One belt, one road. Who wouldn’t want that? Er, right, but what is it? Exactly?
This weeks paper is more a long snippet but distills elegantly the big thinking behind four words that may end up changing China’s place in the world order more profoundly than since Deng opened the door in 1978.
Ms. Nadege Rolland of the National Bureau of Asian Research, a US think tank based in Seattle, believes ‘..the United States [May be] ..relegated to the position of a distant island, floating between the Atlantic and the Pacific.’ and ‘..Europe becomes a mere peninsular at the end of the Asian continent, economically integrated with and dependent on the Chinese locomotive,..’
Ms. Rolland is no ten-tips-to-flat-abbs copysmith looking for clicks. Before working for the NBR she was a senior adviser to the French Ministry of Defense and writes with authority seeing beyond the concrete pouring to the much bigger game. The link below will take you to her piece, one of the neatest summaries I’ve seen this year on the subject.
http://www.nbr.org/downloads/pdfs/psa/rolland_commentary_021215.pdf
She concludes ‘..if China succeeds in linking itself more closely to Russia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, then U.S. policymakers may be compelled to radically alter their traditional approaches to these regions and indeed the entire world.’ Indeed.
Happy Sunday, for some..