China's Belt and Road: Compete or Fearmonger?
The US needs to offer a competitive alternative rather than complain | #TC95
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This edition:
Opinion Essay
Stories to Watch
Opinion Essay
Joe Biden is no stranger to empire games, and he Xi he sees as a worthy opponent.
Nowhere is this clearer than China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), or China’s New Silk Road. The globe-spanning infrastructure plan is Beijing’s play to center itself in the Afro-Eurasian economy of the 21st century and beyond, marketing itself as the successor to the ancient Silk Road that once defined global trade.
Launched in 2013 by Xi Jinping, the BRI will expand to more than $1 trillion in worldwide investment by 2030 with plans to reach $6–8 trillion by 2050 as China builds out the Maritime Silk Road, the Polar Silk Road, the Digital Silk Road, a Green Silk Road, the Health Silk Road (re: vaccines), and even a One Belt One Road space information corridor. (Graphic: Deutsche Welle)
Given the staggering sums and objectives of BRI, it should be no surprise that President Joe Biden is betting all his chips on American infrastructure – $4–6 trillion to be exact – to prepare the US economy to compete in the coming decades, and centuries, to come.
I disagree with the need for a “Cold War” framing, but old habits die hard.
It’s truthfully not necessary when Beijing plays the game the way they do. The US wins by investing in itself and prioritizing our friends. China knows this better than we do.
We have friends. We don’t treat others well! But, they are there.
Xi does not. (Before you even think it – Putin is not a friend any wants or chooses outside of anything but necessity.)
Major partners in the BRI – Australia and the European Union – are rethinking the scale of any projects or are backing out of their plans with Beijing altogether. Yes, this comes after incessant lobbying from the US that the BRI is not to be supported and even “western” opposition has its limits when the scope of BRI is so tempting, but China didn’t give the larger nations much of a reason to stick around either.
It’s similar in Africa. The US doesn’t need to worry about what China is offering – we need to have a better pitch. You’d think the capitalists would under some competition?
Plus, the US is finally teaming up with its roster of allies to offer an alternative to developing states rather than simply demonizing another great power’s offering for almost a decade. There are genuine critiques to make of BRI projects – financials lack transparency, the projects aren’t environmentally sustainable, countless labor issues – so there’s no reason to reach for fearmongering when the US and democracies are more than capable of rising to the challenge.
Personally, I’m in favor of the “partnership model” where Washington and Beijing recognize each other as equals and work together to keep the world balanced. I think the Belt and Road Initiative fits wonderfully into this framework by providing the US the kick in the pants we need to do anything of note. Competition breeds results.
The Blob would never admit it, but it likes the great game better when they have a true competitor to play against.
Stay safe and healthy, beautiful people. And, thanks for reading.
xoxo,
Kyle (@kgborland)
PS – Here are some great reads worth your time.
A Timeline of the Biden Administration’s Efforts To Support LGBTQ Equality in the First 100 Days (Center for American Progress)
African Continental Free Trade Area and exchange rate misalignments (Brookings)
Alabama governor signs bill to remove anti-LGBTQ language from sex education curriculum (The Hill)
Apple's battle with Fortnite could change the iPhone as we know it (CNET)
China Is Losing the Soft War But Could Win the Hard One (Bloomberg)
Contending with China’s Rise to Great Power Status (Cipher Brief)
Honey Bear Mural Painted Over By SF LGBT Center; Artist fnnch Responds (KQED)
How 26 People In The Census Count Helped Minnesota Beat New York For A House Seat (NPR)
How the US won the economic recovery (Vox)
“America is going to win this the way we won World War II,” he told me. “Everything was larger than it needs to be, duplicative, just throwing lots of stuff at [the wall]. ... But you won the war.”
The most distinctive, and easiest to compare, part of America’s response was the stimulus checks. The US government has by this point sent out three rounds of “economic impact payments,” or stimulus checks. The March/April 2020 round was $1,200 per adult and $500 per child dependent; the December 2020 round was $600 per adult or child dependent; the March 2021 round was $1,400 per adult and child, including adult dependents with disabilities and college students.
For a family of four like Jasmine Holloway’s, those checks added up to $10,700 over the course of a year — a life-changing sum of money.
More strikingly, the checks were a distinctive policy internationally. The US, South Korea, and Japan were the only large countries to send checks to the vast majority of their citizens; Hong Kong and Singapore did something similar, but peer nations like the UK, France, and Germany did not.
