America's foundational contributions to China's Belt & Road Initiative (BRI)

Western BRI discourse, especially commentary by US strategic analysts and even cabinet-level leaders, not to speak of responsible officials making policy-statements or drafting high-level executive- and legislative branch documents, and contributing to the rapidly growing China-focused academic literature have, over the past five years since Xi Jinping proclaimed his BRI vision, made clear their disdain for the initiative, and underscored their suspicions that Beijing's BRI vision is, in fact, a geopolitical stratagem aimed at non-violently supplanting America at the core of the post-Soviet international security system, dressed up as an innocuous geo-economic plan to gird the planet with Chinese-designed infrastructure, trade and regulatory norms with all roads leading to Beijing.

Repeated ad nauseum, not only by US officials, media-observers and academic researchers, this view has become the mainstream not only in the USA, but also in US-allied and -aligned states, especially across Western Europe, Japan, India and Australia. Coincidentally, the latter three, led by the USA, have recently revived their 2007-vintage Quadrilateral Initiative, or the Quad, to deter feared Chinese aggression across the newly-proclaimed Indo-Pacific stretching, in the words of the recently retired Commander of the US Pacific Command, now renamed the US IndoPacific Command, 'from Hollywood to Bollywood'. Naval drills, policy coordination and official remarks by the leaders of the four states make clear their collective determination to stop any Chinese attempts or even intent - repeatedly denied by Beijing - to erode American and allied force-projection capabilities all along China's periphery, defeat the PLA in combat if China crosses certain 'red lines', and extend America's systemic primacy into the indefinite future.

It is in this context that the BRI has been viewed by leaders, legislators and their advisors in these capitals, although their counterparts from at least 68 countries in Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America and Oceania appear to have voluntarily joined China in benefiting from the BRI. This notable dichotomy, while clear and widely understood, does not explain the BRI's historical evolution. The BRI's terrestrial component, the Silk Road Economic Belt, an overland network of roads, railways, airports, transport hubs, fibre-optic cables, oild and gas pipelines, and coordinated regulatory frameworks easing and optimising their trans-Eurasian utilisation, in fact, originated in America, with US visionaries envisaging, promoting and advancing the cause of a united Euro-Asian economic space, as early as the late 1980s, before politicians and their assorted advisers had begun considering the possibility of the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the end of the Cold War. It was that American intellectual spark, nurtured by a few farsighted men and women, which illuminated the new world of possibilities. Without it, and direct intervention by governments and multilateral agencies based in America and its allies, there would probably be no BRI today.

American prophets imagine a new Silk Road

Western imagery of Eurasia and imagination of Asia played a significant role in creating a European collective and ideational identity in opposition to the non-European-inhabited continental landmass stretching away eastward. Early in the 20th century, the eminent British geopolitician, Halford Mackinder, posited, ‘European civilization is, in a very real sense, the outcome of the secular struggle against Asiatic invasion.’[1] His seminal construct of the ‘world island’, its two-tiered ‘peripheries’ and the need to dominate this territory or, at least prevent it from falling to hostile hands, shaped Western strategic thinking for over a century. This motivation acquired added salience following the Soviet collapse and the advent of US primacy which began confronting challenges in the early-21st century.[2] While official and semi-official analyses viewed the possible rise of ‘near-peer rivals’ in Eurasia, namely Russia and China, Western thinkers operating outside state-funded national security establishments envisioned a non-competitive, indeed collaborative, vision of the future.

One of them, the US politician and co-founder, with his wife Helga LaRouche, of the Washington-based Schiller Institute, Lyndon LaRouche, promoted such a vision, with some success in influencing segments of trans-Atlantic opinion.[3] In October 1988, LaRouche briefed the media in West Berlin on ‘US Policy Toward the Reunification of Germany’, prophesying the collapse of COMECON economies, and urging food-support to Poland so that a ‘majority of Germans on both sides’ desired reunification. In December, he assigned a group of Schiller Institute specialists to examine prospects for establishing a Paris-Berlin-Vienna ‘productive triangle’. In January 1990, Schiller Institute published LaRouche’s book on a proposed 320,000 sq.km. European economic area comprising a population of 92m concentrated in 10 large industrial areas, from which he envisaged infrastructural corridors, linked with high-speed railways, radiating in all directions, ‘providing a basis for upgrading living standards’ across Eurasia.[4]

At Schiller’s March 1991 ‘Infrastructure for a Free Europe’ conference in Berlin, LaRouche’s paper – as he was a prisoner in America since January 1989 – urging the construction of ‘a sphere of cooperation for mutual benefit among sovereign states’ of Europe and Asia, was read out to over 100 participants from 17 countries. In October 1991, at the first All-European Conference on Transport in Prague, Schiller Institute staff distributed literature describing energy-and-technology-intensive economic corridors radiating from Europe’s ‘productive triangle’. In November, 400 delegates from almost three-dozen countries, including former-Soviet republics, gathered at Schiller’s Berlin conference on ‘The Productive Triangle: Cornerstone of an All-Eurasian Program of Eurasian Development’.

