Managing Allied Expectations
Allied alternatives to China’s Belt and Road face a central challenge: international politics and infrastructure projects have fundamentally different timelines.
Allied alternatives to China’s Belt and Road face a central challenge: international politics and infrastructure projects have fundamentally different timelines.
Jonathan Black and Daleep Singh, the UK and U.S. G7 Sherpas, respectively, discuss the Build Back Better World (B3W) infrastructure initiative and the G7’s response to China’s Belt & Road Initiative, among other outcomes from the June 2021 summit.
G7 leaders unveiled an initiative to support global infrastructure, launched as China’s Belt and Road Initiative pulls back. To succeed, the United States and its partners must design incentives that mobilize private capital and appeal to leaders in the developing world.
Negotiations between North and South Korea have revived prospects for reconnecting the Korean peninsula. A critical aspect of connectivity is energy infrastructure, which will require analysis and technical planning to make the most of any future political openings. This series of case studies underscores the poor state of North Korea’s existing energy infrastructure, illustrates different models for delivering projects, and considers the strategic implications of different paths forward for the peninsula’s energy connections.
This report, the third in a series on Chinese economic activities in the Western Balkans, provides recommendations for U.S. and partner responses to China’s growing economic and political influence in the region and a “red flags” checklist to help identify activities that warrant further scrutiny.