Abstract
This article examines U.S. policy toward the supercontinent of Eurasia from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present. The baseline for U.S. policy was established in 1992, the prevention of a peer competitor emerging in Eurasia. The initial focus for ten years was on assistance to promote Russia's transition to becoming a market democracy while simultaneously hedging against the return of a revanchist Russia through promotion of expansion of NATO and the European Union.
The 9/11 attack in 2001 shifted the attention of the Bush Administration to the War on Terror with the United States military getting bogged down in two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Obama Administration sought to end both wars and withdraw U.S. troops with mixed success. In 2011/2012 with growing concern over China's more assertive policy in East Asia, U.S. foreign and security policy aimed to put more military, economic, and diplomatic resources toward East Asia. These efforts, however, were distracted by Russia's aggression in Ukraine, the civil war in Syria, and the emergence of ISIS.
Almost in the background over this quarter century, a far more significant phenomenon has been developing – the reconnection of Eurasia. With the rise of China, India and Russia, as well as the emergence of middle powers including Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, and others, the Eurasian supercontinent is being “rewired” economically, politically, and strategically. China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has garnered the most attention, but virtually every state – large, medium, and small – are adjusting their national interests and foreign policies in a very fluid environment. To date Washington has struggled to grasp the breadth and depth of change and failed to develop its own strategy as well as allocate adequate analytical and policy tools to advance U.S. interests.
The United States has responded quite skeptically and critically to various non-U.S.-led efforts to promote Eurasian integration without being able to offer an attractive and compelling alternative in the post-Cold War era. Russia-led efforts such as the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and more recently the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) are seen in Washington as thinly veiled means to promote Russia as a regional economic, political, and/or security hegemon. For example, in December 2012, then Secretary Clinton described the Eurasian Union as an effort “to re-Sovietize the region…” “It's not going to be called that. It's going to be called a customs union, it will be called Eurasian Union and all of that… But let's make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it,” (Clover, 2012). U.S. government officials actively urged future members of the EAEU, such as Kyrgyzstan, not to join. 1 The U.S. government and NATO have refused for more than 15 years to engage with the CSTO as an institution and thus legitimize it in the West.
Author discussions with Kyrgyz government officials in July 2014. One official greeted the author saying “Andy, can you please ask the State Department to stop telling us not to join the EAU?”
The Bush II and Obama Administrations essentially ignored and downplayed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) since its founding in 2001. The announcement of China's Silk Road Economic Belt and Maritime Silk Road in late 2013 (which have subsequently been combined under the moniker Belt and Road Initiative or BRI) was essentially ignored by the Obama Administration. When the Chinese announced the founding of a new multilateral bank, the Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank (AIIB) in 2015, the Obama Administration urged its Asian and European allies not to join and was very embarrassed when many major partners ended up joining the new venture. And now it appears from highly critical statements of the BRI from Secretary of Defense Mattis and Secretary of State Tillerson in October 2017 that the Trump Administration intends to take a much more critical posture toward the BRI.
Conversely, the United States has been supportive of Western organizations such as NATO, the OSCE, and the EU to engage more with its not so close neighbors to the East. For example, Washington strongly urged Kazakhstan during the year of its chairmanship of the OSCE in 2010 to back off the notion of a new European security framework initially promoted by then Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to focus on Afghanistan as a priority. Washington has also encouraged the Central Asian states in particular to work together institutionally without Russia and China. Interestingly, this kind of cooperation (states in the region are allergic to the word “integration” as it is seen historically as forced integration Soviet style and/or a means to diminish newly won sovereignty) may now be more possible with rapidly shifting policies of Uzbekistan.
This article will analyze U.S. efforts to promote Eurasian integration since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present as well as how Washington has reacted to integration efforts led by other major powers, notably China and Russia. The narrative draws special attention to the period after 2001 since this marked a dramatic departure for U.S. policy toward Eurasia to support Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. We will conclude with an effort to examine more closely U.S. policy debates and responses to China's Brick and Road Initiative since its initial articulation in the Fall of 2013. The central argument suggests U.S. efforts while experiencing some modest success at times have been limited first by Washington's lack of strategic vision and willingness to allocate adequate diplomatic and material resources as well as growing pushback from Russia and finally what appears to be an overwhelming initiative from China designed to play out over the Eurasian supercontinent 2 over the next three decades.
