Daily Times

Hardly had anyone remembered how to commit a foreign policy blunder when the US reminded the Asia region of the US ability to do so. The tyranny enacted by the blunder is that it was meant to touching a raw nerve of both Pakistan and China.

On October 6, US Defence Secretary James Mattis appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee and briefed the legislators on the latest in the Pak-Afghan region by mentioning two main points. First, the US opposed the One Belt One Road policy in principle because in a globalised world, there were many belts and many roads, and no one nation should put itself into a position of dictating any such policy.

Interestingly, Secretary Mattis was supposed to apprise the US legislators of the latest updates related to the Pak-Afghan region. However, it is not yet known what the relationship is between the One Belt One Road policy of China and the Pak-Afghan region.

The objective of the OBOR initiative — a combination of an overland belt and a maritime road — is to connect China with Asia, Africa and Europe through infrastructure developments including constructing highways, railways, pipeline, ports and power grids. Against this background, Secretary Mattis flayed both road and sea trade routes of China in the pretext of issuing statement on the Pak-Afghan region.

It is known that Kashmir is a disputed territory and similarly there are other disputed territories traversed by the OBOR initiative. Should there be no development? Should people of underdeveloped areas remain deprived and impoverished?

Another interesting point is that only the belt part of the OBOR called the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is passing through Pakistan and not through the Pak-Afghan region. The CPEC is not a recent development to get stunned and shocked. Instead, the change of mind by the US towards the Asia region under the leadership of US President Donald Trump is the recent development.

The point is not that whether or not the US has criticised the CPEC aspect of the OBOR at the behest of India, the point is that the US has made a deliberate attempt to strain its relations with both Pakistan and China in one go. The US is overlooking the fact that the services of Zbigniew Brzezinski are no more available, as he passed away in May this year. It was Brzezinski, the polish-born Professor of International Relations and former National Security Adviser to US President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), and helped the US normalise its relations with the People’s Republic of China in January in 1979.

In his book, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the eve of the 21st Century, published in 1993, Brzezinski predicted that as the technology-induced acceleration of communication was distancing the contemporary history away from the past, more likely than Russia, China would assume a leadership role on the world stage.

Brzezinski also propounded the idea that the US alone could not solve global problems. Instead, the US should encourage China to share its burden. In April 2017, Brzezinski spoke to a Russian newspaper and said, “China is considerably more important than Russia right now, but if American and China cooperate, Russia has absolutely no choice but to join them. That would be in America’s interest, firstly, but it would also be beneficial to Russia in the long run.” Today, after rejected by Europe, Russia has mended its fences with China.

Kevin P. Gallagher writes in his book, The China Triangle: Latin America’s China Boom and the Fate of the Washington Consensus, published in 2016, that China’s new development banks have arisen from at least two motivations. First, China has accumulated an enormous store of wealth and savings that it seeks to diversify by making big investments across the world. Second, China feels slighted by the West for not being given a greater role in the Bretton Wood institutions such as World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF). In 2010, the IMF passed significant reforms that would have given China and other emerging economies a greater say, but those reforms were stalled in the US Congress. Since China wasn’t allowed to enter into existing institutions, it has begun to create its own. These institutions now have levels of capital at their disposal more than that of the Western-backed development bank. For instance, the World Bank holds just over 200 billion dollars in capital and has just over 500 billion dollars in assets, whereas the China Development Bank (CDB) holds 100 billion dollars in capital, and has over 1 trillion dollars in assets. Related to OBOR initiative, China’s President Xi Jinping has pledged 124 billion dollars. It is expected that the plan would funnel investment of 502 billion dollars into 62 countries over next five years.

It is known that Kashmir is a disputed territory and similarly there are other disputed territories traversed by the OBOR initiative. Should there be no development? Should people of underdeveloped areas remain deprived and impoverished? The point is simple: about 62 countries perceive progress and economic stakes embedded in the OBOR. Is the US ready to invite the ire of these countries?

Voices were also raised inside Pakistan in favour of the US in order to bring the Pakistan government under pressure on the CPEC issue. The US shouldn’t have criticised the OBOR initiative on which Pakistanis had already forged a consensus. Such criticism is bound to be counterproductive.

The writer can be reached at qaisarrashid@yahoo.com