Thursday, May 23, 2019

Russia and the Future of Europe

Russia And The Future Of Europe

MAY 23, 2019JOHN FEFFER 1 COMMENT

Heinz-Christian Strache (Wolfgang Simlinger via Shutterstock)

by John Feffer

Europe is gearing up for much-anticipated elections this week to the European parliament. Austria, however, now has to deal with a very unexpected snap election — thanks to a drunk politician, a Russian honeypot, and a leaked video. This scandal currently rocking Austria may ultimately play a decisive role in the European elections as well.

Heinz-Christian Strache was once the ambitious, successful leader of the Freedom Party in Austria. In 2017, on the heels of a strong third-place showing in the legislative elections, he led his far-right-wing populist party, which had been founded by former Nazis, into a coalition government with the more conventionally right-wing People’s Party. Sebastian Kurz, the young leader of the People’s Party, became chancellor. Strache became the vice-chancellor.

On Sunday, Strache stepped down after a seven-hour video went public of his discussions with a young Russian woman in which he promised government contracts in exchange for campaign funding. The meeting took place two years ago, before the elections that elevated Strache and his party, and it was apparently a sting operation. The woman wasn’t who she said she was (the niece of a Russian oligarch), and cameras in the villa in Ibiza where the meeting took place captured all the action.

The Austrian government is now in shambles. On Monday, Austria’s president fired one of Strache’s fellow party members, Interior Minister Herbert Kickl. The defense minister and the rest of the Freedom Party cabinet members resigned in protest.

The timing of the video’s release is curious. If it had come out before the Austrian elections two years ago, it would have nipped the Freedom Party’s electoral chances in the bud. Now it has emerged just on the eve of the European Parliament elections, which could damage the prospects of Europe’s populist right.

No one has come forward to claim authorship of the video. It was reportedly offered to several German media outlets over the last few months, but no one bought it. The set-up has all the hallmarks of Russian kompromat — the beautiful woman, the vodka, the video proof. It might make sense for the Russians to arrange and record such a meeting — in order to have something to hold over a future Austrian politician. But it makes no sense for them to turn around and release it right now.

After all, Strache has been reliably pro-Russian. Before the 2017 election, he went to Moscow to broker a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. The Freedom Party pledged to mediate an arrangement with newly elected U.S. president Donald Trump to ease economic sanctions against Russia.

Since 2017, Russia has made considerable headway in improving ties with Austria. The most visible symbol of this new relationship was Vladimir Putin dancing with Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl at her wedding last summer. The bride bowed at the end of the dance, as if to a visiting king. Unlike many other EU countries, Austria didn’t expelany Russian diplomats after the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Britain in March 2018. The two countries have signed energy deals, and Kurz promised to pursue a “step by step” reduction of sanctions against Russia when Austria occupied the EU’s rotating presidency last fall.

But not everything was hunky-dory between the two countries. In November, Austria outed a retired senior military officer as a Russian spy, prompting Kniessl to cancel a planned trip to Moscow. And neither Austria nor the EU has altered its stance on sanctions. In fact, in mid-March, the EU – along with the United States and Canada – imposed yet more sanctions on Russia connected to its “continued aggression in Ukraine.”

Russian officials have denied any connection to the video, falling back on their usual excuse: it was a provocation. But if the sting operators were indeed Russians, rather than some European intelligence outfit, perhaps the Kremlin was sending a warning to its allies in Europe that friendship comes with benefits — or else.

Russia’s European Friends

The Freedom Party is not the only European far-right movement to cultivate ties with the Kremlin, or the only one to get into trouble over those ties. Italy’s right-wing League negotiated a deal with United Russia similar to the one that Strache inked, which should have been scandalous enough.

But then, in February, an Italian magazine published allegations that Russia offered the party leader, Deputy Prime Minister Mario Salvini — who was on a trip to Moscow last year — a kickback arrangement involving sales of Russian diesel and funds diverted into the League’s election coffers. Salvini is a big Putin admirer — once, at the European parliament, he wore a t-shirt emblazoned with the Russian leader’s face — and he wants sanctions against Russia eliminated. However, he has denied the allegations.

But Strache and Salvini are pikers when compared to Putin’s friend in Budapest. It might seem like a losing political strategy for a Hungarian to align with the Kremlin, given the country’s experience as a Soviet satellite during the Cold War and the Soviet invasion of 1956. But Prime Minister Viktor Orban has imported Putin’s version of “illiberal democracy” and put a distinctly Hungarian spin on it with his control of the media and his confrontations with Brussels.