There are multiple definitions and conceptions of the shape-shifting term “Eurasia.” For the purposes of this article, the author's focus will be the supercontinent stretching from Europe in the West to East Asia and from Russia in the North to South Asia, bracketed by the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
With the collapse of its superpower rival, the Soviet Union, of more than 45 years in 1991, the United States stood atop the global hierarchy to an extent perhaps not seen since the acme of the Roman Empire 2000 years ago. In response to this rapid and nearly unimagined position of predominance, the George H. W. Bush Administration, in what turned out to be its final year in office, developed a new strategy document that in many ways has served as the fulcrum of U.S. foreign and security policy for the next 25 years. The key concept of the strategy called for preventing the emergence of a “peer challenger” who could challenge U.S. dominance of the international system (Cheney, 1993, p. 1; Tyler, 1992, p. 1). And just as the famous British geographer Halford Mackinder presciently articulated more than 100 years ago, given the vast mineral, economic, demographic, and military resources throughout the Eurasian supercontinent, this was the only place on the globe from where an imaginable peer competitor could emerge to challenge Washington.
At the time of the Soviet collapse, one could only imagine three potential candidates – Europe, Russia, and China – but for different reasons, neither Europe nor China appeared as either realistic or imminent threats. However, a revanchist and nationalist Russia where democratic and market reforms had failed was a possibility, admittedly or not, that U.S. policymakers had to consider. This is one reason why the United States and its European allies immediately recognized the historically arbitrary borders of the 12 non-Baltic Soviet republics as virtually sacrosanct. This left Moscow with about one-third less territory than that of the Soviet Union, one-half of the population, and 25 million ethnic Russians living outside the borders of the Russian Federation. The collapse of the USSR 3 also broke down production chains developed over 70 years of Soviet rule that added to the massive economic woes of Russia and its neighbors. While Moscow maintained a nuclear deterrent of parity with that of the United States, by virtually any other index of power, the new Russian Federation was vastly weaker than the Soviet Union.
The new reformist Russian government was quite comfortable initially to not be encumbered by its neighboring republics that it viewed as likely to slow down and complicate reform in Russia. By no means should the Soviet collapse be viewed as the result of some Western “plot.”
U.S. strategy toward the new states of the former Soviet Union revolved around promoting market democracies in the region, and especially promoting the sovereignty of the neighboring states around Russia. None of them had been sovereign ever before in their new borders. Several conflicts broke out in Georgia, Moldova, and the territorial dispute between Armenia and Azerbajian intensified. The new Russian government used various military, intelligence, and what we now call “hybrid” means to intervene in these conflicts in 1992/1993 with very little pushback from Washington. This probably reflected both the more hands-off approach to the region of the Bush Administration and sensitivities to not undermine the fragile liberal Yeltsin government. This perspective shifted with the electoral defeat of the Russian reformers in the December 1993 Duma elections that fueled Western fears of a “Weimar Russia” and/or a “red/brown” coalition of communist and nationalist forces coming to the fore that would reject that results of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This led the Clinton Administration to increasingly hedge its bets against a Russian revanche by strongly insisting on Russia following its agreements to remove troops back to Russia, open the door to the expansion of NATO first to former Warsaw Pact members, and more actively seek to promote the sovereignty of the new states. A strong feature of promoting their sovereignty was to reduce their dependence on Russian infrastructure for access to international markets. The most strategic aspect of this policy was the development of new oil and gas pipelines that avoided the territory of the Russian Federation. The biggest success in this regard was the building of the Baku–Tiblisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline completed in 2006.
For its part, Russian efforts to reintegrate with its neighbors both militarily and economically resulted in many agreements on paper that were mostly paid lip service to by its partners. The weak state of the Russian economy allowed for virtually no resources to be devoted to the task, and Moscow had its hands more than full with an insurgency on its own territory in Chechnya. In sum, Russia felt its interests during the 1990s for the most part under some degree of encroachment from the expansion of Western institutional, commercial, and infrastructural developments with little means to stop the process. This was most vividly illustrated for Moscow in 1998 with the financial crisis and even more pointedly in the 1999 NATO war against Serbia.
During the 1990s, the term “Eurasian integration” was virtually non-existent. Almost immediately after the collapse, sharp debate inside Russia about foreign policy orientation emerged between what some called “the Atlanticists” and the “Eurasianists.” From the standpoint of the United States, the game then was about European and Western integration according to norms and institutions controlled by the West. After 9/11, however, the focus of U.S. policymakers turned to Afghanistan (and later Iraq of course), and the term “Eurasia” began to return to the lexicon of international relations.
