Given his focus on trade, it was only a matter of time before President Donald Trump discovered the romance of a great trade route. Having already given us “beautiful tariffs” and “perfect phone calls,” he now promises to build “one of the greatest trade routes in all of history”—stretching “from India to Israel to Italy and onward to the United States.” Standing beside India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House in February, Trump declared that America and India agreed to work together on this ambitious project, which would connect key allies through ports, railways, and—Trump being Trump—“many, many undersea cables.” Unlike his first term, when infrastructure projects were mostly aspirational, Trump now speaks with the confidence of a man who has already spent some money and is prepared to spend a lot more. But what exactly is he talking about?
The trade corridor in question is officially called the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), but it is better understood through a term that I helped introduce: the New Golden Road. Unlike China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which is billed as a revival of the old Silk Road, the New Golden Road is a revival of a much older network of trade and commerce. Long before modern geopolitics, this route linked India to the Mediterranean world, carrying goods, ideas, and cultural influence across an ancient superhighway of trade.
The Golden Road’s rebirth signals a shift in global economic alignment. But understanding the reasons behind this modern-day revival, along with the network’s historical roots, is crucial to appreciating why the Trump administration has embraced this initiative.
As recounted in William Dalrymple’s masterly tome by the same name—The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World—the Golden Road’s origins can be traced to the height of the Roman Empire, when maritime trade routes connected the Mediterranean world with the Indian subcontinent. The Romans had an insatiable appetite for luxury goods from India and beyond—spices, silks, ivory, gemstones, and more. India, in turn, absorbed vast amounts of Roman gold. So extensive was this exchange that Pliny the Elder famously lamented how India was “the sink of the world’s most precious metals… draining the Roman Empire of at least 55 million sesterces annually.” Indian ports like Muziris on the Malabar Coast flourished, receiving Roman gold coins in exchange for highly coveted goods. In fact, to this day, the Indian subcontinent holds the largest collection of ancient Roman gold coins found outside the empire.
It was Roman control over Egypt after the Battle of Actium in 31 BC that catalyzed this trade, allowing merchants to travel through the Red Sea. Numbers tell the difference: An overland caravan roundtrip from the Mediterranean to India and back again could take at least three years. With the monsoon winds, though, a ship could sail from the Red Sea to Gujarat in just forty days—provided one departed in early summer and caught the return winds by August. If that window was missed, the round trip could take nearly a year.
The Greek geographer Strabo noted a sixfold increase in ships sailing annually from the Red Sea to India compared to the Ptolemaic era: “Formerly not even [twenty] vessels ventured to navigate the Arabian Gulf, but now large fleets are despatched.” The importance of this trade to the Roman Empire’s economy cannot be overstated; at its peak, the Roman treasury derived up to a third of its revenues from the customs duties levied on Indo-Roman trade through the Red Sea. This was the first proto-global economy, with monsoon winds dictating shipping schedules, drawing India closer to the Mediterranean in both commerce and culture.
This splendid system of exchange survived the fall of Roman power in the fifth century and endured well into the Arab expansion of the seventh century, transforming the Golden Road into a network dominated by Islamic maritime commerce. This introduced a new layer of economic and cultural integration across the region, with monsoon-versed Arab traders acting as intermediaries. In the process, they transmitted Indian scientific knowledge, astronomical advancements, and mathematics to the Mediterranean world. In fact, what we today call “Arabic numerals”—the decimal digits of zero through nine used in the modern world—are, in fact, Indian in origin. As Dalrymple recounts:
Mathematicians initially overcame the problem of denoting empty spaces in decimal place-value notation by drawing a space-holder dot where there was a missing entry. This was probably first tried out around 3000 BCE in the temples of Sumer, not far from what would become Baghdad. The innovation was passed on to both the Babylonians and the Persians, but it was in India that the use of a circle gave rise to the present-day symbol 0 for zero. It was also the Indians who named that symbol sunya, meaning emptiness or the void, linking it to a fundamental concept in Indian Buddhist philosophy. From this word came the Arabic zifr and hence the English “cipher.”
By the Middle Ages, Europe’s demand for Eastern goods hadn’t diminished, but access to the Golden Road became increasingly difficult due to constant clashes between Cross and Crescent. The Venetians, those adept maritime traders, became the dominant European players in the Indo-Mediterranean economy by securing a monopoly over the spice trade through agreements with the Mamluks of Egypt. They profited immensely by acting as middlemen between Indian spice exporters and European markets.
But it was the Portuguese, led by Vasco da Gama, who shattered this lucrative monopoly in 1498 by discovering a direct sea route to India around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. The Portuguese presence in Goa and other Indian coastal cities marked the beginning of European colonial expansion and eventual domination of the Indian Ocean. This is perhaps human history’s irony: The innovations from the East—mathematics from India, gunpowder from China, and so forth—were refined by Europeans and then used by the West to expand into and dominate the East.
None exemplified this dynamic more than the British Empire. Where earlier empires had participated in Indian Ocean commerce as trading partners, it was the British who turned India into the beating heart of a global imperial system. Through the East India Company, Britain slowly dismantled the old trading networks that had sustained Indo-Mediterranean commerce for centuries. What was once an open system of mutual exchange was refashioned into a tightly controlled mechanism for extracting wealth and maintaining supremacy.