And the US sent much bigger checks than Japan or South Korea did. If Jasmine Holloway lived in Japan, her family would have received about $3,800, or about one-third of what she actually received in America; in South Korea, she would have received 1 million Korean won or $1,151, far less. Even if you adjust for the fact that South Korea and Japan are poorer on a per-capita basis than the US, they sent out less.Investigation: San Francisco museums may hold Nazi-looted art (JWeekly)
The 10 paintings flagged by FAMSF in 2001:
Washerwoman by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Saint Anthony the Hermit by Colijn de Coter
Madonna and Child by Francesco Granacci
The Tow Path by Jacob Henricus Mari
View of Amsterdam by Jacob Henricus Maris
Rest on the Flight to Egypt by Polidoro da Lanciano
Madame de Genlis by George Romney
Mirth (Sketch for Head of Comedy) by George Romney
The Monkey and the Gander by Frans Snyders
A Village Road by Lodewijk de Vadder
The two paintings flagged by J.:
Sketch to the artists’ enchantment by Rudolph Grossman
Mary Magdalene by Unknown Tyrolean Master
May Day: Made in the U.S.A. (People’s World)
On faith, science, and furries (Sex and the State)
Potential Seen for Regional Power Plays as US Departs From Afghanistan (VoA)
Rethinking the Past (War on the Rocks)
SCOTUS turns away challenge on CA LGBTQ travel ban policy (The Blade)
Systemic Racism Built Mississippi. Gov. Reeves Says It Doesn’t Exist. (MSFreePress)
Tennessee passes bill requiring anti-trans signs on businesses with trans-inclusive restrooms (LGBTQ Nation)
The Case for Microlateralism (Foreign Affairs)
The Déby Dynasty (Foreign Exchanges)
The Future of Sino-U.S. Proxy War (Texas National Security Review)
During and after the Cold War, the United States repeatedly intervened directly in foreign internal conflicts with troops and airpower. The Intervention Project dataset found that the United States engaged in 500 military missions after 1776, with over half of these operations taking place after 1950 and over one-quarter occurring since the end of the Cold War.69 In 2008, Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted:
Think of where our forces have been sent and have been engaged over the last 40-plus years. Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa, and more. In fact, the first Gulf War stands alone in over two generations of constant military engagement as a more or less traditional conventional conflict from beginning to end.70
During the Trump administration, every major U.S. deployment of troops in a combat zone was in a foreign civil war, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Niger, and Somalia.71
The critical problem for the Chinese doctrine of non-intervention is that, oftentimes, Beijing is not neutral when it comes to foreign civil wars. Like other major states, China has interests at stake in foreign conflicts and has sought to manipulate their outcome. From the late 1950s through the 1970s, China pursued a militant anti-imperialist (and anti-Soviet) foreign policy and sponsored a variety of rebel factions engaged in “wars of national liberation.”81 Beijing sent tens of thousands of troops to North Vietnam; backed leftist political groups in Laos, South Korea, Thailand, and Oman; and armed rebels in approximately 20 African countries, including Algeria, Zimbabwe, Guinea-Bissau, Congo, Angola, and South Africa.82 Beijing tried to reconcile this overt interference with its non-intervention doctrine by claiming that imperialist states do not respect non-intervention and therefore socialist states were obliged to assist popular movements.83
The UAE's grand strategy is shaping a new regional order (TRT World)
The Week in Blob (Nonzero)
Given the way the War on Terror followed on the heels of the Cold War, which followed on the heels of British imperialism, we are in many ways caught in a dynamic unleashed in 1919 when the British established their colonial presence in these regions. “Exit” strategies designed to appease antiwar or anticolonial domestic opinion in Britain or the United States have repeatedly led, in practice, to continued involvement, just behind the scenes.
History suggests that, rather than maintain a more covert military presence, the United States should evolve a relationship with Afghanistan that eschews control and instead offers moral support to the indigenous efforts against the Taliban. Those who protest that some military presence is necessary to protect Afghani women or ethnic minorities extend the British colonial paradigm of the “white man’s burden.” Moreover, experience shows that such a presence, because it depends on cultivating particular groups, exacerbates rather than soothes inter-group tensions and undermines indigenous struggles. More than protecting Afghani women from Afghani men, the United States might support all Afghans negotiating a postcolonial future by helping to provide much needed resources—delivered through multilateral agencies to avoid colonial influence. The economist and U.N. adviser Jeffrey Sachs said even in 2010, “Afghanistan is in urgent need of the basics for survival…seeds, fertilizer, roads, power, schools, and clinics—much more than it is in the need of another 30,000 troops.”
We have seen the old society perish, and with it that crowd of domestic institutions and independent magistracies which it carried within it . . . , true republics within the monarchy. These institutions did not, it is true, share sovereignty; but they opposed to it everywhere limits which were defended obstinately. Not one of them has survived. The revolution has left only individuals standing. It has dissolved even the (so to speak) physical association of the commune. This is a spectacle without precedent! Before now one had seen only in philosophers’ books a nation so decomposed and reduced to its ultimate constituents.
From an atomized society has emerged centralization. There is no need to look elsewhere for its origin. Centralization has not arrived with its head erect, with the authority of a principle; rather, it has developed modestly, as a consequence, a necessity.
Where there are only individuals, all business which is not theirs is necessarily public business, the business of the state. Where there are no independent magistrates, there are only agents of central power. That is how we have become an administered people, under the hand of irresponsible civil servants, themselves centralized in the power of which they are agents.
– Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, a political ally of Tocqueville’s, in a 1822 speech on the social consequences of the French Revolution
Stories to Watch
$2 trillion: Global military spending rose 2.6% in 2020 to almost $2 trillion. The US increased 4.4% from 2019 and makes up 39% of total worldwide spending.
Venezuela: Maduro has lost complete control of most areas in Venezuela, signaling his willingness to negotiate with Juan Guaido’s faction, but swaths of the country are already under the authority of terrorist groups ruling "mini-states of their own."
Yemen: To the surprise of no one – the US is still helping the Sauds kill Yemenis.
