China's Belt and Road Initiative

It is revealing of current American political obsessions that a recent book about the Marshall Plan’s relationship to the Cold War might be seen first and foremost as having lessons for today’s troubled ties between the United States and Russia. In that book, Benn Steil, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that with the Marshall Plan’s launch in 1947, the U.S. and the Soviet Union “became irrevocably committed to securing their respective spheres of influence.” Yet despite widespread concern about Russia, the most consequential great power struggle today is the one between the U.S. and China. [...]

Last month, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono traveled to Sri Lanka, where he announced Tokyo’s plans to invest in several infrastructure projects, including a natural gas terminal. It was the first visit to Sri Lanka by a Japanese foreign minister in 15 years. Following similar Japanese investment projects in India and elsewhere in the region, the Sri Lanka trip appeared to be the latest sign of a growing strategy aimed at countering China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative, also known as One Belt, One Road. In an email interview, Shihoko Goto, the senior Northeast Asia associate at the Wilson Center’s [...]

BELGRADE, Serbia—Is China building a Trojan horse in a divided Europe? The diplomatic initiative between China and 16 countries in Central and Eastern Europe, known as the 16+1, has become more controversial since its launch in 2012 at a summit in Poland. Critics worry that it may undermine the European Union’s unified approach to Beijing, weaken transparency in economic and diplomatic engagement, and give a secretive regime with an increasingly muscular foreign policy a foothold in Europe. The 16 European countries are all ex-communist states, and all but five are EU members. In January, Hans Dietmar Schweisgut, the EU’s ambassador [...]