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Harsh V. Pant and Kaush Arha, Eds., A Global Vision of Free and Open Spaces: Creating Connectivity in the Modern World, August 2025, Observer Research Foundation.
Globalisation as we know it—characterised by chasing the lowest costs of production, including in rival countries’ territory—is at an end. Global commerce and trade, however, is not. Indeed, global engagement and interconnectedness continue to be the bedrock of peace and prosperity in the world and will flourish with an increasingly high premium on trusted connectivity among free and open regions of the world. In large measure, the future global economic and security architecture will be shaped by diverse and resilient trusted interrelationships between the free and open Indo-Pacific and Mediterranean-Atlantic (Med-Atlantic) regions.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, now deceased, articulated a vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific region that is not beholden to any coercive sphere of influence. One of the virtues of the ‘free and open’ notion is its adaptability to regional characteristics. Most populations aspire to live in free and open societies and to achieve prosperity from free and open markets. Some nations and regions may choose to articulate the concept of ‘free and open’ as a normative state of being, while others may assign greater weight to being free of coercion, by a malign neighbour, to seek an open path forward.
Trusted connectivity across digital or physical infrastructures is built on two pillars. It calls for industry-best standards in execution, and more importantly, the governance by laws and institutions which accord, and are accountable for, individual dignity and freedom.[1] Countries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea legally and institutionally fall substantially short on the second tenet. Nations adhering to both tenets of trusted connectivity will increasingly devise procedures and rules to prioritise trusted commercial and security engagements among the like-minded.
A framework for free and open connectivity is not a one-size-fits-all; rather, it derives its strength and resilience organically, built atop shared regional characteristics and perspectives that continue to evolve. This pioneering volume brings together varied viewpoints—from Japan and Nigeria to Lithuania and India—on regional applications of the ‘free and open’ framework. One of the common themes that thread the essays is the primacy of sovereignty, unencumbered by the pressures of influence-peddling by regional states that seek to impose their heft and power.
In recent years, historical corridors where commercial and cultural exchanges traversed for centuries are witnessing a reinvigoration, giving new energy to the world’s free and open spaces. The Indo-Mediterranean maritime pathways, for example—connecting key points across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe—are seeing renewed attention. During the reign of the Roman Empire, nearly one-third of its annual revenue was derived from customs levies on its trade with India. Outside of the territory of the erstwhile empire, the highest concentrations of Roman coins can be found in the Indian subcontinent—a testament to the once-flourishing and deep-rooted interconnectedness between them. India, through much of the first two millennia, accounted for anywhere between a quarter and one-third of global wealth—that wealth propelled the Indo-Mediterranean trade. William Dalrymple’s 2024 book, The Golden Road, offers an account of the historical Indo-Roman and Indo-pan-Asian commerce that began somewhere in the 2nd century BCE.[2]
India—the world’s fastest-growing large economy aiming to be the third largest economy by 2030—is once again well positioned to propel trade with West Asia and Europe and usher in what some call a “new Golden Road”.[3] In 2023, during India’s presidency of the G20, the United States, European Union, Italy, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and India launched the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). The promising initiative plans to enhance trade and transit connectivity across the Middle East beyond the Suez Canal by building complementary road and rail networks across the Gulf peninsula. It will likely incentivise Iraq and Türkiye to do the same along the Euphrates watershed to the Mediterranean. IMEC was made possible by the diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and the UAE through the Abraham Accords, which may include Saudi Arabia in the near future, potentially further strengthening the commercial linkages between the Gulf and Mediterranean regions. A fully realised thoroughfare for Indo-Mediterranean commerce may present an extraordinary opportunity for economic growth and prosperity for the people of Jordan, Israel, and Palestine, connected as they are by shared histories and common aspirations.