The inflection point in U.S. policy in Eurasia was 9/11 and America's War on Terror, which embedded it in the region with the war in Afghanistan. The initial military effort in Afghanistan in the Fall of 2001 was very successful thanks to support from key NATO allies, notably Great Britain, and key regional powers, India, Iran, and Russia which had been supporting the Northern Alliance operations against the Taliban for several years. Northern Alliance fighters together with Russian intelligence and logistical support as well as Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan allowing allied forces use of military air bases in their countries for easier access to Afghanistan were all essential for the rapid defeat of the Taliban. The international Bonn conference in December 2001 provided the initial agreement for the re-establishment of the Afghan state. The Iranian delegation played a critical role in bringing various Afghan regional and warlord leaders to reach agreement in Bonn in support of the United States and its allies and partners.
For more than a decade, the war in Afghanistan dominated U.S. policy toward Eurasia given its central position and the presence at one point in 2011 of more than 100,000 U.S. troops. Since Afghanistan borders on states that are, to put it mildly, not natural partners or allies of Washington (China, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) and nearby major powers India and Russia, managing logistical support and some degree of regional coordination required highly skilled diplomacy on the part of Washington. This informal coalition of partners already began to break down when President Bush in his State of the Union address in January 2002 included Iran in the strange grouping tagged the “axis of evil” along with Iraq and North Korea. Given that Iraq was Iran's biggest security threat at the time, linking the two together in any fashion defied logic and needlessly alienated and weakened the relatively moderate Khatami government. The Bush Administration's decision to pivot attention from Afghanistan to attack Iraq in March 2003 in the context of its War on Terror lost Washington a great deal of good will and support around the world.
Both military efforts after initial success experienced serious pushback that led to a large and long-term militarization of U.S. policy in Eurasia. The “surge” of U.S. forces into Iraq in 2007 prevented defeat before Bush left office. But as U.S. forces were focused on stabilizing Iraq, beginning in 2006 the Taliban began to regain ground in Afghanistan. Newly elected President Barack Obama in 2008 had campaigned on the notion that Iraq was the “bad war” and Afghanistan was the “good war”—frankly it is unclear how “good” Obama thought the war in Afghanistan was, but as a presidential candidate with virtually no military and national security experience, it was not a viable option to oppose both military efforts initiated by his predecessor. After two lengthy reviews during his first year in office, President Obama reluctantly signed on to a dramatic increase of U.S. military forces in theater, seeking to apply some of the success of the Iraqi surge strategy to Afghanistan. In December 2009, President Obama announced that U.S. forces deployed in Afghanistan over the next 18 months would increase approximately by a factor of three to more than 100,000.
This much larger military footprint created a huge logistical challenge to support the troops. More than 85% of goods to support U.S. troops are non-lethal goods transited by commercial carriers. Before increased military presence, virtually all non-lethal goods were being transited through one ground lock of communication (GLOC in military parlance – basically a transit corridor) from the port of Karachi through enemy territory in Southeastern Afghanistan. To accommodate the new demand and alleviate the vulnerability of dependence on one GLOC, the U.S. devised a set of three additional corridors involving Central Asian and South Caucasus states, Russia, and Latvia that collectively was termed the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) and started to become operational in 2009. The success of the NDN during a pivotal time in 2009 when the new Obama Administration catalyzed a team of non-governmental team of experts in Washington and a working group on Afghanistan based at Central Command (CENTCOM) in Tampa, Florida to begin developing a regional economic cooperation strategy to promote Afghan economic development as well as strengthen economic and political cooperation with its neighbors that they called a Modern Silk Road Strategy (MRS).
The MRS really emanated from Afghans themselves as the notion of Afghanistan as a transit hub in the center of Eurasia was a major feature of the Afghan National Development Strategy (ANDS) that successive U.S. administrations had not taken very seriously. Public debate in Washington was narrowly focused on military strategy, but it seemed obvious to many that whatever military success was achieved on the ground, it would not be sustainable without robust economic growth that was not derived primarily from foreign assistance. To the extent that the United States had an economic development strategy for Afghanistan, the debate early in the Obama Administration boiled down to those who wanted to focus on (non-poppy) agriculture and others who emphasized development of the mineral and metal wealth of Afghanistan. The problem with each orientation was that if either goods did not have a reliable means to get to domestic and international markets, then they would provide little value for the Afghan commercial sector or tax revenue for the state. The MRS sought to address this core challenge. In addition, it was designed as a regional economic cooperation strategy that would engage all six of the bordering states of Afghanistan with a greater stake in its economic growth and stability from which they would benefit as well in a strategy that was broader than simply focusing on Pakistan.
