undercutting European workers and pushing European engineers and youth out of their own labor market.
Taken together, the panel’s consensus: Europe can still turn its geography into opportunity and shape the corridors of the future.