Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project

If the US wants to counter China's Belt and Road Project, it should offer a suitable alternative instead of merely talking about how it's debt trap diplomacy.

Point taken.

Because now I think about it, the world bank and other western trade facilities are also, at heart, simply "debt trap diplomacy" as well.

We need to come up with something new.

Ahem, Marshall's plan? It also left the affected countries better off, not indebted (although I doubt that China will have many attached strings in Italy's case)

It’s more like your friend pointing out your bad spending habits and telling you not to get a payday loan.

Countering OBOR is only on the agenda of DoD and some policy wonks. What happened here ? Almost nothing.

An ailing economy that has high youth unemployment rate and anemic growth and cannot control its monetary policy is willing to take money from who ever is willing to give. Big Deal! When Italian Navy is doing war games with China.. call me.

This is a whole lot of symbolism and a costly one for those putting money. Its not Americans who do not want this dog and pony show, its the Germans.

Russians and Chinese are playing the same game, with different tactics and some elements of western media are eating it. They are weak internally and use these external symbolism as a "proof of strength" back home.

Right, Italy should leverage an Orwellian authoritarian regime to start a bidding war to build its infrastructure in exchange for implied future foreign relations favors and it's clearly the US's fault here for not playing its role as bidder.

It is worth pointing out that there have been several responses. China dominates the US' defence strategy.

One of the centrepieces of Obama's foreign policy was a comprehensive 'pivot to Asia', and the trans-pacific partnership free trade agreement. In fact, many argue that the Belt and Road Initiative is a response to the efforts of the US to contain China.

More recently, the Trump administration has assigned $60bn to the 'Overseas Private Investment Corporation', a US government agency that will use to the funds to underwrite far larger sums of private capital, and invest it around the world.

It is a long-standing part of US grand strategy to use India to balance against China, which lines up with the fact that the biggest investments of the new Silk Road have been to Pakistan.

India, Japan and various African countries set up the 'Asia-Africa Growth Corridor' a couple of years ago, a direct rival to the Belt and Road Initiative.

Why not join rather than counter? Surely a deal could be wored out that would fit the theme, e.g., US could let China companies build and manage HSR, China could let US cloud vendors operate freely.

That's a nice thought but doesn't balance well with the $1 trillion debt to China that US themselves have. Almost as if the US doesn't want other countries to prosper using Chinese money. Goes well with the America First slogan.

To be clear, I'm not saying that the Chinese money doesn't come with baggage. However I think it's ridiculous to believe that the US is on some altruistic lookout for others here, as opposed to just being interested in maximising US benefits.

Like what? The current US position basically amounts to telling the international audience to be wary of China's payday loan scheme. Are you suggesting the US should get in the payday loan business too, as an incrementally (?) better alternative to China? Or are you suggesting there's a bipartisan majority in US Congress to hand out charity or low interest loans by increasing foreign aid?

The US has an overwhelmingly domestic economy and export driven global infrastructure development isn't exactly an American strength. In so far as the US influences European or Asian countries it appears to be mostly by military, cultural or political means.

Up until now the US, economically, has mostly functioned as a consumer of European and Asian goods, so it is hard to imagine how they could offer an alternative to OBOR. For China it's a way to offload their export driven surplus and creating new markets, which is something that the US isn't really positioned to do.

> The US has an overwhelmingly domestic economy

Of the 10 of the World's most valuable companies, 8 are American. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook didn't get there by concentrating only to American markets.

Actually they sort of do. Domestic / foreign revenue is about split for Facebook and Microsoft, and Amazon makes twice as much in NA than outside of it, tendency increasing.

And most importantly, even those global companies constitute only a fraction of the entire US economy. Most of the US economy is not organised in publicly traded, globalized, businesses.

The bottom line is, as can be seen in the American export and import balance, a strong tendency to consume global goods rather than sell them. The reverse is true for China. That's why China pursues an expansionist economic foreign policy, whereas American economic policy is largely divorced from its foreign politics.