After considerable debate in 2010/2011, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton announced in Chennai, India in July 2011 a very truncated version of the MRS that was dubbed the “New Silk Road Vision” (NSR) that focused on a few projects to build economic connectivity between Central Asia, Afghanistan with Pakistan and India. While the projects and goals of the “Vision” were admirable, they were really insufficient to make much of a difference for Afghanistan if implemented (which they have not been for the most part), and it was also clear that the administration's commitment both financially and politically was modest. It is significant, for example, that President Obama himself never spoke about the NSR, and this did not go unnoticed by states in the region.
The NSR also did not include two of Afghanistan's most important neighbors, China and Iran. China was already working bilaterally extensively with Central Asia, Pakistan, and to a lesser extent Afghanistan, where it was reluctant to engage too much while the U.S.-led military coalition was essentially running the show (Zhao, 2012). Iran was explicitly excluded from the strategy as both the Bush Administration (after 2002) and the Obama Administration consistently sought to keep Iran out of multilateral discussions about Afghanistan and regional security. This was a deeply counterproductive position as it is impossible to imagine any successful regional cooperation strategy for Afghan stabilization without Iran's participation (and the same applies to Syria). The Central Asian states were also unenthused because they quickly sensed a lack of commitment in Washington, and perhaps more importantly, they much preferred transit options to the South through Iran or East through China rather than South to Afghanistan and Pakistan. 4 There was also a powerful Afghan fatigue in Washington and the Obama Administration. After the successful operation to kill Osama Bin Laden in May 2011, there was little energy for new initiatives as the main focus was on the scheduled date for the withdrawal of U.S. troops by 2014. It is not unfair to conclude this section that the United States spent enormous resources in blood and treasure in two wars over 15 years in Afghanistan and Iraq with little broader strategic thinking or attention to the dramatically shifting dynamics of Eurasia taking place right for all to see.
The author traveled extensively in Central Asia in 2014/2015 and consulted with hundreds of governmental and non-governmental experts. There was a strong consensus on their part that the United States was not really committed and that Washington's NSR Vision remained too tied to the war in Afghanistan.
It is highly ironic that most Chinese experts on the United States and security issues were deeply skeptical that Washington was deploying so many military resources to Afghanistan for so long only to fight terrorism. Rather, they (and many Russians shared this concern) viewed U.S. military deployments to Afghanistan as a convenient justification for a long-term military presence in China's strategic rear, an area of relative vulnerability given significant Muslim populations in Western China as well as the proximity to Tibet. With the Bush-43 Administration's new-found enthusiasm for democracy promotion in the wake of the “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan from 2003 to 2005, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in its July 2005 in Astana expressed its discomfiture with the allied military presence in the region by demanding that ISAF declare a planned withdrawal date from Afghanistan (Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 2005).
China had no interest in militarily working with ISAF in Afghanistan, but over the course of the first decade of that war, China did get much more economically engaged with Central Asia and Pakistan, displacing Russia's status as largest economic partner and investor. By 2010/2011, China was behaving more aggressively in the South China Sea, leading to territorial conflicts with Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Concern was growing in Washington and with U.S. allies and partners in Asia about China's rapidly growing economic clout and military assertiveness. Despite increasing friction with the United States in the Asia-Pacific, Beijing regarded the United States more as a potential partner as it expanded activities to its West into Central and South Asia. One of China's leading strategic thinkers, Wang Jisi, summarized the argument and justification for a strategic consolidation of Chinese foreign policy in this direction in his October 2012 article entitled “Marching Westwards: The Rebalancing of China's Geostrategy” (Jisi, 2012). One year later in Astana, Kazakhstan at Nazarbayev University, part of a five-nation tour of Central Asia, President Xi announced his new policy initiative “The Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB)” (Xinhua, 2013). One month later in Malaysia, Xi announced the “Maritime Silk Road” project, which together with SREB was dubbed One Bridge, One Road (OBOR) and more recently the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Wu & Zhang, 2013).
