Nowhere other than India is the railway so indelibly connected with the image of the nation. Just as there is no single country on earth that has such a broad cultural, ethnic, and racial mix as India, there is also no railway system that has played and, crucially, continues to play such a fundamental role.
It reads like a scene from Henry Kissinger’s worst nightmare. China, Russia, and four Central Asian states gather today in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, to welcome India and Pakistan into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a security and economic club that excludes the United States. But what might have alarmed U.S. strategists during the Cold War could be cause for relief. The expansion signals a potential shift away from military coordination and toward economic cooperation.
Quotes and Quotas is a weekly digest of phrases and facts that help explain Asia’s infrastructure push.
Connectivity is an old game that great nations have played since times immemorial. To sustain its empire, Rome supposedly paved 55,000 miles of roads and built aqueducts across Europe. It is China’s turn to play this game now. Discussions on connectivity should address not only the physical infrastructure aspects but also the institutional, financial, commercial, legal, and management issues. International collaborative projects demand statecraft and sagacity of a unique order to reconcile different points of view.
If he were alive today, Darius the Great would have cheered the commissioning by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in March of a new railway connecting their countries. The fifth century Persian king was able to dominate much of West Asia in part because he understood the strategic importance of transportation and organized one of the world’s first highways: the Royal Road. The route spanned all of modern-day Iraq and Turkey, and cut messengers’ travel times by a factor of 12.