Italy Joins China's New Silk Road Project

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.