Is Iraq the Missing Piece in India’s India-Middle East Economic Corridor Strategy? by Michael Rubin

Very recommendable! India, a rising superpower!

Reminder: Indians refer to the Middle East as West Asia! Geography is destiny!

"At the G20 Summit in New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Joe Biden, and other world leaders unveiled the India-Middle East Economic Corridor (IMEEC), a trade highway to bring Indian goods by sea to the United Arab Emirates, overland to the Mediterranean, and then onward to Europe. ...

What is missing in India’s approach, however, is a third way that increases India’s trade security. After all, the trans-Iran North-South corridor need not be the only alternative to IMEEC. In many ways, Iraq could be a natural partner for India to augment its trade security beyond IMEEC and Iran.

Iraq is no stranger to India. Almost three crore Indians supported the British Army in Iraq during World War I, most in non-combatant roles, but others in more direct military roles. For years, Indian laborers and expatriates helped the Iraqi railways run. The numbers of Indian officers in Iraq declined from two thousands to just a few dozen after the British mandate ended, but relations rebounded upon India’s independence.

In 1952, India and Iraq signed a “Treaty of Perpetual Peace and Friendship” and, despite Iraq’s neutrality in the 1965 war and its more overt support for Pakistan six years later, India and Iraq developed cordial military ties, leading to the Indian Air Force training Iraqi MiG-21 pilots, and the Indian Navy supporting a Naval Academy in Basra. Prior to the 1991 Gulf War, the Indian presence in Iraq soared to more than 80,000. It plummeted under sanctions but, after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, began to rebound. US contractors recruited thousands more to provide various services to military bases.

In May 2010, the number of Indian workers increased greatly in the Iraqi Kurdistan region after New Delhi lifted its travel advisory. Today, Indians are spread across the country. More than 5,000 Indians work at the Karbala Refinery Project, and another 25,000 have worked from Basra in the south to Baghdad in the centre, to the Iraqi Kurdish capital Erbil in the north. Ministry of External Affairs statistics today count only 18,000, but that is more than four times the number of Indians in Iran and more than ten times the number in Turkey, both far larger countries.

India-Iraq trade has more than doubled since 2020 to more than Rs 250,000 crore ($30 billion), largely on the back of Iraqi oil exports but also due to other opportunities. Indian companies, for example, have taken the lead on the Basra sewage system, and on compressors to enable the Beiji refinery to operate. Following its success with Beiji, Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd. has moved to help Sulaymani, the second-largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan, upgrade its own power generation. ..."

Is Iraq the Missing Piece in India’s Corridor Strategy? | American Enterprise Institute - AEI

Middle East or West Asia?

They say geography and demography is destiny!

Is Europe part of West Asia or Eurasia? It depends on your standpoint or viewpoint.

If one considers the current oceans and population as the most defining criteria, the answer seems easier: There are the Americas, Africa, and Asia and a land bridge between Africa and Asia.

Geography and geopolitics? How do they mix!

As a European, I was very used to accept Middle East as the correct geographic designation. I have to admit, I was not really aware of the term West Asia as regards to the Middle East.

It was the Indian journalist Palki Sharma, who constantly refers to the Middle East as West Asia in her reporting that triggered my curiosity.

Wasp populations that recognize faces cooperate more, and may be smarter than wasp populations that are not capable of face recognition

Amazing stuff! Apparently, these distinguishing phenomena developed/evolved only a few hundred miles apart. 

In biological evolution, geography ca be destiny.

"... Furthermore, genomic sequencing revealed that populations of wasps that recognized each other – and cooperated more – showed recent adaptations (positive selection) in areas of the genome associated with cognitive abilities such as learning, memory and vision. ...
Observing nesting behaviors in the spring when females established nests, ...  found that southern queens mostly remained solitary and established their own nests, but in the north, three or four females would inhabit a nest, with one taking over the role of queen and laying most of the eggs, and the others operating more like workers, engaged more in foraging.

While individuals from northern and southern populations are of the same species, they look very different. Southern paper wasps tend to have nearly identical red color patterns on their faces. The northern ones have distinctive black and yellow patterns. ...
Wasps from the northern population were aggressive to strangers, but much less so to the wasp they had previously met two days earlier. “Individuals in the southern population treat everyone the same,”  ..."

From the highlights and abstract:

"Highlights

• Cooperation and signal diversity covary across the geographic range of a paper wasp

• The ability to recognize individuals is related to cooperation and signal diversity

• Individual recognition stabilizes social groups

• Selection on social cognition genes is stronger in more cooperative populations

Summary

The ability to recognize others is a frequent assumption of models of the evolution of cooperation. At the same time, cooperative behavior has been proposed as a selective agent favoring the evolution of individual recognition abilities. Although theory predicts that recognition and cooperation may co-evolve, data linking recognition abilities and cooperative behavior with evidence of selection are elusive. Here, we provide evidence of a selective link between individual recognition and cooperation in the paper wasp Polistes fuscatus through a combination of clinal, common garden, and population genomics analyses. We identified latitudinal clines in both rates of cooperative nesting and color pattern diversity, consistent with a selective link between recognition and cooperation. In behavioral experiments, we replicated previous results demonstrating individual recognition in cooperative and phenotypically diverse P. fuscatus from New York. In contrast, wasps from a less cooperative and phenotypically uniform Louisiana population showed no evidence of individual recognition. In a common garden experiment, groups of wasps from northern populations formed more stable and individually biased associations, indicating that recognition facilitates group stability. The strength of recent positive selection on cognition-associated loci likely to mediate individual recognition is substantially greater in northern compared with southern P. fuscatus populations. Collectively, these data suggest that individual recognition and cooperative nesting behavior have co-evolved in P. fuscatus because recognition helps stabilize social groups. This work provides evidence of a specific cognitive phenotype under selection because of social interactions, supporting the idea that social behavior can be a key driver of cognitive evolution."

Wasps that recognize faces cooperate more, and may be smarter | Cornell Chronicle Social interactions may well make animals smarter and more diverse, a new study of paper wasps suggests.

Evidence for a selective link between cooperation and individual recognition (no public access)

Graphical abstract

Paper wasps from a northern population in Ithaca have diverse black and yellow color patterns on their faces and are able to recognize individuals.

Paper wasps from a southern population in Louisiana have reddish and more uniform faces and behave indiscriminately towards each other.