Drawing Battlelines: US Openly Targets China's OBOR

May 30, 2020 (Tony Cartalucci - NEO) - Judging by US foreign policy - China is a massive global threat - and by some accounts - the "top" threat. But a threat to what? 

AFP would report in its article, "Trump nominee to lead intel community sees China as top threat," that: 

President Donald Trump's pick to lead the US intelligence community said Tuesday that he would focus on China as the country's greatest threat, saying Beijing was determined to supplant the United States' superpower position.

Were China doing this by using news agencies like AFP to lie to the public to justify invading Middle Eastern nations, killing tens of thousands of innocent people, installing client regimes worldwide, and using its growing power to coerce and control nations economically and politically when not outright militarily - US President Donald Trump's "pick" - John Ratcliffe - might be justified in focusing on China and its "determination" to "supplant the United States' superpower position."

However, this is not what China is doing.

China Building Rather than Bombing 

China is - instead - using economic progress to rise upon the global stage. It makes things. It builds things. It creates infrastructure to bring these things to others around the globe who need or want them, and enables other nations to make, build, and send things to China.

One example is China's One Belt, One Road initiative (OBOR) also referred to as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This includes a series of railways, highways, ports, and other infrastructure projects to help improve the logistical connections between nations, accelerating economic development.

Only in the US could the notion of building railways connecting people within and between nations seem like a dangerous idea.

By building such networks, people are better empowered to trade what they are making and what they seek to buy and sell. China, which possesses the largest high-speed railway network on Earth carrying 2 billion passengers a year, is extending this network beyond its borders - deep into Southeast Asia and even across Eurasia via Russia and beyond. Alongside it are a raft of other projects ranging from ports to power plants, and more.

The political and economic power China is gaining by expanding real economic activity both within its borders and beyond them, and both for China itself as well as for its trading partners - represents a global pivot away from America's century-long unipolar global order and closer toward a now emerging multipolar world order.

The US with a population of over 300 million and some of the best industrial potential in the world could easily pivot with this sea change - but entrenched special interests refuse to do so. Paying into a genuinely pragmatic method of generating wealth and stability exposes Washington and Wall Street's various rackets, making them no longer tenable. So instead, US special interests are labeling China's One Belt, One Road initiative a global threat and China itself as one of America's chief adversaries.

EU Event Chastises China-Pakistan Economic Corridor

November 26, 2018 (Joseph Thomas - NEO) - The European Foundation for South Asian Studies (EFSAS) put together a day-long seminar chastising the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Organised by Jonathan Bullock, a UK Independence Party (UKIP) Member of the European Parliament (MEP), it gathered European critics of China's rise upon the global stage along with US and European-funded agitators active in undermining Chinese-Pakistani relations.

The CPEC is a keystone project amid Chinese-Pakistani ties and an integral part of Beijing's One Belt, One Road initiative (OBOR). It includes energy and transportation projects developing and connecting Pakistan's Baluchistan province along the Arabian Sea with Chinese territory along Pakistan and China's border.

When completed, the projects will increase both Pakistan's prospects and China's influence not only in Pakistan, but across the wider region. Together with other OBOR projects, CPEC will be yet another step toward the rise of Eurasia out from under centuries of European domination.

For MEP Jonathan Bullock of UKIP, it is somewhat perplexing to see a politician supposedly concerned with British independence so eager to interfere in the sovereignty of Pakistan and China, thousands of kilometers from British or indeed, all of Europe's shores.

The EFSAS website included a summary of the CPEC-oriented event:

A high level panel consisting of Members European Parliament (MEPs), Scholars and Academicians spoke at the event and discussed the construction of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and its interrelated legal, geo-strategic, economic and environmental issues, which directly impact the stability of South Asia. 

Participants claimed that China would assume unwarranted influence over Pakistan over the course of the projects' construction. Concerns related to Pakistan's Kashmir region and Baluchistan were also brought up by representatives of separatist groups, many of which are funded by the US and Europe specifically to serve as vectors for Western influence in Pakistan and agents of destabilisation not only within Pakistan, but between Pakistan and its immediate neighbours (Afghanistan, India, Iran and China).

The EFSAS' statement would claim:

Mr. Fernando Burgés, Programme Manager at the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), provided his perspective on the negative repercussion stemming from the construction of the CPEC, which goes through the disputed territory of Gilgit Baltistan, part of the erstwhile Princely State of Jammu & Kashmir over which Pakistan does not have any legal right.