Orban has bent over backwards to help Putin. He awarded Russia a no-bid contract to modernize Hungary’s nuclear power plant (only two words are necessary to show why that was a bad idea: corruption and Chernobyl). He has criticized the EU’s economic sanctions against Russia. He has welcomed Russian individuals with high-level ties to live in Hungary and even permitted a Russian bank of shadowy provenance to set up in Budapest.

Hungarian law enforcement worked with the United States to nab two suspected Russian arms dealers only for Orban to decide to extradite the suspects — not to the United States, but back to Russia!

Then there’s Milos Zeman, the president of the Czech Republic. Like Orban, Zeman is virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Islam. Like Orban, he has managed to erase some part of the stigma once attached to Moscow, in this case for its suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968. Like Orban, he wants to make sure that his country benefits from Russia’s energy supplies. But there are other, more subterranean economic reasons for his tilt toward Moscow, like the business interests of top advisors like Martin Nejedly.

Not all far-right parties in Europe are enamored of Putin. Poland’s Law and Justice Party has stayed out of any potential pro-Russian alliances because of the country’s long-standing suspicion of Russian motives. The Estonian far right is equally wary, and some of their compatriots further to the west share these concerns. “We are very concerned about Russian aggression,” says Anders Vistisen, of the Danish People’s party. “A wounded bear is dangerous.”

As with the U.S. presidential elections in 2016, the Kremlin knows that a little money and disinformation can go a long way. The point of its electoral interventions in Europe is not necessarily to put any one person or party into office. Rather, it is to undermine confidence in the liberal elite and liberal institutions.

Most importantly, Putin wants to weaken the European Union. The Kremlin would prefer not to deal with a European bloc, which is more economically and militarily powerful than Russia, and instead negotiate bilaterally with European countries. The EU supports sanctions against Russia. It broadcasts a siren song to states like Ukraine on Russia’s borders. It embodies precisely the kind of free-thinking liberalism that Putin abhors.

But the Kremlin will go even further than social media trolling and opaque financial dealings to influence European politics. It even will go as far as regime change.

The Case of Montenegro

Earlier this month, a court in Montenegro handed down guilty verdicts for 14 people involved in a coup attempt back in 2016. Two of the 14 are alleged Russian intelligence officers. According to The Washington Post:

The verdict said the group planned to take over the parliament in Montenegro on election day — Oct. 16, 2016 — assassinate then-Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic and install a pro-Russia, anti-NATO leadership in the Adriatic Sea nation.

The Russians were tried in absentia. They’d helped coordinate the coup from their perch in Serbia. The Serbian government, also closely aligned with Moscow, allowed the two to return to Russia before law enforcement could catch up with them. One of the convicted Russians, Eduard Shishmakov, had been the deputy military attache in Warsaw before being kicked out of the country for spying.

Montenegro went ahead and joined NATO in 2017, which was also part of its bid to enhance its chances of joining the European Union. Djukanovic remains prime minister. He’s the fellow that Trump nearly elbowed in the face in an awkward group gathering at the 2018 NATO summit. The president also went out of his way to disparage Montenegro when, in response to a Tucker Carlson question, he called the Montenegrins “very aggressive people.” He added, “They may get aggressive and congratulations, you’re in World War III.” It’s instructive to reinterpret Trump’s words and actions in light of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 coup attempt.

Montenegro is only one of the points of entry for Russia in its attempts to influence the course of events in the Balkans. The Kremlin also tried to upend the deal between Macedonia and Greece that finally, after several decades of acrimony, ended the dispute over what to name the former Yugoslav republic. Now known as North Macedonia, the country will become a member of NATO by year’s end.

In a more traditional bid for geopolitical influence, Putin has strengthened ties with Serbia’s authoritarian leader Aleksandar Vucic and ramped up Russian efforts as the mediator of last resort in the longstanding dispute between Serbia and Kosovo. This conflict is a win-win for Putin. A continued standoff over Kosovo’s independence makes the EU look impotent and binds Belgrade and Moscow even closer. But the Kremlin can also use any deal that provides Kosovo with international legitimacy as a precedent for its own efforts to gain recognition for Russian-aligned breakaway regions in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.