Poland also represents the largest and fastest-growing economy in Europe. Poland shares a fundamental interest with other Central and European nations to improve north-south connectivity between the Baltic and the Adriatic Seas, in effect resurrecting the Amber Road where the Vikings and the Hanseatic League plied through the Middle Ages.[4] The economic imperative of modernising the physical and digital infrastructures between the two seas is further reinforced by the security demands for military mobilisation along the NATO front from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
The Adriatic Sea could play a pivotal role in linking the resurgence of the Indo-Mediterranean with the Central-Eastern Europe region to achieve an extraordinary cumulative impact. Two other variables may amplify the impact further. First, the increasing convergence among the Baltic and Arctic commercial and security interests across the Free North—spanning Finland across Iceland and Greenland to North America.[5] Second, a Central Asia–Caucasus–European link analogous to IMEC that resuscitates the historical commercial and cultural connections across the Eurasian continent that took root for much of the second millennium.[6] The latter puts a premium on ensuring a free and open Black Sea for connecting Europe with the Caucasus and across the Caspian Sea to Central Asia.
The convergence of a revitalised Indo-Mediterranean with a modernised manifestation of the Amber Road from Baltic to the Adriatic, and a reinforced trans-Caspian link from Central Asia to Caucasus to Europe constitute the main arteries that will integrate the free and open spaces of the Indo-Pacific with those of the Med-Atlantic.
Closer connections between the free and open spaces of the Indo-Pacific and the Med-Atlantic regions from the Pacific Islands to the Caribbean are positioned to shape the future. Three important geopolitical projects can bring this about: the Quad, the IMEC, and the New Atlantic Charter. It is in the interest of the United States to serve as the driving force behind all three developments to bolster the inter-regional linkages and catalyse this transformation.
The Quad is likely to evolve from an informal partnership to an institutional apparatus to preserve and promote a free and open Indo-Pacific. The group is motivated by a strong collective interest in a region that is free and open. The Quad is on a trajectory of becoming an enduring institution in the emerging “new old world”. This partnership has already borne fruit, including in the collective response to the COVID-19 epidemic; better coordination in engaging the ASEAN and the Pacific Island nations; and in security and development across the Indian Ocean. The Quad’s primacy in US foreign policy transcends political parties and administrations. The first foreign policy act of the new Trump administration was a meeting of the Quad foreign ministers, chaired by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Quad is diligently engaging with like-minded states in the Quad-Plus club—including countries like Indonesia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
The IMEC eight—the European Union, France, Germany, India, Italy, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States—in coordination with Egypt, Israel, and Türkiye are set to reaffirm the Indo-Mediterranean as the primary economic and security corridor linking the free and open spaces of Asia and Europe. It is in the economic and security interest of each individual IMEC signatory to invest in the optimal success of the initiative. Additionally, IMEC offers an extraordinary opportunity for African nations to integrate their rising economies in one of the world’s most dynamic and fast-growing economic thoroughfares. IMEC offers a timely boost for the African eastern seaboard to resurrect its historical maritime trade and commerce with India and the Gulf nations. As mentioned earlier, IMEC also offers ballast for the growth of Central-Eastern Europe and the resurgent Central Asia–Caucasus–Europe economic corridor. Importantly, IMEC makes it an imperative to ensure a free and open Black Sea to ensure the integrity of not just the East Mediterranean and the trans-Caspian trade but also future Ukraine reconstruction and reintegration with the world economy.
The resurgence of the Indo-Mediterranean region expands the campaign for free and open spaces from the Straits of Malacca to the Panama Canal. Italy’s economic and security future is directly intertwined with a free and open Indo-Mediterranean. Similarly, the vision closely complements India’s burgeoning trade with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Europe; its efforts to build rail and road networks to Vietnam; and its Indian Ocean and Africa strategies. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are also eager to increase their engagement with Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
A New Atlantic Charter is needed to complete the free and open pathways across the world’s oceans. In the closing days of Trump’s first presidency, his team at the National Security Council worked on an Atlantic Strategy to combat China’s malicious actions in the Atlantic region. Trump’s second term is likely to complete the unfinished task in reaffirming an Atlantic Strategy or Charter articulating an integrated, partnered approach to protecting free and open spaces from the High North to the transatlantic community to the littoral spaces in Africa and South America in the South Atlantic. Canada, along with Greenland, Iceland, and the Nordic and Baltic countries, is America’s indispensable partner in ensuring a free North. The “new” Monroe Doctrine is aimed not to make the Atlantic an American lake but to keep this part of the world free and open—and safe from interference from China, as well as Russia or Iran.