In 1992, Schiller economists detailed the ‘spiral arms’ or economic/infrastructure corridors radiating from the ‘productive triangle’, claiming resonances in Beijing’s ‘Eurasian Land-Bridge’ initiatives as Chinese-Kazakh rail connectivity became operational in June 1992. This made it possible for the first time to travel 11,000km from China’s Yellow Sea port of Lianyungang across Eurasia to Rotterdam.[5] LaRouche’s political action committee and the Schiller Institute mounted a privately-funded campaign aimed at persuading the American political mainstream to abandon its ‘policy of antagonism towards China, and Russia’, and embrace Eurasian economic integration instead.[6] This proved to be a particularly complex undertaking.

In late 1993, the European Union championed Jacques Delors’ eponymous ‘Delors Plan’ to extend Western Europe’s high-speed railway network into former Soviet-bloc Central- and Eastern European countries, starting with a Berlin-Warsaw section, and raising the prospects for the eventual fashioning of a ‘continental bridge’ linking Europe to ports in Asian Russia and, later, China. Unlike Schiller Institute’s theoretical proposition, the EU’s more pragmatic plan excluded the war-torn Balkans. In December 1994, the recently freed Lyndon LaRouche presided over Schiller’s conference on ‘Global Economic Recovery and the Cultural Renaissance’ in Eltville, Germany, leading a seminar on Eurasian development corridors attended by leading figures from China, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe.

This led, on 7-9 May 1996, to the UNDP, the UN Department for Development Support and Management Services, the WBG, EU Commission, ADB and other multilateral and international organisations helping the Chinese government to host a three-day ‘Symposium on Economic Development along New Euro-Asia Continental Bridge’ in Beijing. More than 400 delegates representing governments, academia and businesses discussed the status of socio-economic development across Eurasia, ‘thereby, laying the groundwork for a new continental bridge to cover a vast area of the Eurasian continent.’[7] In addition to ministerial-level officials from China and other participating states, and non-governmental contributors to the Eurasian economic-infrastructural integration discourse, co-founder of the Schiller Institute, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, addressed the gathering, focusing on ‘Building the Silk Road Land-Bridge: The Basis for the Mutual Security Interests of Asia and Europe.’

Coincidentally, around this time, Iran and Turkmenistan announced the opening of the Mashhad-Ashgabad railway line, enabling direct rail-transport from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia and further east and west, potentially knitting much of the southern half of Eurasia into a cohesive transport network. In January 1997, Lyndon LaRouche addressed a Washington conference, urging the Clinton Administration to sponsor a ‘New Bretton Woods system’, reorganising the world economy to prevent disruptive boom-bust cycles, and recognise the global merit of the ‘Eurasian Land-Bridge’ programme. Reinforcing and explaining her husband’s persistent thematic refrain, Helga LaRouche published a commentary titled, ‘Eurasian Land-Bridge: A new era for mankind’, which was widely circulated across the Atlantic by the Schiller Foundation.[8] In October-November 1997, she presented a paper on ‘Principles of Foreign Policy in the Coming Era of the New Eurasian Land-Bridge’ at a conference themed ‘Asia-Europe Economic and Trade Relations in the 21st Century and the 2nd Eurasian Bridge’ hosted by Beijing with multilateral financial assistance. By then, railway connectivity between coastal China, Central Asia and Russia was a reality; Europe beckoned.[9]

A year-and-a-half later, in July 1999, Schiller’s Indian representative, Ramtanu Maitra, convened an academic seminar in Delhi with Russian, Chinese, and Indian scholars discussing triangular collaboration across Eurasia. R.B. Rybakov, Chairman of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Oriental Studies, Ma Jiali, a professor at the Chinese Institute for Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), and Devendra Kaushik, Head of the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, discussed challenges and prospects. With Rybakov presiding, the scholars established a ‘Triangular Association’ with the goal of promoting Indo-Russian-Chinese cooperation in forging a shared vision of Eurasia’s post-Cold War future of peace, progress and prosperity. The effort failed for a combination of distractions and difficulties: fallout from the ‘Asian Economic Crisis’, the September 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington and America’s subsequent ‘Global War on Terrorism’, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then, the Great Recession.[10] Nonetheless, seeds had been sown in the febrile post-Cold War intellectual hotbeds. Ideas analysed at Schiller’s many conferences and events began gelling into policy-frameworks in early 21st century.

The LaRouches were not the only American visionaries imagining a new, post-Cold War, inter-connected Eurasian future. Schiller’s protracted endeavours eventually percolated into the US academia. S. Frederick Star, a Johns Hopkins University scholar specialising in Central Asian studies, presided over a conference themed ‘Partnership, Trade and Development in Greater Central Asia’ in Kabul, Afghanistan, in April 2006, amidst the US-led counter-Taliban campaign raging across much of the country. A number of mostly Western specialists presented papers which were later edited into a volume titled ‘The New Silk Roads: Transport and Trade in Greater Central Asia’, and published in 2007.[11] By this time, the US Congress was already actively exploring legislative options supportive of US engagement with the region and regional cohesion, with a view to strengthening America’s strategic influence and footprint there. So, the general concept of Eurasian transport-and-trade integration, with many separate but inter-connected points of origin, including scholarly American minds, came together early in the new century. Execution, dogged by practical, political, financial, regulatory and engineering challenges, was slow. Beijing’s assumption of leadership, with much multilateral support, propelled the drive to forge BRI.