The Problem of Russian Interference

After he was inaugurated as president, Trump told Bill O’Reilly — in response to a question about Putin being a “killer” — “Well, you think our country is so innocent?”

It’s true that the United States has been involved in numerous coups around the world, both successful (Iran) and unsuccessful (Cuba). It’s also true that the United States has attempted to sway innumerable elections through both covert and open means. Trump, who knows so very well about the lack of innocence, is quite right about U.S. complicity in various international crimes.

Progressives should, of course, condemn these U.S. actions over the years. And I’m certainly no fan of an expanding NATO.

But we should also call out Russia as well. And not just because Russia attempted to interfere in U.S. elections, as detailed in the Mueller report. That’s not the worst of it, considering the number of political assassinations that the Kremlin has orchestrated on foreign soil, its involvement in the attempted coup in Montenegro, and its efforts to sway multiple European politicians.

The bottom line is that the Kremlin has backed some of the most noxious reactionaries now operating on the world scene: Viktor Orban, Mario Salvini, Heinz-Christian Strache, Marine Le Pen. Oh, yes, and Trump too.

Russian actions in its near abroad (Georgia, Ukraine, the Baltics) have revived NATO from what should have been its deathbed. And if Russia succeeds with its political vision for Europe, say goodbye to the European Union and its bold effort to apply progressive social policies across borders. (Yes, the EU’s economic program has veered off in a neoliberal direction, but that’s something to fight about within the EU framework rather than discarding the framework altogether.)

Putin’s divide-and-conquer strategy has attracted a dyspeptic band of right-wing populists, Euroskeptics, and neo-Nazis, who will likely capture a much larger share in the European parliament elections this week despite the Austrian scandal. But they don’t represent any real alternative to NATO and neo-liberalism. Follow Russia and the path leads back to 1914. Europeans deserve a brighter future, not a catastrophic rewind.

JOHN FEFFER

John Feffer is the the editor of LobeLog and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is also the author, most recently, of Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe's Broken Dreams (Zed Books). He is also the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands (Dispatch Books) and its soon-to-be-released sequel Frostlands. He is a former Open Society fellow, PanTech fellow, and Scoville fellow, and his articles have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, and many other publications.

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

War with Iran : the pretext of proxies

War With Iran: The Pretext Of Proxies

MAY 22, 2019GUEST 3 COMMENTS

Hezbollah Brigades in Iraq

by Kevin L. Schwartz

The prospect of war between the United States and Iran is more likely than it has been in decades, with the pretext for justifying a U.S. military strike or invasion already in place. In recent weeks, leading Iran hawks in the Trump administration have presented a framework to assign culpability to Iran in any future attack. Intentionally broad statements threaten military action in response not only to Iranian actions, but the attacks of “their proxies of any identity.” They also assert that the United States will respond to actions against a wide array of interests including U.S. military vessels, commercial vehicles, and oil tankers in the Persian Gulf.

Such an expansive framework has already been used to explain recent events and beat the drums of war. Following a cursory assessment, American officials cast blame on Iran or Iran-backed proxies in an explosives attack on four oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, while noting that there was no definitive evidence to back such a claim. (Upon the collection of further evidence, the determination was upgraded to “highly likely.”)

By presenting the possibility that Iran could be blamed for hostile actions, even when carried out by other groups, the United States has afforded itself a high-degree of latitude in justifying a potential retaliatory attack. As Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has been briefed on recent intelligence on Iran, noted: “We are not going to start a war. But if we are attacked by Iran’s proxies, we are going to respond against those proxies and hold Iran responsible. And they’re going to pay a price for that as well. Who could disagree with the notion that if we are attacked, we have a right to defend ourselves and respond.”

This attitude represents a key difference between the build-up to a potential war with Iran and the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War. There are certainly striking similarities between the two—the lack of transparency, presentation of selective or disputable intelligence, and desire for regime-change—but the pretext for an attack on Iran is significantly broader, making it all the more cavalier.

In the case of the Iraq War, the justification followed a narrow and direct path to link Saddam Hussein to weapons of mass destruction because the United States decided it needed to secure a UN mandate and coalition partners. In this case, the path is quite wide: a military strike or war can be initiated in response to the actions of any number of Iran-backed militias in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen and possibly any action undertaken by a Shiite individual or group deemed hostile to the interests of the United States and its allies in the Gulf. The only requirement is to consider a group as an “Iranian proxy,” an idea already ingrained in public discourse as a way to describe Iran’s strategy of malfeasance in the region, with little differentiation among the levels of support and direction provided. The label already written is ready to be affixed and paraded as a justification for war.