It was clear that entering 2011/2012 the Obama Administration very much wanted to reduce its military presence in the Middle East and Afghanistan in order to allocate more military, economic, and diplomatic resources to East and South Asia to address the rapidly growing concerns about China's increasing power and influence (Chollet, 2016). The new Obama policy, “The Pivot to Asia” (later renamed “Rebalancing to Asia”), was previewed in an article Secretary of State Hilary Clinton authored in FP in November 2011 modestly entitled “America's Pacific Century” (Clinton, 2011). It is interesting to note that the main regional accent in Secretary Clinton's article is “Asia-Pacific,” but the term “Indo-Pacific” is also used several times to indicate the increasing importance of India in U.S. foreign and security strategy in Asia. The key military component of the “pivot” was raising the allocation of our global military resources in Asia to 60% by 2020 and strengthening, and in some cases elevating (Australia for example), our alliances and partnerships in the region. The main economic component was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a multilateral trade grouping dating back to 2005 that the United States joined in 2010, and later bringing in Japan and South Korea. The principal mission behind the TPP was to raise and define the norms and standards of regional trade in the region and protect members from being overwhelmed economically by China and victimized by unfair trade practices. China was notably not included in any of the negotiations for the TPP, and obviously is not a member.
Many analysts have suggested that China's BRI was developed in response to the United States’ “Pivot to Asia” and TPP. We must look at BRI in a number of ways. First, this is a major legacy project of President Xi Jin-Ping as it was consolidated and launched already in his first year of power and most recently included as a core part of “Xi Jin-Ping thought” that was elevated at the October 2017 Chinese Party Congress to the status of Mao Tse-Tung and Deng Xiao-Ping. Its plans have been set, albeit very loosely, decades ahead to conclude in 2049, not coincidentally the 100th year anniversary of the Chinese Communist Revolution. Already 70 countries have signed on as partners of BRI, and the Chinese have committed to allocating more than a trillion dollars with the hope of attracting additional major partnership co-funding. While the Japanese, Indians, Australians, and others are responding with their own and in some cases joint or multilateral initiatives, it is clear that as long as Xi Jin-Ping is in power, BRI will be the “elephant in the room” of Asian and Eurasian economic integration.
U.S. debates and policies on BRI and Eurasian integration
U.S. policy toward BRI and Eurasian integration more broadly lacked coherence, commitment, and consistency in the Obama Administration and even more so in the first year of the Trump Administration. U.S. policy has been more noteworthy for its contradictions and muddled strategic framework. For example, in August 2015 U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (a position initially created for and held by Richard Holbrooke until his untimely death in December 2010) Dan Feldman stated that “We welcome China's engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which we see not as competitive, but complementary to our own efforts,” (Hudson, 2015). Yet, at the same time earlier in 2015 the Obama Administration was advising our allies and regional partners not to join China's new multilateral financial institution, the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB). Ironically, the Chinese pushed forward with the AIIB to some extent from frustration that the U.S. Congress was blocking approval for increased voting rights of China and other emerging economies in the leading Western-led multilateral institutions, the World Bank and the IMF.
By 2016, the Obama administration had adopted a more nuanced and insightful view on the AIIB when in June Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew acknowledged the acceptable standards of the AIIB, but that the U.S. continued to harbor doubts regarding the lending standards of China's development and policy banks (Lew, 2016). In fact, perhaps we should view the AIIB as the exception that proves the rule regarding concern about transparency and high standards in lending practices of Chinese financial institutions supporting BRI projects. As the AIIB has only a capitalization of $100 billion, already and in the foreseeable future it is Chinese development and policy banks, whose lending practices are far different than established multilateral financial institutions like the World Bank and the ADB, let alone private Western financial institutions, that are funding the lion's share of BRI projects.
The Obama Administration did not so much react to BRI, but more importantly contributed to China's decision to move forward with it in response to the U.S. “Pivot to Asia” and its support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership which were both perceived by Beijing as part of a China containment policy. Aside from the initial negative response to the AIIB, Obama's broader reaction to BRI was one of cool detachment. Although the Asia Pivot was announced with considerable fanfare in 2011/2012, the reality is that the Obama Administration's attention during its second term was dominated in foreign and security policy by the Arab Spring, Syria, the rise of ISIS, and Ukraine. This is not to say that the Asia Pivot was bereft of achievements – certainly the successful negotiations on the TPP was a very significant development – but the series of crises in the Middle East and Europe took up a lot of bandwidth in the administration.