By the 19th century, the British grip over India was matched by its increasing dominance over global maritime logistics. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 was a watershed. The canal did not just shorten the sea route from Europe to India—it reoriented the geography of global power. What once took weeks around the Cape of Good Hope now took days. London was brought into almost telegraphic proximity to Bombay. As the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli quipped in 1847, “The East is a career.”
At this point, it should be noted that, while the Suez Canal is primarily remembered as a Franco-Egyptian engineering feat, it had a critical and often overlooked Central European dimension. The port city of Trieste, then the primary port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was a crucial Mediterranean node for eastward trade. Trieste’s role was championed by Pasquale Revoltella, a Venetian-born Triestine businessman and vice president of the Suez Canal Company, who was instrumental in financing and promoting the canal’s construction. Revoltella understood what many in Vienna and Paris only dimly grasped: that the canal would reorder global trade, restoring a direct east-west axis across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. He envisioned Trieste as the northern anchor of this revived maritime route—a Mediterranean gateway not just for Austrian commerce, but for Europe’s future in Asia.
Yet while the Suez Canal enabled the British Empire to consolidate control over its Indian possessions, it also created vulnerabilities. By the 20th century, Britain’s dependence on the Suez route for imperial logistics was a strategic liability—one laid bare in 1956 during the Suez Crisis.
When Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain, France, and Israel launched a military intervention to seize it back. The operation was militarily successful but geopolitically disastrous. Facing economic pressure and diplomatic opposition from both the United States and the Soviet Union, Prime Minister Anthony Eden was forced into an abrupt withdrawal. The message was clear: Britain could no longer act unilaterally, and its imperial days were over. The canal, once a symbol of imperial mastery over the Golden Road, became the site of imperial unraveling. Trieste, too, faded into strategic obscurity—its dreams of serving as a gateway between Europe and Asia were buried as its economic hinterland was locked behind the Iron Curtain.
In this sense, the 1956 crisis was more than a diplomatic debacle; it was the final punctuation mark on the old Golden Road. The corridor that once conveyed Roman gold to Indian ports met an inglorious end.
Or has it?
India, in a broad historical sense, is back. Its ascent on the global economic stage is noteworthy. In just over three decades since its economic liberalization in 1991, India’s GDP had expanded from roughly $270 billion to more than $3.7 trillion by 2022, propelling it to the rank of the fifth-largest economy worldwide. Through fits and starts, and much painful development, the country has evolved from a closed, state-led economy into one of the world’s more dynamic growth engines. With favorable demographics, a booming services sector, and a steadily maturing manufacturing base, India is now projected to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2030, with GDP expected to reach $7.3 trillion.
As India reasserts itself as a civilizational and commercial force, it is once again becoming the anchor of an Indo-Mediterranean trade revival. This took formal shape in 2023 with the unveiling of the IMEC during the G20 Summit. This modern corridor, backed by eight founding signatories (India, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Italy, France, Germany, the European Union, and the United States), is de facto a revival of the Golden Road. It is, in effect, the New Golden Road. And far from being just a trade network, it is also the blueprint for a new geoeconomic alignment.
Everyone has a stake in this strategic opportunity, albeit for different reasons.
For India, the New Golden Road offers both a gateway to deeper integration into global value chains and a geopolitical lever to balance China’s growing assertiveness. Modi has cast the initiative in grand historical terms, declaring it “the basis of world trade for hundreds of years to come,” and reminding audiences that it began “on Indian soil.”
For the Gulf states, the corridor served as a hedge—allowing them to maintain equilibrium between Washington and Beijing while reinforcing their role as indispensable players in a multipolar world. It also aligns with their broader push to diversify energy exports and invest in East–West infrastructure.
For Europe, the initiative promises a boost to economic security, rewiring supply chains away from China and toward India, opening new markets, and providing a long-sought improved energy bridge to the Gulf.
For Israel, the New Golden Road is the culmination of what began with the signing of the Abraham Accords. It is the country’s one chance to anchor its long-term security in economic integration rather than military dominance. By becoming a key junction in the corridor, Israel gains both strategic relevance and commercial dividends—particularly through its port infrastructure and its connection to the Gulf via land and digital links. As I’ve noted elsewhere, this shift toward regional economic integration offers Israel a pathway to greater stability by aligning its future with broader prosperity in the Middle East, rather than permanent confrontation. In this sense, for Israel, the New Golden Road is not merely a trade route—it is the scaffolding for a different kind of regional order, one in which it is embedded, connected, and indispensable.
But it is the United States that has, perhaps, the most reason to hope the New Golden Road succeeds. This is because Washington views the initiative through its broader policies of downscaling its global involvement, what I term the American Sphere Doctrine, and simultaneously restraining China’s geopolitical influence across Eurasia by knitting together key regions along the periphery. The New Golden Road achieves this in three ways.
