The New Silk Roads summary

Across the Western world, governments and ordinary voters are turning to the politics of nationalism and actively lessening cooperation with other Western powers. Just consider Donald Trump’s 2016 election slogan: “America First,” a rallying cry for the United States to isolate itself. And perhaps the biggest symbol of Western Europe’s increasing division is Brexit: Britain’s 2016 decision to turn its back on its neighbors and leave the European Union.

While Western powers have been fragmenting and isolating themselves, much of the Eastern world has been quietly doing the opposite: consolidating ties between nations, building more effective collaboration and finding mutually beneficial solutions to shared challenges.

In September 2013, China’s President Xi Jinping spoke at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan and unveiled his vision for the future. It was his foreign relations priority, President Xi explained, for China to build a better relationship with her neighbors. The time had come, he said, to deepen trade and economic cooperation and to revitalize ancient bonds between Central and South Asia. In other words, the president concluded, China would build the new Silk Roads.

Significantly, Xi’s idea for wider Asian cooperation was nothing new. Both the Obama and Bush administrations in America had paid lip service to the idea of revitalizing trade, communications and transport between Eastern nations. However, in the last five years, Xi has done much more than simply talk about this initiative. Instead, he has put up huge sums of Chinese money in his mission to forge greater connections throughout the East.

In almost every respect, the world is a better place today than in the past. Access to health care and clean drinking water has increased, as has the provision of fast and cheap transportation, reliable communication and energy networks.

However, the fact that twenty-first-century humans have a lot to celebrate does not make it easier to accept the way in which our world is changing as much as it is improving. Indeed, for many Americans, used to being the world’s undisputed superpower, the future seems downright disturbing rather than hopeful.

In 2017, the US State Department lost nearly two-thirds of its longest-serving ambassadors. This was disastrous, given that ambassadors are America’s greatest resource of international knowledge and experience.

Unsurprisingly, America’s recent lack of foreign know-how has led the government to stick with what it knows best when it comes to foreign policies and allegiances. And for the United States, what it knows in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia.

In recent years, the European narrative has been one of separation, regaining national control and putting up barriers. Brexit is the most obvious example of this friction, but the rise of anti-EU parties in Hungary, Poland and other European nations, as well as vocal independence movements in Catalonia and Scotland, also attest to a growing threat to European solidarity.

In the wake of European disharmony, China has seen an opportunity to further its own interests.