Although the current U.S. approach to confront Iran more forcefully may prove to be more bluster than bite, it’s worth assessing its claims. What is the evidentiary threshold for determining Iranian culpability in actions carried out by groups it supports? Where does the line of culpability for proxy militias end and sponsorship begin? Would financial support and the supply of Iranian arms—a long-standing feature of Iran’s relationship with groups it supports—be enough to blame Iran for an attack on U.S. interests or would more convincing evidence, like the ordering of an attack, be necessary? As the United States has learned through its support of the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen and its reliance on proxies in Syria and elsewhere, the use of such weapons does not always adhere to even the most perfunctory of conditions under which they were granted, nor do proxies invariably follow the orders of their sponsors.

Justifying a war with Iran based on the actions of its proxies, especially without clear evidence of Iranian direction, is dangerously misguided. It is founded on the flawed logic that Iran operates as an omnipresent puppet master to create havoc across the Middle East, seemingly impervious to the challenges of operating proxies faced by others, including Western countries. It also suggests that such groups do not have motivations and aspirations of their own in confronting U.S. interests and those of its allies. Should it be to anyone’s surprise, for example, that Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed responsibilityfor the drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities in response to what an official spokesman deemed the Saudi-led coalition’s “aggression” and “genocide” against the Yemeni people?

Understanding the Houthis, or Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq for that matter, as merely pawns operating at Iran’s direction is based on a simplistic misreading of current dynamics and politics in the Middle East. Conflating their interests with Iranian regional ambitions and discarding their actions as the mere handiwork of Iran nullify any necessity to faithfully confront the political and social realities shaping their attitudes and driving their behaviors. U.S. allies, like Israel and Saudi Arabia, also often use this tactic to avoid addressing the underlying causes of social strife. Relying on the Iran threat and its network of proxies to explain away all Middle Eastern ills obviates the need for more complex thinking and solutions. Such a pretext for another avoidable conflict in the Middle East suggests such a limited understanding of regional dynamics that the result is likely to be unsuccessful, costly, and counterproductive.

Kevin L. Schwartz is a research fellow at the Oriental Institute at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague where he focuses on Iran. He was previously a research fellow at the Library of Congress and Distinguished Visiting Professor (Middle East Chair) at the US Naval Academy. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

To stop arms sales to KSA

It’s Time To Stop Arms Sales To Saudi Arabia

MAY 15, 2019WILLIAM HARTUNG 1 COMMENT

Arms exhibition in Abu Dhabi (z.o.y.a via Shutterstock)

by William D. Hartung

The Senate’s failure to override President Trump’s veto of its effort to end U.S. military support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen is not the end of the story. A way can and must be found to stop U.S. assistance in refueling, targeting, and other activities that bolster the Saudi/United Arab Emirats (UAE) war effort, which has killed tens of thousands of civilians and left millions of Yemenis at risk of famine and fatal, war-induced diseases.

For starters, Congress should work to close off the other main avenue of U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition—the sale of bombs, combat aircraft, armored vehicles, attack helicopters, and other equipment to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the two primary perpetrators of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. According to statistics from the Security Assistance Monitor, the United States has offered over $68 billion in weaponry to those two nations since the start of the current Yemen conflict in March 2015. As Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution has noted, these U.S.-supplied systems are the backbone of the Saudi military, and without those weapons and related maintenance and support they could not sustain their intervention in Yemen.

The Trump administration, the U.S. arms industry, and the Saudi and UAE lobbies have made numerous arguments in favor of keeping U.S. weapons flowing to its Gulf allies, but none of them holds up to scrutiny.

With respect to the sales of precision-guided bombs—whose use has been documented in the widespread killings of civilians—the argument of choice has been that even more civilians would die in Saudi/UAE air strikes if the coalition were limited to “dumb” bombs that could not be targeted as accurately. This assertion is premised on the idea that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are making good faith efforts to avoid hitting civilians. The sheer volume of strikes on targets like hospitals, a school bus, funerals, factories, water treatment plants, and other civilian infrastructure puts the lie to this argument. Air strikes on civilians are not “mistakes.” They are part and parcel of the Saudi/UAE strategy to bomb Yemenis into submission and end the war on terms favorable to their coalition.

