Kashmir: The Overlooked Battleground in the New Economic Order
Peter McGahan
Monday 19th May, 2025.
PART eight in our series: The Global Shift Away from the US Dollar and how that will affect your finances.
I travelled from Amritsar to Dharamshala by car and decided to leave Kashmir to another time where I could give it justice. Its breathtaking. One week later, my host put the headlines in front of me. They are still very confusing and uncomfortable.
You can think of Kashmir as conflict and headlines, but behind the noise is something far less discussed and far more critical to the new global economic race now reshaping a potential post-dollar world.
The real battle for Kashmir isn’t just about land or nationalism anymore. It’s about water, minerals, supply chains, and, crucially, who controls the future of global finance.
Kashmir’s river systems (the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab) are among the most vital freshwater arteries in South Asia. With rising droughts, food insecurity, freshwater is quietly becoming what oil was in the twentieth century: the resource nations will fight to secure.
Control over Kashmir’s rivers influence the agriculture of hundreds of millions downstream in India and Pakistan. It shapes hydropower generation for two nuclear-armed nations. And it could, in time, back new forms of trade finance if water becomes collateralised in future commodity-backed financial systems, as some BRICS+ economists are already discussing (see previous article).
The Indus Waters Treaty has kept these rivers flowing peacefully since 1960 through wars, coups and crises. Kashmir’s "blue gold" is increasingly strategic.
Then, there is the lithium.
In 2023, India confirmed the discovery of an estimated 5.9 million tonnes of lithium ore in Kashmir’s Reasi district. While its only c0.3 per cent of known global reserves once refined, the location is what makes it explosive. New surveys (esp post-2020) have suggested that only about 10–15 per cent of Kashmir’s potential mineral wealth has been systematically mapped because of political instability, conflict, and limited infrastructure.
Lithium is essential for electric vehicles, battery storage, mobile technology, and military systems. It’s a metal which will power the twenty-first-century economy, and whoever controls it will have significant control of the future of energy and technology supply chains. Making sense?
In a world fragmenting into BRICS+ and G7+ blocs, Kashmir’s lithium could tip the scales. If India channels this lithium into BRICS-led initiatives, settling trades in yuan, rupees, or future BRICS coins backed by real commodities, it would accelerate the shift away from the dollar.
On the other hand, if India puts its lithium into US-led critical minerals alliances, supplying the West’s green tech ambitions and pricing it in dollars, it could prolong the dollar system’s dominance over global commodities a little longer.
Either way, the fight over Kashmir is no longer just about borders. It’s about the foundations of the future financial order.
The Belt and Road Initiative, China’s grand plan to stitch together Eurasia with railways, ports, and pipelines runs dangerously close to Kashmir, through Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan-administered territory.
India has long protested this, arguing that the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) violates its sovereignty. But beyond legal arguments, the real concern is strategic: CPEC is China’s overland lifeline to the Arabian Sea, bypassing vulnerable shipping lanes.
Instability in Kashmir creates pressure points along CPEC. For the West, supporting India’s control in Kashmir and building alternative trade routes like the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) offers a way to quietly challenge China’s Belt and Road dominance without firing a shot.
If Kashmir can be stabilised under Indian administration, it could form a vital link in a new east–west economic corridor free of Chinese control which is a subtle but powerful blow against Beijing’s ambitions.
Today, Kashmir is a resource frontier, financial pivot, supply chain battleground.
It will help shape whether the future world economy is multipolar and commodity-backed, or whether the dollarised system limps on through new critical mineral alliances with countries like India.
Kashmir sits at the crossroads of some of the most powerful currents shaping the twenty-first-century world: the collapse of dollar hegemony, the scramble for critical minerals, the construction of new financial architectures.
Control over Kashmir’s assets will help decide whether tomorrow’s global economy is still chained to Wall Street, or built on a new, multipolar foundation of real resources, real trade, and real sovereignty.
And once you see it that way, it is clear: the story of Kashmir is no longer just about politics. It is about the future of money itself.
To understand the whole structure of dedollarisation, I’m creating a complimentary factsheet which you can register for by emailing info@wwfp.net but if you have a question on the subject, also send me an email to this address also.
Peter McGahan is the Chief Executive Officer of Independent Financial Adviser Worldwide Financial Planning. Worldwide Financial Planning is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
