China’s Belt and Road poised to transform the Earth, but at what cost?

Donald Trump speaking at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland. One of Trump’s first acts as president was to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, greatly weakening U.S. influence in Asia. Image by Gage Skidmore on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0 license. President Donald Trump second guessed himself this month, as he announced a decision to revisit his withdrawal of the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), one of the first acts of his controversial presidency. The agreement, already signed by 11 states, would eliminate 98 percent of tariffs in a Pacific marketplace worth close to $14 trillion, even as Trump aims U.S. tariffs at Asia. TPP nations have already indicated that they won’t be jumping to let Trump and the United States back into the game. This means not only that trade and investment barriers between the U.S. and the 11 TPP states will likely remain in place, but also that the Asian economic vacuum left by the U.S. will be filled by another nation. And that nation is most certain to be China, which, while not a TPP member, boasts total geographical dominance, a 1.4 billion population, soaring economic growth, and a seemingly unquenchable thirst for its neighbors natural resources. At the heart of China’s plan to geopolitically and economically master the region, and maybe the world, is its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), that simply put, is the largest infrastructure project ever embarked upon in world history. This staggering infrastructure development…

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