The UNPO serves as collective representation for myriad separatist groups backed by Western special interests used to agitate around the globe.

They have included or currently include Chechen separatists seeking to carve off territory from Russia's south, Tibetan separatists backed for decades by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and various groups from Kashmir and Baluchistan. The latter are backed by the US State Department in their bid for independence and the effective end of Chinese access to the Arabian Sea via the recently built Gwadar Port. 

It should be noted that Pakistan's claimed portion of the Kashmir region is its only direct access to the Chinese border in the north. Thus it is especially convenient that here, the UNPO has found yet another group to support which seeks independence and would effectively close Pakistan off from China in the north.

While the European Union's various MEPs complaining about the CPEC will hardly do anything to slow down its construction let alone stop it, even augmented with US and European funded and backed separatist groups attempting to complicate security on the ground, it is important to understand the persistent imperial chauvinism that still deeply infects many circles of political elite across the West.

It is also important to understand how it manifests itself politically through various but entirely disingenuous and cynically abused "human rights" causes. Likewise, it is important to see how it manifests itself on the ground where these interests seek to disrupt their geopolitical competitors instead of finding common grounds for cooperation and mutual benefit.

Alternative circles of interests both in the US and Europe and elsewhere around the globe will seek common grounds for cooperation and mutual benefit with China and its many Eurasian partners. They will ultimately find themselves in prime seats at the table of emerging multipolarism while the instigators and imperial chauvinists find themselves out in the cold.

Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Washington's Dirty Fight Against China's OBOR

November 21, 2018 (Joseph Thomas - NEO) - Five years into China's ambitious One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative sees analysts and political circles around the globe taking stock of Beijing's progress.

This includes the Wall Street Journal in its article, "U.S. Fights China for Influence, One Project at a Time: Washington prods private sector and focuses on financing as Beijing’s ‘Belt and Road’ hits obstacles."

What the article reveals and what the article omits, speaks volumes of America's response, or lack thereof. 

The article claims:

The U.S. has launched a new strategy aimed at ramping up investment in Asia to vie with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s overseas infrastructure-building spree, as Beijing grapples with setbacks to its sprawling program.

The WSJ would explain:

In October, President Trump signed into law the Build Act, which creates a new development finance agency that offers loans, loan guarantees and political-risk insurance to private companies.

And that:

The Build Act allows for $60 billion in U.S. development financing around the world under the new agency, the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. The IDFC merges existing programs, doubles the current agency’s spending cap and has the authority to own equity stakes in projects, giving it more flexibility to choose and guide them.

Yet what development this scheme will fund was curiously absent from both the WSJ's article, and has been consistently absent from statements being made by Washington. While the article claims China has a "head start," the reality is that Washington has had a head start of about half a century in the realm of both primacy over Asia and in spurring development.

For a variety of reasons, Washington failed to exploit either advantage.

America's gutting of its own industrial capacity, its favoring of global loan sharking and war over actual development as well as its corporate-financier sectors seeking monopolies and profits over any tangible measure of real societal progress squandered this immense head start.

Predatory Lenders: It Takes One to Know One 

The WSJ would sum up Washington's claims regarding the China's OBOR initiative, claiming:

The U.S. sees Belt and Road as a tool used by Beijing to advance its strategic and military interests. A number of Trump administration officials and U.S. lawmakers describe the risks of China using “debt traps” to gain control of sensitive infrastructure and “predatory economics” to undermine the autonomy of debt-burdened countries.

Predatory economics, however, is how many across Asia would describe the US and European-dominated International Monetary Fund's (IMF) activities in the window following World War II and ending with the start of China's OBOR initiative.

The OBOR initiative most certainly creates the risk of debt for Beijing's partner nations and undeniably expands China's influence across Eurasia, but each project is producing tangible infrastructure that will spur development within and between partner nations, an aspect consistently absent from America's half century of "development financing" via the IMF.

Washington's Campaign of Subversion, Disruption and Sabotage 

Just as the US failed for half a century to spur genuine development and instead used the IMF as a vehicle to advance the interests of Western corporations and financial institutions while stripping nations of their resources and sovereignty, Washington's new strategy to compete with China's OBOR initiative also lacks anything resembling actual development. It is instead a campaign simply to impede China's plans for the sake of containing China's rise.