Much like Mark Twain’s apocryphal quote about arguing with idiots who ‘drag you down to their level and beat you with experience,’ Europeans should think twice about whether they want to try to compete with China when it comes to the use of economic power in pursuit of geopolitical ends.
‘It’s useless moaning about it,’ the German foreign minister Heiko Maas (correctly) told journalists last week, when discussing Chinese economic power at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels. The EU foreign ministers tasked the European Commission on Monday with preparing a European ‘strategic response’ to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Provisionally dubbed ‘A Globally Connected Europe’ – though still in search of a name and a logo – the European response aims to ‘identify and implement a set of high impact and visible projects and actions globally’ by deploying a variety of public financing tools to channel European private investment into ‘connectivity’ in countries that may have been attracted by the prospect of Chinese investment.
In its quest to support countries to the EU’s east and south, the bloc risks being fleeced by opportunistic kleptocrats
There are several problems with the EU’s ‘alternative’ to the Belt and Road Initiative.
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