Competing Directly With Belt and Road Initiative Spells Disaster for Western Taxpayers

What is driving this massive transfer of wealth from the developed world to developing countries?

The reason is the U.S. State Department and Biden managed to persuade G7 leaders in Germany that Western democracies need to match Beijing’s bribery of the developing world.

The State Department argues that China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is successfully recruiting “third world” leaders into a maturing Beijing-Moscow bloc, and it was, therefore, imperative the West create a counter-BRI—in this case, the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII).

So the G7 has effectively announced a new kind of “Cold War” to win over the underdeveloped world between Beijing and the West.

So with the BRI expanding China’s influence and control over ever-growing portions of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, the State Department has decided to get back into the business of so-called “development aid,” which it hopes will buy the support of third world leaders.

It produced dependency and poor governance and enriched both corrupt third-world leaders and Western bankers who happily accepted these leaders’ unethical deposits.

The old Cold War foreign aid industry was a shameful system that cost Western taxpayers a fortune simply to prop up ineffectual and corrupt Afro-Asian elites, who then turned around and bit the hand that fed them by attacking the West as imperialist, colonial racists.

A more foolish foreign policy is hard to imagine.

The billions handed out by the West and Soviets simply paid for the survival of bad governments. The fact that all this money did not manage to buy solid “allies” or result in helpful third world “development” was scandalous. Now with PGII, the G7 wants to rebuild this foreign aid industry and recreate the second round of scandalous bribery.

Also, as the dust settled from the G7 announcement, one could feel the excitement building in capital cities around the developing world, where third-world elites realized the good old days of money pouring into their coffers were about to return.

It is worth noting that the plan Biden took to the G7 appears to be a rebadging of a part of the “Build Back Better” program, which was blocked by the Republicans.

Significantly, the plan’s vision embedded in PGII encodes all the usual left-wing rhetoric about climate change, Green New Deal spending, gender politics, and women’s equality. From another perspective, Western taxpayers are now paying for the rollout of left-wing projects across the developing world.

In the United States, this amounts to a $200 billion contribution of taxpayers’ money. The rest of the $600 billion funds will come from the other G7 members and through leveraging private sector investments in areas like digital communication and mining for precious earths.

In contrast, given Beijing does not have to worry about taxpayer revolts when it throws money around the developing world, it is a moot point as to whether the West can ever realistically outspend China in any bribery competition to win over third-world leaders.

Western taxpayers should pay serious attention to these PGII plans to ensure they meet the expectations voters have for how their dollars are being spent.

One can only hope that this time, taxpayers will pay more attention to the failings of foreign aid and third-world development programs than they did last time and avoid breeding mass corruption, waste, and poor governance in distant lands.