Source: New York Times <\/p>\n
China\u2019s \u201cOne Belt, One Road\u201d initiative, an economic expansion plan that follows the
\ntrade routes of the medieval Tang and Yuan dynasties across Eurasia, is overly
\nambitious because, like all grand strategies, it is aspirational. Yet the future of
\nEurasia is written into its design.<\/p>\n
This new Silk Road serves several goals of China\u2019s leaders, who are intent on
\nmaking their country a full-fledged superpower. It is a branding operation for many
\nof the roads, bridges, pipelines and railroads that China has already built, linking it
\nwith the former-Soviet-controlled countries of energy-rich Central Asia. In the
\nprocess, One Belt, One Road seeks to develop \u2014 and at the same time surround \u2014
\nthe Muslim region of China that abuts Central Asia.<\/p>\n
Further westward, China intends to create an organic alliance with Iran, a state
\nthat because of its immense size, location and population, as well as its long imperial
\ntradition, functions as the fulcrum for the Middle East and Central Asia.
\nThe larger Chinese goal is to dominate Eurasia, which means relegating Russia
\nto a second-tier power.<\/p>\n
China and Russia share a land border of more than 2,600 miles, an
\ninterminable stretch of birch forest separating mainly the Russian Far East from
\nChinese Manchuria, whose particulars were formally agreed upon only in the last
\ndecade. In 1969, the dispatch of about 30 Soviet divisions to this border, and China\u2019s
\ndeployment of 59 divisions in response, deepened the Chinese-Soviet split and
\nallowed for President Richard Nixon\u2019s opening to China and his d\u00e9tente with the
\nSoviet Union.<\/p>\n
In few areas is the Russian state so feeble as in its far east. The ethnic Russian
\npopulation is only an estimated 6 million. Chinese migrants are moving steadily
\nnorth into this vastly underpopulated Siberian back-of-beyond, rich in the natural
\ngas, oil, timber, diamonds and gold that China covets. China lost part of this region
\nto Russia only in the 19th century, when the Qing dynasty was in its death throes,
\nand the rest in the 20th century.<\/p>\n
At the same time, China is vanquishing Russia in Central Asia. In the last
\ndecade, the China National Petroleum Corporation has become Central Asia\u2019s main
\nenergy player. China pumps Kazakh oil to Europe and also to China through a
\npipeline, and the Chinese transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to western
\nChina. Chinese money has also been coursing through Central Asia to build power
\ngrids and transportation infrastructure, altering the landscape and forming the
\nbackbone of the One Belt, One Road plan.<\/p>\n
The prize is Iran. Lying at the other end of Central Asia from China, Iran has 80
\nmillion people and straddles the oil and gas fields of the Caspian Sea and the Persian
\nGulf, providing Beijing with the incentive to build rail lines through the Iranian
\nplateau, make energy deals with Tehran, use Chinese state companies to excavate
\nIranian mines, and send armies of entrepreneurs there. Russia\u2019s Eurasian Economic
\nUnion, including Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, was formed in 2014
\nto counter China\u2019s growing influence in Eurasia.<\/p>\n
Russia is not only losing out to China in its far east and Central Asia, but in
\nEurope, too. While Moscow has been undermining the independence of the former
\nSoviet republics in the Baltic and Black Sea basins through subversion and military
\nincursions, Beijing has been strengthening trade ties throughout Europe. The Trump
\nadministration\u2019s aversion to free trade \u2014 combined with its apparent ambivalence
\nabout defending European allies \u2014 has provided China with an opportunity in
\nEurope, further enhancing Beijing\u2019s plans for the western terminus of One Belt, One
\nRoad. China\u2019s gains will weaken not only American influence in Europe, but Russian
\ninfluence, too.<\/p>\n
For example, Greece, because of its tensions with the European Union and its
\nOrthodox religion, should be drifting closer to Russia. But it is slipping into China\u2019s
\neconomic grasp, as the port of Piraeus becomes another western endpoint of the new
\nSilk Road. China is also competing for nuclear power plants and other energy
\ninfrastructure in Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic. President
\nVladimir Putin\u2019s compulsion to challenge the West \u2014 while China under President Xi
\nJinping is quietly on the march all around him \u2014 demonstrates his strategic
\nshortsightedness at a time of Russian economic vulnerability.<\/p>\n
China and Russia refer to their relationship as a \u201ccomprehensive strategic
\npartnership,\u201d in which Russia supplies oil to China and the two countries hold joint
\nmilitary exercises. And, officially, their relationship has rarely been better.