Another popular argument for continuing arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE is “if we don’t do it, somebody else will.” But the United States and its European allies supply the Saudi air force and the majority of the arsenals of both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Saudi and UAE militaries could not turn on a dime and seek Russian or Chinese systems to substitute for any cutoff of U.S. weaponry and support. It would take a decade or more for these nations to end their dependence on U.S. arms. A few deals with Moscow or Beijing would have limited impact on Saudi and UAE military capabilities, if Russia and China were even willing to supply arms to two nations that are responsible for the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe, with the international opprobrium that would accompany any decision to do so.

President Trump’s favorite argument for keeping the weapons trade going is jobs, jobs, jobs. His claims of U.S. jobs tied to Saudi arms sales and related deals have fluctuated widely, from 40,000 to as many as one million. But an analysis of actual deals concluded over the past two years suggests a figure that is a fraction of the president’s claims. And many of these jobs will be created in Saudi Arabia as part of that nation’s goal of having 50 percent of the value of its arms purchases produced in the kingdom by 2030.

Last but not least is the claim that stopping arms sales to the Saudi/UAE coalition will aid Iran. But the Houthi-led opposition is by no means a proxy for Tehran. They have longstanding grievances that have nothing to do with Iran’s limited military support and would be fighting no matter what posture Iran takes towards the conflict. If anything, the brutal Saudi/UAE intervention is driving the Houthi coalition closer to Tehran. The best way to undercut Iranian influence in Yemen is to support UN efforts to end the war.

There are several congressional initiatives to cut off U.S. arms to the Saudi/UAE coalition, including a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Todd Young (R-IN), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Susan Collins (R-ME), Jack Reed (D-RI), and Chris Murphy (D-CT). That measure would, among other things, stop sales of precision-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for two years and condition other sales of offensive weapons on an end to the targeting of civilians and assurances that Saudi Arabia and the UAE will support the free passage of humanitarian aid. And a bill sponsored by Rep Jim McGovern (D-MA) would immediately end all U.S. arms sales and military aid to Saudi Arabia. It’s time for Congress to move on this and other initiatives that would once and for all end U.S. support for the slaughter in Yemen.

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.

WILLIAM HARTUNG

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.

Demystifying Belt and Road (BRI)

Wednesday, May 22, 2019 - 12:00am

Demystifying Belt and Road

The Struggle to Define China’s “Project of the Century”

Yuen Yuen Ang

YUEN YUEN ANG is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and the author of How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. [1]

In May 2017, Beijing hosted the first Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. The summit, which gathered representatives of more than 100 countries, had been organized to promote Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy: the Belt and Road Initiative [2] (BRI), an ambitious vision to expand Beijing’s investment and trade ties with some 65 other countries that collectively cover two-thirds of the world’s population. In his keynote speech at the summit, Xi hailed BRI as “the project of the century.”

“What we hope to create,” he said, “is a big family of harmonious coexistence.”

Yet the effects of BRI have been anything but harmonious [3]. Chinese-backed railway projects in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand have stalled, as Beijing’s partner governments have complained about excessive costs, corruption, and what Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad has termed “a new version of colonialism.” Analysts have criticized Beijing for practicing [4] “debt-trap diplomacy”—using BRI as cover to extend astronomical loans that will leave its partners beholden to Chinese interests. American diplomats routinely accuse Beijing of “predatory lending,” and last October, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo referred [5] to BRI as a Chinese attempt to buy an “empire.”

There is one problem with the current hysteria surrounding BRI: nobody, including in Beijing, knows what BRI really is. In his 2017 keynote, Xi described “the project of the century” as encompassing nearly everything: finance, infrastructure, innovation, trade, transportation, sustainability, and people-to-people connectivity. The Chinese government has never provided an official definition of what constitutes a BRI project, nor has it issued a list of approved BRI participants. As a result, Chinese interest groups of all stripes—local governments, state-owned corporations, private enterprises, universities, and even charities and nongovernmental organizations—have been able to claim that their pet projects are a part of BRI, whether or not they have official government support. BRI may be the most talked about and least defined buzzword of this decade.