In the South Atlantic, Argentina’s Javier Milei is of the same view: that security, prosperity, and freedom can be secured by partnerships building free and open spaces. West Africa is also an important part of the new Atlantic community. The Africa-Atlantic pipeline project, for example, which will connect the economies of West and Central Africa to Europe, is an example of the expanding web of connectivity spreading over the Atlantic world. So is the Lobito Corridor, extending from the Angolan Coast into the mineral-rich hinterlands of Congo and Zambia.
Nations need a pragmatic and resilient paradigm to navigate a new era after the present one of unrestrained globalisation, in which the great powers are engaged in a thinly veiled Great Game. The great-power struggle fails to answer the question of what the rest of the world does while the great powers are competing.
The United States and its adversaries, China and Russia, do not have the power and influence to divide the world amongst themselves into their own, private playgrounds—no East and West, no neutral zones or Global Souths distinguished from Global Norths, no poles with nations circling great powers like little planets. Rather, the old geography, the traditional paths that linked Asia and Europe together and that linked the Eurasian landmass with the rest of the world, are reemerging. Neither Beijing nor Moscow nor even Washington, certainly not Tehran, has the power to stop them from growing back like mowed grass.
Indeed, the times they are a-changing. Instead of fighting the new old geography, free world nations such as the G7 group should nudge the world along; in the end, they too, would benefit from not lapsing into the brutal old practices of imperialism or isolationism trying to prevent or insulate themselves from a changing world. Enlightened and prudent leadership calls not for pushing the world under a Davos-fuelled progressive vision or the revisionist mercantilism peddled by China’s Belt and Road Initiative, but rather, a more restrained and rewarding exercise of going with the flow in buoying up organic regional aspirations and connections.
US and India policies ought to adopt, as an aim; not just supporting these initiatives but promoting actions and architecture bolstering them further.[7] Enhancing connectivity between free and open spaces adds more value to each region. It also creates more resilient, secure, and diverse supply chains and more opportunities for commerce.
Furthermore, linked spaces dramatically add to global stability. They decrease opportunities for destabilising powers to dominate and disrupt the global commons, create strategic choke points, or control critical sources of energy, materials, supply chains, and manufacturing capacity. Free and open connectivity is an alternative to regional competition, with security coming from the resistance to hardened alliances. Free and open common bonds that deliver shared prosperity provide breathing space for nations to determine their own future outside the weight of great-power competition.
Reaching across free and open spaces strengthens enlightened leadership that delivers enhanced opportunity for human flourishing, for people to deservedly benefit from the fruits of their liberty and the promise of security in their person and freedom of expression from present and future imperialists and globalists.
Unlike the unfulfilled promises of globalism and the Belt and Road, free and open spaces do not advertise and cannot deliver a new rules-based order, let alone a utopia free from war and want or tariffs. What they can do is to allow free sovereign nations more space to make their own decisions. The ones that choose good governance in service of their people will, without question, reap the greatest profit.
It is time to think of creative ways by which momentum and synergies can be achieved in the ongoing regional initiatives using new appropriate institutional frameworks. It calls for establishing enduring partnerships that transcend security cooperation and span the economic, political, and cultural spheres, from Argentina to South Korea. Importantly, there is an imperative to engage and integrate Africa and Latin America in burgeoning links between free and open spaces across the Indo-Pacific and Med-Atlantic.
It is time for the post-Second World War free world institutions to better represent Indo-Pacific equities and the primacy of interconnectedness of Indo-Pacific and Med-Atlantic free and open spaces. It should start with the G7 transitioning to G10—embracing India, Australia, and South Korea with immediate effect. A G10 better represents Indo-Pacific and Med-Atlantic equities with equal number of leading liberal democracies from each region—UK, France, Germany, and Italy from Med-Atlantic; Japan, India, Australia, and South Korea from Indo-Pacific; with US and Canada belonging to both regions.