Washington initiates a 'New Silk Road' proposal

Washington’s accretive proposition began as a modestly functional, hydrocarbon-fuelled programme which, however, originated elsewhere. Central Asian oil-and-gas reserves were a key source of Soviet wealth before 1992, when the Stans assumed ownership of assets within their newly-restored borders. With political fluidity reshaping the Soviet periphery as Mikhail Gorbachev steered the Soviet Union away from Cold War confrontations with the West, the proposal to build a natural gas pipeline linking Central Asian energy reserves to energy-starved South Asian markets, especially India, looked realistic. It acquired some urgency since 1989, shortly after Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan and made it possible to imagine a more benign future for Central Asia-South Asia relations.

That was when the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline project was mooted. This 3,000km pipeline would carry Iranian gas from its South Pars field across Pakistan’s Balochistan and Sindh provinces to India, and would cost $7.5bn to build.[1] A spur-line would off-take some of the gas for the Pakistani industrial-commercial hub in Karachi. After years of talks which stalled owing to disputes over delivery-price, transit fees and less openly articulated political-strategic differences, the IPI became mired in minutiae. But it energised those who viewed any expansion of Iran’s possible influence as a threat to their interests.

The result was a counter-proposal to build a pipeline linking Turkmenistan’s massive gas reserves to the growing Indian market via Afghanistan and Pakistan. This 1,800km Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline would cost $7.6bn to build and, when completed, would move a maximum of 33bcm of Turkmen natural gas annually for 30 years.[2] Discussions of US interest vis-à-vis post-Soviet Central Asian states grew to a crescendo in the late-1990s when public discourse precipitated Congressional action. Legislators amended the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to focus US aid on ‘economic and political independence of the countries of the South Caucasus and Central Asia,’ to this end enacting the ‘Silk Road Strategy Act of 1999’. The Act, effective vis-à-vis Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, was explained on the strength of America’s strategic and geo-economic imperatives[3]:

·        The development of strong political, economic, and security ties among countries of the South Caucasus and Central Asia and the West will foster stability in this region, which is vulnerable to political and economic pressures from the south, north, and east.

·        The development of open market economies and open democratic systems in the countries of the South Caucasus and Central Asia will provide positive incentives for international private investment, increased trade, and other forms of commercial interactions with the rest of the world.

·        Many of the countries of the South Caucasus have secular Muslim governments that are seeking closer alliance with the United States and that have diplomatic and commercial relations with Israel.

·        The region of the South Caucasus and Central Asia could produce oil and gas in sufficient quantities to reduce the dependence of the United States on energy from the volatile Persian Gulf region.

·        United States foreign policy and international assistance should be narrowly targeted to support the economic and political independence as well as democracy building, free market policies, human rights, and regional economic integration of the countries of the South Caucasus and Central Asia.

The Silk Road Strategy Act, which provided the legal framework for and the juridical basis of subsequent diplomacy and aid, stipulated US policy vis-à-vis countries of the South Caucasus and Central Asia on the merit of US normative, grand-strategic and economic objectives[4]:

·        to promote and strengthen independence, sovereignty, democratic government, and respect for human rights;

·        to promote tolerance, pluralism, and understanding and counter racism and anti-Semitism;

·        to assist actively in the resolution of regional conflicts and to facilitate the removal of impediments to cross-border commerce;

·        to promote friendly relations and economic cooperation;

·        to help promote market-oriented principles and practices;

·        to assist in the development of the infrastructure necessary for communications, transportation, education, health, and energy and trade on an East-West axis in order to build strong international relations and commerce between those countries and the stable, democratic, and market-oriented countries of the Euro-Atlantic Community; and

·        to support United States business interests and investments in the region.

Washington was strongly engaged in bilateral diplomacy with these countries since the mid-1990s, developing individual policy-prescriptions relevant to each country as seen from the US perspective. Much of the preliminary effort generated bilateral investment treaties  (BIT) crystallising the parameters, purposes and procedures for making and securing US commercial investment in these struggling economies, and establishing the frameworks for resolving any future disputes between US firms investing in the countries and their respective governments[5]:

·        Armenia: The US-Armenia BIT entered into force on 29 March 1996

·        Azerbaijan: The US-Azerbaijan BIT entered into force on 2 August 2001 and soon encountered several disputes between US investors and the Azeri Government

·        Georgia: The US-Georgia BIT entered into force on 17 August 1997

·        Kazakhstan: The US-Kazakh BIT entered into force on 12 Jan 1994. Over the Treaty’s first nine years, four US firms engaged in dispute with Kazakh authorities. One firm filed an appeal with a US court against Astana’s refusal to license the export of Kazakh uranium, but its case was dismissed; a second firm disputed Astana’s failure to repay debts owed to it but then negotiated a resolution before arbitration procedures were completed; a third firm obtained favourable arbitration outcome on Astana’s expropriation of its oil-field concession before negotiating a resolution; a fourth firm claimed that Astana expropriated its real-estate development assets without paying appropriate compensation, and moved the dispute to international arbitration.