The ambivalence of the Obama Administration's response reflected a dissonance in the U.S. policy community about BRI and uncertainty about China's long-term goals and intentions on the global stage. Chinese officials and commentators to some extent contribute to the uncertainty by shifting the narrative about BRI, but usually selling it in overly glowing public relations terminology highlighting it as a “win-win” initiative that marks a “new type of international relations” that is totally devoid of geopolitical interests. This kind of saccharine posturing only heightens the skepticism among those already inclined to view Chinese regional intentions darkly.
Responses in the U.S. policy community tend to various degrees of alarmism, concern, skepticism, and hope. More alarmist interpretations of BRI will focus on geopolitical goals that BRI and the AIIB and other institutions are tools for China to expand its influence and eventually displace U.S. leadership not only in Asia but globally. Nadege Rolland of the National Bureau of Asian Research described China's goals in terms reminiscent of the eminent Yale geo-strategist Nicholas Spykman in the 1940s to transform Europe into “a mere peninsula at the end of the Asian continent” and relegate the U.S. “to the position of a distant island” (Rolland, 2015; Spykman, 2017). While a report published in 2016 by the Peterson Institute for International Economics described BRI as a “purely mercantile endeavor” without geopolitical goals, it also concluded that if BRI succeeds, it will transform Eurasia into “the largest economic market in the world and may effect a shift away from the dollar-based global financial system,” (Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2016).
Somewhat less alarmist yet quite concerning assessments of BRI will emphasize the danger that many of the poorer states signing on to large BRI projects with dubious economic fundamentals will find themselves deeply indebted to Chinese companies and banks that will compromise their economic and political sovereignty. The recent case of the Sri Lankans being forced to hand over sovereignty of the port of Hambonata to the Chinese because they could not finance the debt is a strong case in point. Many analysts raise the issue of low quality construction and environmental standards and point to failed Chinese development projects in Africa and Latin America. There is also a strong view that much of BRI is motivated by domestic economic and political concerns in China, such as support for mammoth state-owned enterprises in construction-related industries who need to export their over capacity, rather than on sustainable development. Even those more inclined to ascribe more benign intentions on China suggest that Beijing will be too tempted to allow political ambitions to get in the way of economic and commercial goals. As longtime China hand Michael Swaine put it, “perhaps the foremost danger is that in developing and implementing such an action plan, this enormously ambitious undertaking will run afoul of the strong tendency of the Chinese political system to overlook deficiencies and outside sensitivities for the sake of pleasing the top leaders,” (Swaine, 2015).
More skeptical views of BRI suggest that it is nothing more than a Chinese public relations exercise that has no real financial or logistical support and will inevitably fail. Many U.S. analysts are traditionally skeptical of state-led economic programs and see BRI as an “overextension” or “hubris” on the part of China. In a 2015 article, William Overholt stated that BRI is “jeopardized by economic hubris and by China simultaneously antagonizing virtually all of its maritime neighbors,” (Overholt, 2015). The 2016 PIIE report well documents the many barriers to BRI's success, including the fact that security threats in volatile areas may provoke a reaction from the Chinese government and lead to a serious conflict in Pakistan, for example (Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2016).
Hopeful and optimistic assessments of BRI usually start with the premise of the massive needs for infrastructure in Asia alone in the coming decades amounting to more than $8 trillion according to the Asian Development Bank. Obviously the Chinese cannot do this all alone, but their efforts can make a significant and positive impact. The optimists are inclined to believe that BRI projects will provide incentives for Eurasian governments “to provide political stability and a positive investment climate.” Certainly a major goal for China is not only to promote greater economic connectivity with its neighbors, but that increased economic growth will contribute to greater political stability. There also may be commercial opportunities for U.S. companies. A number of projects will also align with U.S. interests to stabilizing and strengthening areas near conflict zones. In a 2015 Brookings report, David Dollar wrote that “there is a risk that the competing initiatives of China and the United States will lead to regional blocs and a disintegration of trade, but it is more likely that Sino-American competition will lead to strengthened institutions and deeper integration throughout the Asia-Pacific,” (Dollar, 2001).
The Trump Administration perspectives on BRI and Eurasia: A work in progress
The Trump Administration initially appeared more positively inclined toward BRI in the first half of 2017. In May, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross released a statement regarding the U.S.–China Economic Cooperation 100-Day Plan in which he said that “The United States recognizes the importance of China's One Belt and One Road initiative and is to send delegates to attend the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing May 14–15.” The Belt and Road Forum was attended by nearly all heads of state involved in BRI, although Japan, India, Australia, Singapore, and most many European countries joined the U.S. in not sending their heads of state. The U.S. was represented at a more junior level by Matthew Pottinger, senior director for Asia at the NSC. Pottinger spoke at the conference, calling for increased transparency from China with regards to bidding for contracts. He added that U.S. companies have much to offer BRI. While Pottinger provided tepid support for BRI, he also criticized the debt burdens, lack of transparency, and potential environmental issues surrounding the initiative.
