Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s three-nation tour of Jordan, Ethiopia, and Oman from 15 to 18 December 2025 can be seen as a novel attempt to reconceptualise West Asia, the Red Sea, and the Horn of Africa as a single, interconnected strategic theatre.
It marked India’s maritime articulation of its conventional continental perspectives about the ‘West Asia North Africa’ (WANA) formulation of yore.
While the visit may have yielded limited headline-grabbing deliverables beyond the India-Oman Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), its deeper significance lay in this structural reimagining of India’s extended neighbourhood — where geo-politics, geo-economics and geo-civilisational diplomacy were fused into a single framework of India’s futuristic strategic engagement.