·        Kyrgyzstan: The US-Kyrgyz BIT entered into force on 12 January 1994. A US telecommunications firm challenged the Kyrgyz government’s alleged breach of terms on which the US firm had established a joint venture, and moved to a hearing by the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC)

·        Tajikistan: Negotiations on a US-Tajikistan BIT were suspended in April 1993

·        Turkmenistan: Negotiations on a US-Turkmen BIT were suspended in March 1998

·        Uzbekistan: The US and Uzbek governments signed a BIT on 16 December 1994. After the US government undertook not to enforce the Treaty until Tashkent completed economic reforms to ensure Uzbek policies did not violate the Treaty’s terms, the US Senate advised the Executive Branch on its conditional consent on ratification. US-Uzbek relations significantly improved following the accession of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev to office, as highlighted during his May 2018 meeting with Donald Trump at the White House, but the BIT remained suspended.[6]

Parallel to Washington’s economic and strategic trajectories converging in Central Asia, US multinationals and regional actors, too, achieved a measure of consonance. On 15 March 1995, promoted by Argentina’s energy-firm Bridas, Pakistan – a country whose economic prospects were hobbled by energy-shortages, and Turkmenistan, Central Asia’s poorest state despite its gas-reserves, signed a MoU to build the TAPI pipeline. This led to US giant Unocal’s joint-venture with Saudi oil-firm Delta to propose an alternative pipeline. Unocal and Delta signed an agreement with President Saparmurat Niyazov on 21 October 1995. Unocal led an international alliance of energy-firms, and the Turkmen government, in incorporating the CentGas Consortium in Ashgabad on 27 October 1997 with the objective of building the TAPI pipeline. The 1,600km pipeline would start at Turkmenistan’s Dauletabad gas field, cross into north-western Afghanistan, run parallel to the Herat-Nimruz-Kandahar Highway, cross into Pakistan’s Balochistan province, pass Quetta, Dera Ghazi Khan and Multan, finally reaching the Indian border at Fazilka. Carrying 33bcm of natural gas annually, it would cost $10bn.[7]

Since the pipeline would have to cross Afghan territory, CentGas needed Taliban-ruled Afghanistan’s consent.[8] Shortly after CentGas was incorporated, the US Ambassador to Pakistan, Robert Oakley, underscoring strong US interest in and support for the TAPI project, moved from diplomatic service to the pipeline-builder’s management. In January 1998, Kabul’s Taliban Government selected CentGas over Bridas for the construction of the TAPI pipeline across Afghan territory and signed an agreement authorising CentGas to proceed. In June 1998, Russia’s Gazprom sold its 10% stake in the undertaking, making the project largely US-led. After al-Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salam on 7 August 1998, and Washington accused Osama bin-Laden of masterminding the attacks, Taliban leader Mullah Omar proclaimed support for bin Laden. Pipeline negotiations ended and Unocal withdrew from the consortium in December 1998.[9] The project suffered from the loss of direct US engagement for a dozen years when US, Western and global attention veered to more acute concerns, and regional interest became TAPI’s prime mover.

In May 2002, leaders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkmenistan met in Islamabad, Pakistan, and agreed on jointly advancing the project. Oil and gas ministers from the three countries comprised a new steering committee to guide and monitor progress. At its first formal session in Ashgabat in July 2002, this supervisory committee requested the ADB to finance TAPI-related studies. In December 2002, the ADB extended the first tranche of such assistance. After the partner-governments asked the ADB to assume TAPI’s secretariat functions in 2003, ADB launched its first technical assessment. It examined TAPI’s planned pipeline-route, preliminary design, cost estimates and environmental impact analyses. ADB specialists also conducted market studies ascertaining gas demand in Pakistan and northern India, a risk analysis, and a risk mitigation study covering likely downstream difficulties for consumers in case of supply disruptions along the TAPI route.

ADB analysts recommended construction of underground storage facilities in Pakistan to counteract unforeseen consequences of supply disruption, an inter-party agreement on host-government responsibilities, gas transportation, and gas-sale-and-purchase, soliciting bids from private corporations interested in building the pipeline, and urged the parties to secure appropriate legal advice for formalising these agreements.[10] America’s war in Afghanistan, however, prevented realisation of Washington’s TAPI programme. In December 2010, the Presidents of Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and India’s Energy Minister, met in Ashgabat to negotiate a framework for reviving the project. They signed an inter-governmental agreement authorising construction of the 1,700km, $7.6bn pipeline while the four energy ministers signed a more detailed framework document. Although the leaders exuded enthusiasm, the pipeline’s route across Afghanistan’s insurrection-afflicted Helmand and Kandahar provinces and Pakistan’s Balochistan province raised questions which remained unanswered. ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda called it a ‘historic project’, but admitted it would not be an ‘easy’ project to implement.[11] He proved right.