The administration's lukewarm and ambivalent initial position is complicated by the fact that several large U.S. companies are angling for a piece of the action. Citibank, GE, and Honeywell International are all currently involved in BRI projects. Both GE and Honeywell have indicated that they are looking for ways to produce more goods in China in order to improve their chances in bidding for BRI projects. This position would appear to be at odds with the administration's strong push for bringing more U.S. companies’ manufacturing back home.
Beginning in June with the visit of Indian leader Modi to Washington, the
administration began to outline a new Indo-Pacific Asia strategy that elevated
military, economic, and political cooperation with leading democracies of Asia,
India and Japan. Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi released a joint
statement on June 26th expressing …support bolstering regional economic connectivity through the transparent
development of infrastructure and the use of responsible debt financing
practices, while ensuring respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity,
the rule of law, and the environment; and call on other nations in the
region to adhere to these principles (The White House, 2017b).
The statement was seen as a thinly veiled reference to China and the BRI and seemed to suggest that the U.S. had joined India in opposition to certain parts of the project.
In October on the eve of President Trump's visit to Asia, Secretary of State
Tillerson gave an important speech in Washington before the trip that elaborated the
administration's new Indo-Pacific strategy. We ought to welcome those who want to strengthen the rule of law and further
prosperity and security in the region. In particular, our starting point
should continue to be greater engagement and cooperation with Indo-Pacific
democracies. We are already capturing the benefits of our important
trilateral engagement between the U.S., India, and Japan. As we look ahead,
there's room to invite others, including Australia, to build on the shared
objectives and initiatives (Tillerson, 2017).
In discussing the importance of regional connectivity, Secretary Tillerson also expressed concern about countries taking on unsustainable debt burdens and the problem of non-transparent financing arrangements. While claiming that the United States was not competing with China, he indicated that together with other Asian allies Washington is seeking to provide alternative financing means for regional infrastructure building.
Earlier in October, Defense Secretary James Mattis in testimony before the Senate
Armed Services Committee on Afghanistan was more straightforward in his criticism of
China's BRI saying Senator, regarding “One Belt, One Road,” I think in a globalized world, there
are many belts and many roads, and no one nation should put itself into a
position of dictating “One Belt, One Road.” That said, the “One Belt, One
Road” also goes through disputed territory, and I think that in itself shows
the vulnerability of trying to establish that sort of a dictate (United
States Senate Committee on Armed Services, 2017).
It should be noted, however, that both Secretary Mattis and General Dunford expressed that the United States and China do share common interests on counter-terrorism and supported cooperation in this realm.
The Indo-Pacific orientation and prioritization is also featured in the new U.S.
National Security Strategy released in December 2017 (The White House, 2017a). The
document is quite traditional in its format, but it does frame the competition
between the United States and its democratic allies in the Indo-Pacific in quite
stark adversarial and ideological terms. A geopolitical competition between free and repressive visions of world order
is taking place in the Indo-Pacific region. The region, which stretches from
the west coast of India to the western shores of the United States,
represents the most populous and economically dynamic part of the world. The
U.S. interest in a free and open Indo-Pacific extends back to the earliest
days of our republic.
The BRI is not directly referred to as such, but the regional section of the document
is peppered with critical comments of Chinese trade practices, threats to
sovereignty of its neighbors, and other more oblique phrases, such as the call for
quality infrastructure, that are implied criticisms of BRI. In the regional section
on South and Central Asian, there is mention of the importance of promoting economic
connectivity, but it sounds a lot like the Obama approach. We will encourage the economic integration of Central and South Asia to
promote prosperity and economic linkages that will bolster connectivity and
trade. And we will encourage India to increase its economic assistance in
the region.
One should not expect details about real actions to be taken in such platitudinous documents, but to date we have little other evidence to understand actually what our policy is. The Indo-Pacific framing appears to be an answer to China's Maritime Silk Road, and the new quadrilateral security dialogue with Australia, India, and Japan was formalized on the sidelines of the East Asian Summit in November 2017. But the administration appears bereft of a regional economic strategy having abandoned the TPP.