China is currently attempting to revamp and rebrand [2] BRI in response to global criticism. To do so successfully, it will have to clarify the purpose, priorities, and scope of the initiative. It should define specific BRI projects, allowing only those that meet sufficiently high standards of quality, transparency, and accountability to claim the initiative’s mantle. By removing the confusion around BRI, China may begin to regain the trust of the international community while heading off speculations that have recently tarnished the image of Xi’s signature project.

UNDERSTANDING BRI

BRI has always been hazily defined. A 2017 essay [6] published in China Daily offers a sense of the official language that has typically surrounded the initiative. According to the authors, both Chinese policy advisers based at Tsinghua University, BRI represents “the integration of spiritual and material human abilities to understand the world, change the world, and profoundly shape the destiny of humanity.” What this is supposed to mean in policy terms is an enigma, to say the least.

Theoretical vagueness translates, on the ground, into practical confusion. Let me offer a concrete example from my research in Sihanoukville, a beach town in Cambodia that has become a symbol of contention over BRI. In recent years, this town of 150,000 residents has seen an influx of Chinese workers, contractors, and tourists, not to mention a deluge of Chinese investment—$1.1 billion in 2018 alone. Casinos and condos have cropped up everywhere. Existing infrastructure can hardly keep up with the frantic pace of construction: the town’s streets are covered with accumulated garbage and flooded with water from burst pipes. Although a minority of local residents profit immensely by renting out properties to Chinese investors, many others have been crowded out by soaring prices. The result has been a rise in anti-Chinese sentiments. For Cambodians—as well as the international media[7]—all of these disruptions fall under the heading of BRI.

Yet for all the Chinese money and investors in Sihanoukville, only a few projects there are definitively part of BRI, understood in the narrow sense as projects funded by the Chinese state in order to promote bilateral cooperation or development. One such project is an expressway, currently under construction, linking Sihanoukville to the capital city of Phnom Penh. State-backed Chinese loans finance the road, at a projected $2 billion, and a state-owned Chinese company [8] is building it. Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, has declared the expressway “a key project under BRI cooperation.”

Yet other projects are more ambiguous, such as the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone (SSEZ), an industrial park that employs about 20,000 workers. On its website [9], the Chinese Ministry of Commerce describes SSEZ as “an important cooperation project between Cambodia and China,” but unlike the expressway, it is a joint venture between private Cambodian and Chinese companies.

Even less directly connected to BRI are the Chinese casinos and condos that now fill Sihanoukville. These are mostly private investments seeking quick profit and speculative gains, rather than projects to promote development or improve ties between Beijing and Phnom Penh. And not all the investment comes from the mainland: some of the investors in Sihanoukville are from Hong Kong, Macau, and Malaysia. But local residents often do not distinguish between state and private investment or among ethnically Chinese investors from different countries—in their eyes, if it’s Chinese, it’s BRI.

Ambiguity about what does and does not count as a BRI project goes beyond single cases such as Sihanoukville; it also affects databases that foreign analysts use to track BRI. The data set constructed by the Center for Global Development, for instance, relies on Chinese media publications to identify BRI projects, leaving out smaller projects not profiled by the media. The China-Africa Loan Database measures Chinese loans to Africa, excluding investment and privately funded projects. The Reconnecting Asia Database covers major infrastructure projects in Asia yet omits industrial parks such as the SSEZ. The wide range of definitions adopted by analysts of BRI has led the political scientist Nick Bisley [10] to argue that “China’s sprawling infrastructure program has become a test of attitudes that tells us more about the analyst than BRI.”

THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

The confusion surrounding BRI defies a stereotype of China’s leadership as strategic and coherent. Because China is an autocracy, many assume that its leaders formulate farsighted grand strategies, which subordinates work to faithfully execute. The reality is typically the opposite. National agendas are formulated at the top and proclaimed by leaders, often using proverbs and analogies (think former Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping’s signature slogan, “Crossing the river by touching the stones”). Yet implementation is left to a litany of committees, ministries, and local governments, which are tasked with translating the grand vision into concrete policies and projects. This arrangement makes it easy for domestic interest groups to use a national policy as cover to pursue their own agenda, for instance by creating BRI projects to secure procurement deals and cheap loans.