The challenges confronting TAPI, and the opportunity costs flowing from failed implementation, led Afghanistan and Pakistan to explore alternatives with Tajikistan and the Kyrgyz Republic, two economies with surplus energy resources. This parallel endeavour followed the TAPI template. In May 2006, ministers from the four governments met in Islamabad, where they agreed to explore electricity trading prospects. At a second meeting in October in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, they agreed to fashion a Central Asia South Asia Regional Electricity Market (CASAREM), initially by building the transmission and trading infrastructure capable of transmitting 1,000MW to Pakistan and 300MW to Afghanistan. The project was named CASA-1000. In August 2008, they established an inter-governmental council to drive project-implementation. As with TAPI, the ADB funded preliminary CASA-1000 feasibility studies. In 2011, the four partners asked the IFC to engage with project designing and –implementation. In 2012, they signed bilateral agreements with the IFC enabling the latter to lead selection of developers and operators for the project.[12] Thus what began as a US initiative to link Central Asian and South Asian economies, turned into a World Bank-managed regional energy-market project.

In 2011, Washington formally launched its New Silk Road Initiative with the aim to reintegrate Afghanistan regionally by reviving traditional trade routes and rebuilding connective infrastructure destroyed in decades of warfare. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the initiative as ‘the economic side’ of America’s Afghan strategy because ‘we all recognize that Afghanistan’s political future is linked to its economic future – and in fact to the future of the entire region.’ The Deputy Secretary of State, William Burns, subsequently reinforced the emphasis on economic linkages providing the bases for future regional stability and prosperity.[13] America sought to link Afghanistan to Central Asia, Pakistan, India ‘and beyond’, with focus on four ‘key areas’[14]:

·        Regional energy markets: Central Asia, ‘a repository vast energy resources’, could help South Asia’s 1.6bn-plus population sustain economic growth. Directing some of the former’s resources to the latter via Afghanistan ‘would be a win-win’. America supported the CASA-1000 power grid project with $15m after the World Bank offered $526m to the project in March 2014. Washington also spent over $1.7bn in building transmission lines, hydropower plants and associated features in Afghanistan since 2010, and also added 1,000 MW to Pakistan’s power grid, helping 16m people.

 ·        Trade and transport: Improved trade and transit across Central- and South Asia required ‘reliable roads, railways, bridges, and border crossing facilities’, as well as harmonised customs regulations, multilateral trade institutions and collaborative efforts to erode barriers. The USA built/rehabilitated over 3,000km of roads in Afghanistan, aided Kazakh and Afghan accession to the WTO, and supported formalisation of the 2010 Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit-Trade Agreement and the Cross-Border Transport Agreement linking Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

 ·        Customs and border operations: Washington claimed credit for encouraging increased speed and efficiency of border crossings, enhancing border security and improving frontier-regional governance so as to prevent the trafficking of weapons, drugs, other contrabands and humans. It noted that Central Asian intra-regional trade had grown by 49% since 2009, average costs of border-crossing across the region had fallen by 15% since 2011, and streamlined customs procedures at seven Afghan border-crossing points had reduced release time from eight days in 2009 to three-and-a-half hours in 2013, generating annual savings of $38m.

·        Businesses and people-to-people: America considered regional economic connectivity to signify much more than ‘infrastructure, border crossings, and the movement of goods and services’. Washington’s encouragement of sharing ideas and expanding markets included fresh opportunities for the youth, women and minorities, and boosting stability and prosperity. To this end, Washington funded hundreds of post-graduate scholarships for Afghan students across Central Asia, sponsored the Central Asia-Afghanistan Women’s Economic Symposium, and South Asia Women’s Entrepreneurship Symposium supporting thousands of businesswomen across the two regions, and financed regional trade meetings and conferences in various Central- and South Asian cities generating trade deals worth over $15m.

In short, for several years before Xi Jinping proclaimed Beijing’s BRI vision and launched China’s ‘trillion-dollar project of the century’, the USA was engaged in fashioning its own New Silk Road programme, albeit one narrowly focused on a very much smaller subregional scale. Linkages between America’s grand-strategic objectives across Central Asia, indeed the Eurasian ‘world-island’, were a principal driver motivating the exercise. The steady accretion of a collaborative palimpsest called the SCO provided some of the impetus, while the perceived need to draw the combat campaign in Afghanistan to an end lent additional urgency. US Central Command (CENTCOM), responsible for the Afghan operations, under General David Petraeus, initiated some of the early blueprints for building a peaceful Afghanistan at the heart of a prosperous Central Asia-South Asia subregional construct, as US analysts recorded.[15] Petraeus’s successor, General James Mattis, focusing on immediate combat-related exigencies, shifted supervision of the New Silk Road Initiative to the Department of State. While Clinton and her team drove the initiative with diplomatic panache, energy and urgency were eroded.[16]

 America's Lower-Mekong Initiative prepares the ground

Washington also worked on another subregional collaborative enterprise before China’s Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) Mechanism took flight. In July 2009, Clinton met her counterparts from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam on the sidelines of a regional gathering in Phuket, Thailand. Establishing the Lower Mekong Initiative, the ministers agreed to deepen cooperation in the areas of the environment, health, education, and infrastructure development. Myanmar joined the group three years later. Although the original framework was expansive, US focus and resources underscored three more limited goals[1]:

·        Strengthening water management: Washington pledged to support lower riparian states in developing environmental protection and environmentally sustainable projects to ‘help address future challenges’ flowing from the consequences of climate change. This would include the development of a predictive modelling tool called ‘Forecast Mekong’ which would aid the Lower Mekong countries in better appreciating climate change-related challenges and preparing appropriate policy responses. America’s Mississippi River Commission signed a ‘sister-river’ agreement with the rather less vigorous Mekong River Commission with a view to developing a partnership, enabling Lower Mekong basin states to improve the management of trans-border water issues. Washington also aided projects designed to help its partners to develop practices and regimes of using and exploiting water and forest resources in a sustainable fashion.

 ·        Supporting education: America funded more than 500 annual exchange programmes involving students and scholars from the region through the Fulbright Programme and other educational projects. Both the US government and private American charities worked to expand basic education facilities and enrolment among school-age children in regional countries, and develop broadband network coverage across these countries, focusing on rural communities. US funding helped many regional leaders to improve their English language skills so as to better engage with external interlocutors. Washington further expanded its International Visitors’ Programme covering the region to bring over officials and practitioners engaged in education, health and environment- related professions to help them acquire best-practice knowledge from US counterparts, and develop inter-bureaucratic relations.  

        Improving health systems: American health-care assistance to regional governments covered a catchment area directly affecting 2m people, while US resources and efforts ‘contributed to the 50% reduction in HIV/AIDS infection rate’ in Cambodia. The USA boosted regional programmes aimed at containing and countering regional threats from pandemic outbreaks of influenza. Washington also supported Lower Mekong partners in tracking, diagnosing and treating multi-drug resistant forms and cases of malaria and tuberculosis. In June 2010, the US and Vietnamese governments jointly sponsored the first US-Lower Mekong Health Conference on ‘Transnational Cooperation to Respond to Infectious Disease Threats’. The event brought together regional and international health professionals to exchange information and coordinate policy responses to regional health issues, and establish both a precedent and a template for the future.

Three years later, as America marked the 40th anniversary of its diplomacy ‘as a friend of the ASEAN community’, the DoS released an update on the fruits of its cooperation with ASEAN in diverse fields; US-LMI outcomes received particular attention. While America’s LMI design had emphasised socio-economic and cultural integration of the partner-states, the Fact Sheet underscored strategic and geopolitical intent. Washington intended ‘to commit substantial resources to LMI over the next three years through the Asia Pacific Security Engagement Initiative (APSEI)’. APSEI was a recently proclaimed ‘integrated framework’ that engaged LMI states on ‘current pressing bilateral and transnational issues, and positions the US and its partners to sustain regional stability and support an inclusive regional economy in our shared future.’[2] To signal ‘the lasting nature of US engagement’, Washington announced ‘LMI 2020’ as the formulation for incorporating LMI into APSEI, and provision of $50m over three years to ‘support a substantial expansion’ of LMI programmes and activities aimed at ‘strengthening regional capacity to address transnational issues.’ Although China was not named, its ghost loomed Banquo-like over the proceedings.

Washington elaborated on its assistance, in collaboration with USAID, the US PACOM, the latter’s Asia-Pacific Centre for Security Studies, the Harvard Kennedy School, and bodies from Japan, the RoK, Australia and New Zealand, towards improving the LMI-members’ capacity in the fields of governance, education, specialised English language training, health, pandemic-monitoring, prevention and preparedness, quality pharmaceuticals production and supply, the environment, gender equality and women’s empowerment. In short, America’s LMI vision was a comprehensive template for the region’s socio-economic-cultural development.

The much-heralded and instrumental engagement of US PACOM’s resources and personnel, and support from America’s key regional allies, demonstrated the geopolitical nature of the enterprise. Clinton’s direct leadership of and personal engagement with the widening and deepening of the LMI endeavour gave ASEAN’s newer and less-developed members ‘options to balance fast-expanding Chinese assistance,’[3] which may have been a driving force behind the Initiative. Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, stressed the importance of protecting the livelihoods of the residents of the Mekong Delta from the ravages of encroaching climate change, especially rising sea levels pumping saline water into the Delta’s rice paddies, Vietnam’s bread basket.[4]

The Trump Administration discarded much of its Obama-era inheritance, marginalising the LMI within the overall rebalancing of its Asia policy. Nonetheless, building partly on his policy inheritance, Trump began translating some of his campaign rhetoric into a broad campaign to constrain China’s geo-economic endeavours while setting out his ‘vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific’. Less than a year into his presidency, addressing APEC leaders and business executives in Vietnam after a visit to Beijing, Trump slammed Chinese commercial practices in words that laid the bases for the trade war which followed:

