China’s flagship foreign policy effort could reshape the world’s digital, trade, and transport networks and political ties for decades to come.
Like its predecessors, China’s efforts at unifying Eurasia are driven by several factors: a desire to boost trade, a need to find new markets for firms struggling with overcapacity at home, and a desire to set the rules of the new Silk Road.
The economic dynamism of early European nation-states solidified naval transportation as the foundation of global commerce, giving rise to the great cities of Asia located on coastlines and along key waterways. Today, this 400-year epoch of Asian geopolitics focused on the littoral is changing. The great Eurasian supercontinent is reconnecting internally.
It is not impossible that President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s vision of Khorgos will emerge in its time; but as it turns two, it is already looking likely that Khorgos will struggle to match Astana’s ambitions—a reminder of some of the larger challenges that Nazarbayev and Kazakhstan will have to overcome on the road to 2050.
Given the wars in the Middle East, the muscle-flexing of China towards its neighbors, the strategic challenges to NATO and its allies posed by Russia, and the serious drug wars on the southern border of the United States, attention in Washington is clearly—and understandably—divided. However, a significant challenge to U.S. national security is looming in Eurasia and appears to be receiving limited attention from the U.S. government: Beijing’s “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) initiative and its plan to connect China with Western Europe through overland routes across Central Asia.
The OBOR initiative is comprehensive, focused and personal to President Xi. As with his rapid consolidation of political power, the striking feature of Xi’s efforts in this area is the speed with which he is moving to put his own stamp on China’s foreign affairs.