A more concentrated, committed and nimble grouping of the world’s four key economic powerhouses—the US, EU, Japan, and India—is needed to ensure collective economic security interests. The collective economic security interests of this new G4—global economic security quad—necessitate resilient and trusted supply chains across the free and open spaces of the Indo-Pacific and Med-Atlantic.
The new G4 and G10 frameworks may engage in dual reinforcing lines of efforts to catalyse trusted interconnectedness across Indo-Pacific and Med-Atlantic free and open spaces. One is to promote new technologies—such as satellite and submarine-backed telecommunications—to drive digital economies across the free and open spaces. Second, to coordinate amongst their respective development finance institutions to leverage market capital for infrastructure investments bolstering trusted connectivity among free and open spaces. Third, to support forums for regional actors to articulate, deliberate, and manifest free and open spaces with local characteristics.
This volume offers an alternative way to conceptualise a strategy for like-minded nations to achieve freedom, prosperity, and security in the currently fractious modern world, eschewing the notion that geopolitics must be viewed through the lens of competing blocs, hard spheres of influence, and great-power competition. Here we argue for a more proactive approach that re-establishes historical pathways of commerce and connectivity, disrupted by the wars and rivalries of the 20th century, that can link free nations in these modern times.
This is a framework in common cause to preserve freedom of the seas, respect for territorial integrity including sovereign states’ jurisdiction over internal waters, territorial seas, contiguous zones, and exclusive economic zones, as well as safeguarding maritime infrastructure (including shipping ports, undersea cables and pipelines, oil and gas drilling and production operations) and maritime industries such as fisheries. In addition, free and open nations foster transparent investment and commerce respecting the rule of law and national sovereignty. Free and open may include all the “commons” including space, air, maritime surface and subsurface, land, and cyberspace. But as the contributors in this volume underline, certain free and open spaces are under attack; others are not truly free and open; and still others are underdeveloped.
It is our hope that this volume will allow for a more productive debate on the idea of a new strategy towards free and open spaces and its operationalisation.
Read the monograph here.
[1] Kaush Arha, “Trusted Connectivity: A Framework for a Free, Open, and Connected World,” Atlantic Council, August 31, 2021, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Trusted-connectivity-a-framework-for-a-free-open-and-connected-world.pdf.
[2] William Dalrymple, The Golden Road (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2024).
[3] Kaush Arha and Carlos Roa, “Trieste and the New Golden Road,” The National Interest, January 30, 2025, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/trieste-and-the-new-golden-road.
[4] C J Schüler, Along the Amber Route (Sandstone Press Ltd, 2020).
[5] Kaush Arha and Tom Dans, “How a ‘Free North’ Strategy Can Ensure Arctic and Baltic Security,” Atlantic Council, August 21, 2024, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/how-a-free-north-strategy-can-ensure-arctic-and-baltic-security/.
[6] Kaush Arha, George Scutaru, and Mamuka Tsereteli, “The Case for CACE,” The National Interest, February 18, 2025, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/silk-road-rivalries/the-case-for-cace.
[7] James J. Carafano and Kaush Arha, “Bridging Free and Open Spaces Serves U.S. Interests,” The National Interest, March 30, 2023, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/bridging-free-and-open-spaces-serves-us-interests-206361; James J. Carafano, “Free and Open Spaces: How Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Global Leaders Are Rewiring Geopolitics,” 19FortyFive, January 25, 2025, https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/01/free-and-open-spaces-how-elon-musk-donald-trump-and-global-leaders-are-rewiring-geopolitics/?_gl=1.
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Professor Harsh V. Pant is Vice President at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. He is a Professor of International Relations with King's India Institute at ...
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Dr. Kaush Arha is the President of the Free &: Open Indo-Pacific Forum and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue and ...
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