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| China lands a win win with Belt and Road? |
| 2019-04-20 |
| [ATimes] The pieces in Beijing’s massive puzzle are starting to come together.. Relentless reports that the New Silk Roads, or the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), are a perfidious neo-imperial debt trap set up by Yellow Peril 2.0 are vastly exaggerated. With less than one week to go before the next BRI forum in Beijing, a quick overview of what’s been happening in Europe and Southwest Asia may be quite enlightening. Immediately after a successful 21st China-EU summit in Brussels, the 8th China-16+1 meeting in Dubrovnik focused on Central and Eastern Europe nations, ending up like a 17+1 – Greece is their newest member. So now we have 12 EU member states plus five Balkan nations committed to the BRI and wider business deals with Beijing. The joint commitments of 17+1 are a “win-win” prodigy in itself. The Europeans exhort China to implement a real “level playing field,” and everyone enthusiastically supports the EU-China Comprehensive Investment Agreement, which Brussels and Beijing had already pledged to sign before the end of 2020. Apart from forcefully investing in a détente with Brussels, Beijing, of course, keeps its own priorities. They focus especially on Greece and Croatia, while the courting of Italy after the signing of the BRI memorandum will also proceed unabated. From the Baltics to the Mediterranean – specifically from Estonia to Greece – China seems to be configuring a new booming trade Intermarium, a mirror image of the combative anti-Russia Intermarium from the Baltics to the Black Sea that obsesses NATO. |
| Posted by:3dc |
| #5 It looks to me like we and Russia should be on the same side, at least in a global sense. We are both going to lose ground to China on our own but together we might keep a balance. Putin wants to play Italy to China's Germany in the next war. Maybe Putin thinks Russia is Germany to China's Italy. Who knows. The point is that he is, for some reason or other, joined at the waist with Xi Jinping. I'd say the primary reason is that China doesn't care about what conquests Russia makes as long as China gets a free hand in its targeted geography, the Western Pacific and possibly Central Asia. Whereas Washington will balk at Russian territorial expansion, even if the US and Russia are allied. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2019-04-20 21:50 |
| #4 It looks to me like we and Russia should be on the same side, at least in a global sense. We are both going to lose ground to China on our own but together we might keep a balance. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2019-04-20 18:37 |
| #3 a perfidious neo-imperial debt trap set up by Yellow Peril 2.0 are vastly exaggerated. *cough*Africa*cough* |
| Posted by: SteveS 2019-04-20 10:10 |
| #2 It's the Chinese making the best of a horrible situation. "Horrible" how? If it were the US, you'd be bemoaning NeoCons and US Military-Industrial Hegemony™/Colonialism. You are transparent |
| Posted by: Frank G 2019-04-20 06:00 |
| #1 BRI is a red herring. It's the Chinese making the best of a horrible situation. Transportation by land is 14 times more expensive than by sea. The US Navy rules the waves. BRI will never amount to anything. But it sure is great watching our "allies" in old Europe cozy up to the commies. Some friends they are. Good luck with your new comrades, I'm sure they'll let them rip you off for $150 billion a year like Uncle Sam, I mean Uncle Sap does. |
| Posted by: Herb McCoy 2019-04-20 02:12 |