First, at its core, the corridor serves to reorient global supply chains away from China and toward India, which Washington increasingly sees as its most important long-term economic and strategic partner in Asia. India’s rise as a manufacturing power and its shared democratic institutions make it a natural counterweight to China, particularly as Washington seeks to “de-risk” economic dependencies created over decades of globalization. The New Golden Road reinforces this shift by establishing new routes and infrastructure that bypass China entirely, connecting Indian production hubs to markets in Europe and the United States via the Gulf and Mediterranean. This aligns with the economic dimension of Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, exemplified by initiatives like the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.
Second, the New Golden Road offers the U.S. a pathway to reduce its direct involvement in the Middle East by encouraging the emergence of a new regional order built around economic interdependence rather than American military primacy. For decades, U.S. engagement in the region has been marked by security guarantees, costly interventions, and volatile alliances. With this new structure, however, the focus shifts toward economic alignment, infrastructure development, energy cooperation, and digital connectivity—pillars of stability that empower and incentivize regional actors to take greater responsibility for their own security and prosperity.
Third, this also advances the long-standing American goal of promoting burden-sharing among its allies. By integrating European and Middle Eastern partners into a shared economic corridor, the New Golden Road distributes the cost and responsibility of regional stability across a broader coalition. This is especially important for Washington, as it seeks to concentrate its strategic attention and finite resources on the Pacific theater, where tensions with China are most acute. In this sense, the New Golden Road is not only a counter-China initiative in economic terms—it is also a tool of strategic rebalancing. By helping to stabilize “West Asia,” as the Indo-Mediterranean region is also called, and connect it more closely to the Indo-Pacific, the United States positions itself to contain China across multiple fronts while reducing its own strategic overextension.
In short, when President Trump spoke about “one of the greatest trade routes in all of history,” he was talking about the New Golden Road—a term that he would do well to use. But this leaves one question unanswered. When Trump said that the route would run “from India to Israel to Italy and onward to the United States,” why did he include Italy, aside from creative alliteration?
Simply put, it is because of Trieste. The New Golden Road has revived the dream of the city serving as the primary maritime and logistical gateway between Europe and Asia. It is, after all, the most strategically located port on the Mediterranean for connecting the European industrial heartland and the rising economies of Central and Eastern Europe—from Bavaria to the Balkans—to the Indo-Mediterranean world. Trieste’s deepwater harbor, robust rail connections, and historic role as the Habsburg Empire’s main entrepôt make it the northern anchor of the corridor. It is, in brief, Europe’s answer to Dubai and Mumbai.
This, then, is where the Trump administration should focus its efforts. If it is serious about making the New Golden Road more than just a rhetorical flourish, it must begin by recognizing the strategic centrality of Trieste. Of all the ports vying for prominence along Europe’s southern flank—Piraeus, Thessaloniki, Marseilles—none can match Trieste’s geographic advantage, historical pedigree, or logistical connectivity to the European industrial heartland. It is no accident that President George Washington authorized the establishment of the second-ever U.S. consulate in Europe in Trieste back in 1797. The city’s longstanding ties to the United States, its free port status, and its renewed relevance in transatlantic and Indo-Pacific strategies all point to one conclusion: Trieste should be formally designated as the sea terminus of the New Golden Road. A large-scale international summit in Trieste—bringing together key stakeholders from Europe, the Middle East, India, and the United States—would be the ideal venue to make this declaration. (As it happens, I serve as secretary general of the board of advisors of an association created precisely for this purpose.)
Second, the administration should formally adopt and promote the term “New Golden Road” when possible in place of the bureaucratic and uninspiring acronym “IMEC.” Names matter in politics, and in geopolitics even more so. The New Golden Road evokes a civilizational memory, a shared history of commerce and connectivity between East and West. It is bold, evocative, and—if we’re being honest—far more Trumpian than anything cooked up in a G20 communiqué. After all, what better way to sell a grand infrastructure project than by branding it with his favorite metal—and a name that already sounds like it belongs on a luxury hotel or a championship trophy?
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Third, the White House should appoint a Special Presidential Envoy for the New Golden Road. Much of the corridor’s potential depends on sustained high-level diplomacy, not just between governments, but also among investors and regional stakeholders. While U.S. embassies and career diplomats play a vital role, regional leaders often look for signals of senior-level commitment. A presidential envoy, backed by the weight of the Oval Office, would lend credibility and urgency to the initiative.
Finally, the administration should push for the creation of a permanent IMEC Secretariat. This body would serve as a coordination hub for the corridor, managing everything from customs harmonization to research and dispute resolution. It would focus on three critical areas: first, developing frameworks for cross-border trade processes, ensuring that goods and services move seamlessly across the corridor; second, producing research and analysis that tracks the corridor’s impact and quantifies its benefits; and third, serving as a neutral platform to resolve disputes or technical disagreements among participating states. Without this kind of institutional backbone, the corridor risks being little more than a collection of announcements and empty promises. With it, the New Golden Road could become the engine of a new economic geography—one that binds together the democratic peripheries of Eurasia, underwrites regional prosperity, and checks the ambitions of America’s chief rivals.
That, surely, is a legacy worthy of the name.
