This week, China hosts its third international conference focused on BRI, the development program launched in 2013 by the CCP and Chairman Xi Jinping. Mr. Xi is hosting the event, which marks the 10th anniversary of the BRI. The forum’s most notable guest is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who shared the dais with Mr. Xi at the opening ceremony.
Ostensibly an initiative to build infrastructure and revive trade links along the old Silk Road, the BRI is, at its core, a projection of China’s economic, industrial, and military power and ambitions. BRI has been an effective tool of Chinese geopolitics to date in recasting the new world order in Beijing’s image.
Some 150 countries have entered into various forms of agreement under the auspices of the BRI. Noting its desire to expand global peace and prosperity, Beijing touts more than $1 trillion in investment across BRI’s projects. Most of this investment has centered on energy, transportation, logistics infrastructure, mining, and commodities. What is left unsaid is the CCP’s strong hand in implementation, with influence that always reaches the heads of state and other powers in each participating country. Alongside the BRI have come military cooperation and other security arrangements with many BRI participating nations.
As much of the BRI’s investment has come with coercive terms, and often in the form of debt, borrower nations in Africa and elsewhere have begun to push back on BRI’s aggressive nature, lopsided benefit to China, and the prospect of debt servitude. China, for its part, now has to reconcile itself with the fact that many of the investments made over the past decade are uncommercial and won’t see a profitable return. The project was manageable on a small scale, but when the sums started totaling in the trillions, even China’s vast treasury had to sit up and take notice. This is all the more true as China’s domestic economy falters and its bad debt mounts.
One of the aspects most notable about this year’s BRI forum was the central importance of the relationship between China and Russia. Day one included a more than three-hour meeting between Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin on the forum’s sidelines to discuss several sensitive matters between them. Topics included the conflicts in Ukraine, Israel, and francophone Africa, as well as commercial affairs such as the exploration and development of the Arctic, a region of longstanding dispute between the nations.
While certainly not an equal partner, Russia has become China’s most important ally in the BRI and the broader geopolitical chess game being played around the globe. Russia, essentially in a proxy war with the United States and NATO, has come to need China now more than ever.
As a geopolitical tool, BRI’s primary objective is to strengthen China’s power and influence while blocking and eventually reducing that of the United States. As part of the initiative, China is using not only its economic might but also its soft power to sway the “Global South” nations of Africa, Latin America, and Asia toward CCP-friendly policies.
The United States has been both slow and ineffective in responding to the challenge posed by the Chinese regime and the BRI. Washington hasn’t taken the threat seriously enough, and as a result, Beijing’s influence around the world has continued to grow.
The United States has fared poorly in confronting the BRI partly because it has been unwilling or unable to counter Chinese investment in Africa and elsewhere. The United States’s soft power—the ability to influence and persuade rather than coerce—has been degraded as a result of inattention, a shift in the values regime toward “wokism”—an ideology that doesn’t travel well in most of the world—and abuse of its hard power tools, including economic sanctions.
Unlike during the Cold War, when a wider approach was taken, today, the United States relies primarily on coercive hard powers and has neglected its soft powers. Both are necessary, but soft power may have greater potential for substantive and long-term cultural and political influence. As the United States has recently been reminded, dependence on hard power alone is ineffective. Hard powers, whether military or economic, are necessary but insufficient tools of sustainable geopolitical influence.
If the United States is serious about countering the threat that the CCP poses to freedom and democracy, it is going to have to dramatically shift its priorities with regard to economic development. The BRI provides a playbook, but so does the United States’ own history from the postwar period.
