New US foreign investment agency counters China Belt and Road 'colonialism

China’s ambitious overseas infrastructure investment program is a form of economic and geopolitical imperialism, according to a senior member of President Trump’s administration.

“The Chinese pitch is orientation toward China,” said Adam Boehler, the first CEO of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. “It is about advancing China's control and interest," he said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. "I'd liken it more toward colonialism, back in the 1800s, which doesn't work out that well, because sovereign nations like to run themselves.”

That observation is a window into the message carried by Boehler, whose newly created agency is “America’s development bank,” as he seeks investment opportunities in developing countries. The critique appropriates a favorite Chinese communist talking point — Beijing often invokes the history of Western imperialism to burnish the regime’s reputation overseas — while identifying a through-line between President Trump’s nationalist agenda, the global U.S. competition with China, and the interests of the local countries around the world.

“Our pitch is we want to come and invest, and we want to improve development in your country,” Boehler said. “But it's not about the United States [having] undue influence over your country. It's about moving toward free and transparent markets.”

Boehler is tasked with blunting the appeal of China’s vaunted Belt and Road Initiative — the $1 trillion spending program that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has denounced as a “treasury-run empire build.” The financial program enabled Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, to gain sovereignty over a new port in Sri Lanka in 2017. U.S. officials believe the deal exemplifies China’s engagement in “predatory” lending to corrupt or impoverished countries in order to gain strategic advantages when the government struggles to repay the debt.

"I've met a whole bunch of, probably now going on 20 or so, heads of state in the countries we focus on, and the typical response you get, almost universally, is, 'We didn't want to take money from China or that other autocratic country, but where was the United States? Where was the alternative?’” Boehler said. “The International Development Finance Corporation is that alternative.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/new-us-foreign-investment-agency-counters-china-belt-and-road-colonialism?utm_source=whatfinger