‘Countries were embraced by the WTO, even if they did not abide by its stated principles. Simply put, we have not been treated fairly by the WTO... The US promoted private enterprise, innovation, and industry. Other countries used government-run industrial planning and state-owned enterprises. We adhered to WTO principles on protecting intellectual property and ensuring fair and equal market access. They engaged in product dumping, subsidized goods, currency manipulation, and predatory industrial policies. They ignored the rules to gain advantage over those who followed the rules, causing enormous distortions in commerce and threatening the foundations of international trade itself.’ Trump’s ‘Indo-Pacific Dream’ demanded that ‘all play by the rules, which they do not right now’. [5] 

Trump warned, ‘Such practices, along with our collective failure to respond to them, hurt many people in our country and also other countries...We can no longer tolerate these chronic trade abuses, and we will not tolerate them.’ In case anyone missed the point, ‘We will no longer tolerate the audacious theft of intellectual property. We will confront the destructive practices of forcing businesses to surrender their technology to the state, and forcing them into joint ventures in exchange for market access. We will address the massive subsidizing of industries through colossal SOEs that put private competitors out of business – happening all the time…Those days are over.’ His new construct: ‘we must uphold principles that have benefitted all of us, like respect for the rule of law, individual rights, and freedom of navigation and overflight, including open shipping lanes… So let us work together for a peaceful, prosperous, and free Indo-Pacific.’[6]

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo fleshed out the basics of Trump’s ‘Indo-Pacific Dream’. ‘Free Indo-Pacific’ meant ‘all nations, every nation, to be able to protect their sovereignty from coercion by other countries (and domestically) good governance and the assurance that citizens can enjoy their fundamental rights and liberties.’ As for an ‘Open Indo-Pacific’, America wanted ‘all nations to enjoy open access to seas and airways. We want the peaceful resolution of territorial and maritime disputes.’ Economically ‘open’ meant ‘fair and reciprocal trade, open investment environments, transparent agreements between nations, and improved connectivity to drive regional ties.’ Pompeo announced a $113m initiative to advance energy ($50m), the digital economy ($25m), and infrastructure-building ($38m) across the Indo-Pacific, with this ‘strategic investment in the most competitive part of the world’ aiming ‘to catalyze’ follow-up action by America’s corporate giants.[7]

Pompeo acknowledged that this amount was small compared to the region’s need for new infrastructure and that only private capital could meet that demand. He assured his audiences that with US firms, ‘what you see is what you get: honest contracts, honest terms, and no need for off-the-books mischief.’ Pompeo insisted, ‘integrity in business practices is an essential pillar of our Indo-Pacific economic vision, and it is what each country in the region needs.’[8] Although Pompeo did not name China, his assertion of ‘the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific’ covering the continuum from domestic dispensation to inter-state transactions challenged much that China sought to attain via Xi’s ‘Chinese dream’ generally, and Beijing’s BRI vision specifically. What appeared new was the openly adversarial dialectic.

The record thus showed, the USA took the lead in drawing up cooperative developmental plans, including those focusing on certain infrastructure projects, using the ‘New Silk Road’ rubric and the Lower Mekong Initiative, before Beijing formalised its BRI mission. Widely varying scales, resourcing, political leadership and persistence distinguished US and Chinese efforts. While Beijing emphasised its economic, indeed geoeconomic focus, Washington’s much more modest initiatives more candidly advertised their geopolitical drivers. Irrespective of the transience of the US efforts and the as yet uncertain success of the Chinese ones, however, America’s successive Administrations, and many US visionaries, scholars, technological innovators and corporations, along with their counterparts from Europe, Japan, Russia, Australia and New Zealand, as well as various UN organs and Western-led multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and the ADB, could justifiably claim significant credit for contributing to imagining what eventually emerged as China’s globe-girdling BRI/OBOR vision.

[1] DoS (2012) Lower Mekong Initiative. Washington. https://www.state.gov/p/eap/mekong/ Accessed 24 May 2018

[2] Office of the Spokesperson (2012) Fact Sheet on LMI. DoS, Washington/Jakarta, 13 July 2012

[3] Bower E (2012) US Moves to Strengthen ASEAN by Boosting the LMI. CSIS, Washington, 24 July 2012

[4] Kerry J (2014) Remarks at the Friends of the Lower Mekong Ministerial Meeting. DoS, Naypyitaw, 9 Aug 2014

[5] Trump J (2017) Remarks at APEC CEO Summit. White House, Da Nang, 10 Nov 2017

[6] Trump J (2017) Remarks at APEC CEO Summit. White House, Da Nang, 10 Nov 2017

[7] Pompeo M (2018) America’s Indo-Pacific Economic Vision: Remarks at Indo-Pacific Business Forum. DoS, Washington, 30 July 2018

[8] Pompeo M (2018) America’s Indo-Pacific Economic Vision: Remarks at Indo-Pacific Business Forum. DoS, Washington, 30 July 2018

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[1] Rousseau R (2011) Pipeline Politics in Central Asia. Foreign Policy in Focus, 24 June 2011

[2] Kawawaki F, Chansavat B, Chenoweth J (2012) TAPI Natural Gas Pipeline Project, Phase 3. ADB, Manila, p.1

[3] US Senate (1999) Silk Road Strategy Act of 1999. 106th Congress, Washington, 10 Mar 1999, Sec.2