\nBut trade is lopsided in China\u2019s favor; the fall in energy prices has made China
\nconsiderably less dependent on Russia. Russia sells arms to China\u2019s adversaries,
\nIndia and Vietnam. And China has copied Russian weapons designs.<\/p>\n
These deeper geopolitical realities mean China and Russia will be only allies of
\nconvenience. And because the Beijing-Moscow rivalry is long-term, understated and
\nfocused on remote terrain, thus lacking in appeal for the news media, it is easy to
\nignore.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s geopolitical ambitions, like Russia\u2019s, arise out of internal insecurity. The
\nChinese state is weakest in the west \u2014 that is, in historic East Turkestan \u2014 home to
\nthe Muslim Turkic Uighur minority, which the dominant ethnic group, the Han
\nChinese, view with trepidation.<\/p>\n
Islam represents an alternative identity for the Uighurs, one independent of the
\nChinese state. Unlike the Tibetans with their Dalai Lama, the Uighurs don\u2019t have an
\nelite leadership with which to communicate with Beijing. Rather, they embody an
\nanarchic force that could be provoked into upheaval by an environmental disaster or
\nother emergency. China\u2019s One Belt, One Road initiative, by joining the rest of Turkic
\nCentral Asia economically and politically closer to China, is meant in part to deny the
\nUighurs a rear base in an uprising.<\/p>\n
China can be stopped only by its own internal demons. As Samuel P.
\nHuntington wrote in his classic 1968 study, \u201cPolitical Order in Changing Societies,\u201d
\nthe more complex a society gets, the more responsive its institutions must become,
\notherwise the creation of a large middle class is destabilizing.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s autocracy, precisely because of its successes, could face a crisis of
\nlegitimacy as social, ethnic and religious tensions intensify in both Han and Uighur
\nareas, especially in the event of any further slowdowns in economic growth that
\nthwart the rising expectations of its people. That\u2019s why the ultimate success of One
\nBelt, One Road will be determined less by what happens in Central Asia and
\nelsewhere than by what happens inside China itself.<\/p>\n
The United States, which has longtime allies to defend against Chinese bullying
\nin East Asia and against Russian bullying in Central and Eastern Europe, is helped
\nby the quiet geopolitical rivalry between Beijing and Moscow. Because the contest
\nbetween China and Russia is largely determined by their geographical proximity and
\ntherefore must persist, America will have the greater possibility to maneuver,
\nhardening or softening its position toward each power as the situation demands.
\nThe United States must only prevent China from dominating the Eastern
\nHemisphere to the same extent that it has dominated the Western Hemisphere. But
\nit must do this without selling out Central Europe and parts of the Middle East to
\nRussia.<\/p>\n
The solution to this conundrum for the United States lies outside geopolitics. It
\nis precisely because Washington has no territorial ambitions in Eurasia that
\nAmericans are not viewed with suspicion by local populations there the way the
\nChinese and Russians are. By relentlessly promoting free trade, human rights and
\ncivil society America will gain credibility with societies undergoing rapid social
\ntransformation across the region.<\/p>\n
This is how the United States gains entry into Eurasia without crudely trying to
\nbalance one power off against the other at a moment when the Chinese-Russian
\nrivalry is far more subtle than it was in Nixon\u2019s time. The very economic
\ndevelopment that China promotes will make societies along the path of the new Silk
\nRoad \u2014 particularly in the sterile dictatorships of Iran and Central Asia \u2014 harder to
\nmanage, and thus to rule.<\/p>\n
It is precisely the universal values that President Trump disdains that can now
\npay geopolitical dividends. A populist-nationalist agenda that confines American
\ninterests to North America will only marginalize the United States on the other side
\nof the world.<\/p>\n
Robert D. Kaplan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a
\nsenior adviser at Eurasia Group, is the author of the forthcoming \u201cThe Return of Marco
\nPolo\u2019s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Source: New York Times China\u2019s \u201cOne Belt, One Road\u201d initiative, an economic expansion plan that follows the trade routes of the medieval Tang and Yuan dynasties across Eurasia, is overly…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3985,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-3986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3986\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3986"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=3986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}