UAE, India and Israel are leading the way

A mid the debate surrounding the changing global landscape and future of diplomacy in a Covid- and post-Covid world, a 2021 announcement by the United States, UAE, India, and Israel offers a new template.

This new grouping is expected to hold their first in-person meeting of foreign ministers in March 2022, which will focus on collaborating in technology and infrastructure projects, enhancing political and economic cooperation, and maritime security issues.

While recent more tentative diplomatic templates in the region like the UAE’s and Saudi recalibration bids with Qatar, Turkey and Iran, are focused on tension management, the most promising is the ‘partnership for the future’ also referred to as the ‘new quad’. However, this nomenclature is misleading.

This US-UAE-India-Israel bloc, unlike the original quad is rooted in increasing regional cooperation, rather than competition with China.

The visit of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to Abu Dhabi and the impending visit of Indian Premier Narendra Modi may not have been deliberately scripted but they are furthering the collective interests of this new grouping. Further, they hold the promise of opening potentially new opportunities with their common strategic partners, especially in Asia.

While the United States is the chief unifier in the club, the three others in this group are striving ‘middle powers’. India’s ‘strategic’ ambition gels well with that of ‘startup’ Israel and ‘scale-up’ UAE. They are capable of forging their own trilateral partnerships and expanding them into other ‘minilateral’ or ‘plurilateral’ mechanisms, with their partners, especially Japan and South Korea, among others.

This stems from several factors. First, power in the 21st century is no longer determined by military prowess alone, but through technology, connectivity and trade components. Second, new relations are more partnerships and coalitions than alliances, driven by strategic autonomy. Lastly, such partnerships are rooted in economic pragmatism rather than political ideology.

With bilateralism inching towards a saturation point and multilateralism yielding limited results, the idea of minilateralism or plurilateralism has gained traction in recent years. It is a narrower — and usually informal and adaptable — initiative to address specific problems with fewer countries sharing the same interest; they are in essence, ‘task-oriented’.

It is in this spirit that a UAE-Israel-India trilateral agreement was signed in May 2021 with an Israeli company producing an innovative water-free robotic solar cleaning technology in India for a project in the UAE. With the three governments confident of replicating such collaboration in other sectors, the innovation and international business potential of the UAE-Israel-India trilateral is pegged at $110 billion by 2030.

Other trilateral partnerships, which include a combination of these countries, continue to develop re-enforcing cooperation between the core grouping. For example, the UAE, India and France are joining hands to spearhead the International Solar Alliance and are conducting joint naval exercises. The UAE and India are also collaborating to set up an ICT centre in Ethiopia, as are the ‘UAE and Israel Uniting with Africa’.