[4] US Senate (1999) Silk Road Strategy Act of 1999. 106th Congress, Washington, 10 Mar 1999, Sec.3

[5] Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs (2003) Assessments Required by the Silk Road Strategy Act of 1999: Report to Congress. DoS, Washington, Jan 2003

[6] White House (2018) The US and Uzbekistan: Launching a New Era of Strategic Partnership. Washington, 17 May 2018; UNCTAD, BITs – Uzbekistan. Undated. http://investmentpolicyhub.unctad.org/IIA/CountryBits/226#iiaInnerMenu Accessed 29 May 2018

[7] Report (2015) Turkmenistan starts work on gas link to Afghanistan, Pakistan, India. Reuters, Mary, 13 Dec 2015; Report (2016) TAPI Gas Pipeline: Infographic. ADB, Manila, 8 Apr 2016

[8] Report (1998) Country-Report: Turkmenistan. EIU, London, p.24

[9] Croissant M, Aras B (1999) Oil and Geopolitics in the Caspian Sea Region. Greenwood, Santa Barbara, p.87

[10] Kawasaki F (2008) TAPI Natural Gas Pipeline Project (Phase II): Technical Assistance Completion Report. ADB, Manila, 16 Dec 2008, pp.1-3

[11] AFP (2010) TAPI gas pipeline: Presidential push for lingering project. Express Tribune, 12 December 2010

[12] Khosla S (2014) Project Information Document: CASA-1000/PIDA2581. World Bank, Washington, 27 Mar 2014

[13] Clinton H (2011) Remarks at the New Silk Road Ministerial Meeting. DoS, New York, 22 Sept 2011; Gulamhusein H (2011) US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Discusses New Silk Road Initiative. Aga Khan Development Network, Dushanbe, 22 Oct 2011; Burns W (2014) Remarks on Economic Connectivity in Central Asia. DoS/Asia Society. New York, 23 Sept 2014

[14] DoS (2017) US Support for the New Silk Road. https://2009-2017.state.gov/p/sca/ci/af/newsilkroad/index.htm Accessed 24 May 2018

[15] Cooley A (2012) Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia. OUP, New York, pp.3-15, 30-50; Kuchins A (2013) Great Games, Local Rules: Book Review Roundtable. Asia Policy. No.16, July 2013, NBR, Washington/Seattle, pp.175-178; McBride J (2015) The New Geopolitics of China, India, and Pakistan: Building the New Silk Road. CFR, New York, 22 May 2015

[16] Rosenberger L (2017) The Rise and Fall of America’s New Silk Road Strategy. Economic Monitor, 12 May 2017; Standish R (2014) The US’ Silk Road to Nowhere. FP, 29 Sept 2014

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[1] Mackinder H (1904) The geographical pivot of history. Geogr J 23:422

[2] Iseri E (2009) The US Grand Strategy and the Eurasian Heartland in the 21st Century. Geopolitics, Vol.14, Issue 1, Feb 2009, pp.26-46; Togt T, Montesano F, Kozak L (2015) From Competition to Compatibility: Striking a Eurasian balance in EU-Russia relations. Clingendael, The Hague, Oct 2015, pp.306

[3] Friedrich von Schiller’s plays and romantic poetry contributed to shaping post-revolutionary European thought. His Ode to Joy, which praised freedom, unity and the brotherhood of all mankind in a period that divided and froze society in arbitrary stratification, was set to music by Beethoven in his ninth symphony, and is celebrated as the European Union’s collective anthem. Rabitz C (2009) Friedrich Schiller’s works have withstood the trials of revolution. DW, Bonn, 10 Nov 2009

[4] LaRouche L (1990) The Productive Triangle: Locomotive for the World Economy. Schiller Institute, West Berlin (in German)

[5] Schiller Institute, From Productive Triangle to Eurasian Land-Bridge. Undated. https://www.schillerinstitute.org/russia/rus_eal_chronology.html#triangle Accessed 23 Jan 2018

[6] LaRouche Political Action Committee (2018) The US Joins the New Silk Road: A Hamiltonian Vision for an Economic Renaissance. Leesburg, Undated. https://larouchepac.com/20151229/us-joins-new-silk-road pp.1-5. Accessed 19 May 2018

[7] Information Office (1996) Symposium on Economic Development along New Euro-Asia Continental Bridge Opens in Beijing. UN, New York, 9 May 1996

[8] LaRouche H (1997) Eurasian Land-Bridge: A new era for mankind. Executive Intelligence Review, Vol.24, No.19, 2 May 1997, 21-25

[9] Xu S (1997) The New Asia-Europe Land Bridge: Current Situation and Future Prospects. Japan Railway and Transport Review, Dec 1997, pp.30-33

[10] Maitra R (2013) The Alliance of India-Russia-China. Paper presented at Conference on The 2nd American Revolution: Developing the Pacific and Ending the Grip of Empire. Schiller, Los Angeles, 2 Nov 2013

[11] Starr S (ed) (2007) The New Silk Roads: Transport and Trade in Greater Central Asia. Johns Hopkins, Washington, 2007

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