It is ironic that TPP had played a role in Beijing thinking to launch BRI, and with the Trump Administration abandoning it in January of 2017, the U.S. is left to respond economically primarily with bilateral trade pacts to address China's growing regional economic power. Stable democracies have a comparative advantage, mainly thanks to trust, in building alliances and multilateral institutions that are more difficult for authoritarian states to build and maintain. While Beijing likes to promote the BRI as a harmonious collective of more than 70 member states, all of which are equal, the reality is that the Initiative functions on a bilateral basis in which Beijing holds disproportionate power in relation to its partners.
Two of our Asian allies, Japan and Australia, have taken a less resistant stance to BRI since the United States withdrew from TPP (Harris, 2018). Without U.S. economic leadership in Asia, the likelihood is that allies and partners will feel more pressure to work with the Chinese despite many reservations about the strategic nature of the Initiative and questionable commercial value of many projects.
In contrast to some of our Asian allies, the EU has recently taken a more overtly critical posture toward the BRI. Notably, in April 2018, 27 out of the 28 national EU ambassadors to Beijing signed a report sharply criticizing BRI, denouncing it as a ploy to hamper free trade and give Chinese companies a competitive edge (Heide, Hoppe, Scheuer, & Stratmann, 2018). European states benefit from less dependence on the Chinese economy and geographic distance. Also, EU regulations about transparent and competitive bidding for infrastructure building make them less vulnerable to deals favoring Chinese companies.
One institutional option the Trump Administration should consider is adding a regional economic strategy and cooperation component to the “quad.” This could make the Australia–India–Japan–U.S. “quad” a more relevant regional grouping that should emphasize the Japanese focus on building “quality infrastructure” in line with the best financial practices of leading multilateral assistance banks, including the AIIB, and private sector.
Conclusion
We do need to be careful not to overly focus how we think about Eurasian integration to the Chinese BRI. China is and will be the most active player, but there is no guarantee that the Initiative will even outlive the leadership of Xi Jin-Ping. And as Russian analyst Alexander Gabuev has pointed out, BRI is more of a conglomeration of past and current projects rather than a strategy (Gabuev, 2017). But there is no question that the supercontinent of Eurasia is reconnecting, and every county, large and small, as well as commercial and non-governmental actors, is developing strategies and policies to advance its interests. One of the most interesting recent developments, for example, has been the shift in Uzbek policy toward intra-Central Asian cooperation and policy coordination. 5
A major step forward was taken at the November 2017 conference in Samarkand where the five Central Asian states agreed to regular foreign ministerial and head-of-state meetings.
The Eurasian supercontinent is genuinely multipolar; bookended in the West by Europe and the East by China with a number of established and emerging powers throughout including Japan, India, Russia, Turkey and others. It is frankly hard to imagine how in the coming decades China could somehow emerge as a continental hegemon. If China's foreign economic or security policy is viewed as threatening or dominating, states will likely look both to self-strengthening and balancing relationships as well as multilateral institutions to secure their sovereignty. The United States holds a natural advantage as being an off-shore balancer in this regard, but its foreign economic and security strategy needs far more calibration and coordination to play this role effectively in an increasingly challenging environment.
Successive post-Cold War U.S. administrations have had a difficult time managing a coherent policy toward a reconnecting Eurasia that transcends the typical regionalization of policy to Europe, the Middle East, Russia, South and Central Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia. This mattered less in the 1990s as the key drivers behind the historic phenomenon, the rapid growth of the Chinese and Indian economies and the collapse of the Soviet Union were just beginning to make their impacts. But with the beginning of the new century, the regional stove-piping of our thinking and bureaucratic and academic organization has been exposed as increasingly obsolete and confounds efforts to develop a strategic framework adequate to address the rapidly shifting dynamics we face. For decades U.S. foreign and security policy has been most preoccupied with Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Those regions are no less important today or in the future, but the key difference is greater interactivity between them and others on the supercontinent of Eurasia. It is a cliché to say that we need to see the “big picture,” but if the United States does not take steps to educate new generations of policymakers and does not take organizational steps that capture the “big picture” of a reconnecting Eurasia, our policymaking will remain disjointed, contradictory, and non-strategic.
Conflict of interest
None.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Rianna Jansen, Alexandra Memmott, and Kate Baughman for their superb research assistance and the students of Georgetown graduate seminar “Reconnecting Eurasia” in the Fall of 2017 for their many insights and contributions to the conceptualization of the topic. The author would also like to thank the Carnegie Corporation of New York for their generous support that made this research possible.