As BRI is only six years old, its formulation naturally extends upon domestic-policy-making traditions. One of these traditions is the “policy campaign [11].” Whereas technocratic democracies pass laws and then implement them in a routine manner, China tends to make policies in a “campaign” style, in which the top commander mobilizes bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, and even ordinary citizens toward a single vision. These campaigns have the advantage of inspiring mass participation and achieving quick results, but the scale and speed of the action they inspire, combined with a lack of coordination, usually produce a string of blunders. When problems grow too serious to ignore, the leadership is forced to adjust. BRI displays the characteristic pattern of such a campaign: vision setting, mass mobilization, and subsequent recalibration.

Another domestic-policy-making tradition, as my own research [12] shows, is deliberate ambiguity. Chinese leaders often speak—and formulate directives—in vague or even cryptic terms. For example, the central guiding document [13] for BRI from 2015 to 2017 was only seven pages long and sketched broad principles such as “go where the demand is” and “share responsibilities and progress together,” rather than providing a detailed plan.

Ambiguity leaves policies open to interpretation, allowing them to be adapted to different conditions and gradually fine-tuned as leaders figure out their plans. But when this deliberate ambiguity is carried over into the formulation of a sweeping global policy such as BRI, it creates misunderstandings overseas that lie beyond Beijing’s anticipation or control.

Countries that participate in BRI, for instance, do not know whether the initiative is primarily about building infrastructure, promoting trade, extending Chinese loans, establishing new standards, or broadcasting Chinese soft power. They cannot enforce accountability because they cannot evaluate BRI projects according to their purported aims. Indeed, they do not even know for certain which projects fall under BRI. This vagueness provides fertile ground for suspicion and speculation, such as claims that China deliberately wants BRI projects to fail in order to seize strategic assets from debtors.

Beijing’s failure to manage BRI’s brand has also emboldened opportunists within China to take advantage of the initiative for self-promotion and enrichment, with global consequences. In June 2017, the party committee on BRI met to discuss precisely this problem [14]: “misusing BRI to extract profits.” It gave a list of examples: some companies appropriated BRI’s name to advertise financial products and investment funds; others organized so-called BRI conventions to raise funds and charge exorbitant fees; and a few even created fake websites that imitated the official BRI website in order to drum up business. These misuses, said the committee, have harmed the initiative’s brand overseas.

THE ROAD AHEAD

Facing a global outcry over BRI, Beijing is now shifting gears from a hazily defined BRI 1.0 to a more fine-tuned BRI 2.0. At a 2018 symposium marking the fifth year of BRI, Xi described [15] this transition, using an analogy from Chinese painting, as a switch from xieyi, freehand painting for outlining broad strokes, to gongbi, the careful inscription of details. Revealingly, during his April speech at the second BRI forum, Xi used two new keywords that were absent from his speech at the 2017 forum: “priorities” and “execution.” He dropped the phrase “the project of the century.”

If China is serious about improving BRI, however, it will need to go beyond a change in rhetoric and take at least three concrete steps. The first, already implicit in Xi’s speech, is to choose its priorities. BRI cannot be everything. Beijing needs to narrow down its objectives and focus on achieving them. Three priorities stood out at the 2019 forum: open consultation, clean governance, and green (environmentally friendly) projects.

Along with narrowing its priorities, Beijing must take steps to clarify the scope of BRI. It should establish standards of quality, transparency, and accountability and issue an official list of BRI projects that meet these standards. Chinese policymakers may already be planning this move: in April, Bloomberg reported [16] that Beijing was drafting rules for which projects should be considered part of BRI and “working on a list of legitimate Belt and Road Initiative projects officially acknowledged by the Chinese government.”

Finally, China should seek to improve the quality of BRI by working with other countries to develop pilot projects [17]. Sihanoukville, for example, could benefit from a relatively low-cost pilot to fix broken roads that focused on consulting with local communities. These pilots would test out policies on a small scale, generating lessons that can then be scaled up to larger projects. Reform-era China has long used pilots to experiment with domestic policies, as it did in 1980 with the creation of a special economic zone in Shenzhen. In the context of BRI, such small-scale experimentation will allow Beijing to discover what works before sinking money and diplomatic capital into more ambitious projects. In fact, the principle of using pilots to “scale from point to surface” was already highlighted in Beijing’s 2015–17 guiding document on BRI, but it has not yet been implemented.

Chinese leaders who invoke history as a guide need not go as far back as the age of the Silk Road. They should instead look to the more recent past. China rose from an impoverished communist country to a capitalist superpower on the strength of its pragmatism and adaptability—the two qualities that should guide BRI 2.0.