China’s geostrategy for the past two decades has been to displace U.S. influence by becoming the major trading partner of U.S. security allies in Asia. It’s worked well. But Belt and Road is something different, an evolutionary step in the strategy.
Beyond potentially increasing trade and investment opportunities, Belt and Road is designed to create physical connections that make trade relationships into concrete routes for the projection of power. Sea routes will have to be protected -- and China’s expanding navy can be expected to offer that service. Land routes generate connections along the way, which in turn can justify expanded military presence.
When Europeans built railroads not only across their own continent but also across Africa and Asia and the Indian subcontinent, everyone understood that these were projections of geostrategic power. Ditto when the U.S. expanded railroads and later highways across North America. That spelled expansion, consolidation, connection -- and sovereign authority.
Today’s Chinese expansion is similar. To be connected by infrastructure is to be interdependent -- and therefore necessary to the weaker partner.
China will no doubt find it tricky to exercise power in places like Pakistan or the Central Asian republics. It will make mistakes and waste money. But that’s par for the course in imperial expansion. Just ask the British Empire, which fought constant small to medium wars all over its empire, or the U.S., which fought bitter insurgencies in the Philippines long before its costly imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
China hopes not to fight such wars -- to acquire global superpower status without using troops. That may work, provided the U.S. continues to treat global leadership as a liability, not a hard-won privilege.
Those who built the U.S. post-war empire believed power had economic benefits. And sure enough, the U.S. became the richest nation in global history in this same period. Today, unsurprisingly, the Chinese think global leadership will have similar economic and psychic benefits. They’re making their play. Will the U.S. respond?
Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter. His seven books include “The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President” and “Cool War: The Future of Global Competition.”
This column was provided by Bloomberg News.