L'Européiste

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« It’s been a bumpy week for Joe Biden. The US president’s dramatic fly-in show of support for Israel was upstaged by the Gaza hospital blast that had the Arab street pointing fingers at Israel — the kind of condemnation that, Marc Champion says, is likely to increase rather than decrease as hostilities continue. Washington also vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for “humanitarian pauses” in the military action so aid can be delivered to civilians in Gaza. [1]  Despite being consistent with US foreign policy aims, it was not a good look. Questions are also being raised about whether the US has the economic and military wherewithal to support two embattled friends — Israel and Ukraine — while trying to shore up a threatened Taiwan at the same time. On Thursday night, Biden said he was sending a request for more aid to a US Congress paralyzed by procedural chaos, as Andreas Kluth describes. Throw in polls showing Donald Trump leading him in swing states, and the American president’s standing is looking pretty beleaguered.

China’s President Xi Jinping, on the other hand, had a more heartening week. He certainly needed it, given the economic malaise Beijing has to deal with (even a pick-up in some data failed to shift concern away from the country’s property crisis). In August, at the BRICS summit in South Africa, his translator was unceremoniously accosted by conference security. His signature Belt and Road Initiative, meanwhile, was looking more like a ball and chain, at least in the eyes of Western critics.

This week, however, Xi unveiled a newer, sleeker BRI at a 10-year anniversary party for the initiative in Beijing. It was attended by representatives of some 150 countries. As Karishma Vaswani writes, controversy has dogged Xi’s pet project ever since it began: Critics said it was a debt trap for poorer nations who signed up for it, a way to build markets for excess Chinese production and it was a cynical part of Beijing’s empire building. That may all still be true, but, as Karishma says, BRI has also done what the Chinese intended: building roads and the infrastructure of business in countries that needed it. Unlike financing from the World Bank and other Western institutions, BRI money goes straight through economic bottlenecks, and its effects are more immediately visible. 

Now, says Karishma, BRI is “going to be smaller, greener and more technologically advanced. It will also be more targeted, as Beijing focuses its ambitions in areas where it still feels welcome.” Despite the griping over the decade, Xi benefits from the optics of the Beijing get-together: a kind of United Nations under China. Writes Karishma: “It appears to be a mechanism through which Beijing will collect friendships and alliances that can help buffer it against an increasingly hostile global environment. The West would do well to pay attention to next year’s guest list, to get a sense of who and where Beijing will focus on next.” (Bloomberg, Opinion Today, October 20, 2023)