US backs infrastructure scheme to rival China’s Belt and Road
Blue Dot Network will vet and certify projects to promote ‘sustainable’ development.
The US is aiming to capitalise on growing unease in Asia about the risks and costs of China’s Belt and Road Initiative by unveiling a certification scheme that will set international standards for big infrastructure projects.
The American-led Blue Dot Network will, its organisers said on Monday, vet and certify projects to promote “market-driven, transparent, and financially sustainable” infrastructure development in Asia and around the world.
The Blue Dot Network — named after the astronomer Carl Sagan’s observation that Earth looked like a “pale blue dot” when viewed from space — will initially be led by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, in co-operation with the Japan Bank for International Cooperation and Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The plan was announced by OPIC, the US agency that promotes investment in emerging markets, at an American-sponsored Indo-Pacific Business Forum held alongside the south-east Asian regional grouping Asean’s annual leaders’ summit.
The organisers will form a steering committee to develop the plan, inviting other countries, private companies and civil society groups to join.
“Each blue dot is meant to be a dot on the map that will be a safe place for companies to operate if they are interested in sustainable infrastructure projects,” Wilbur Ross, the US commerce secretary, told the Financial Times ahead of the launch. “The point is to show seriousness about the sustainability of projects.”
The initiative follows criticism that some BRI projects — for example in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Laos — create debt traps for beneficiary countries or fail to meet international standards on transparency, local workers’ rights and environmental standards.
“The Marshall Plan showed what good development can be,” David Bohigian, the OPIC official who announced the initiative, told the FT, referring to America’s post-second world war aid programme in Europe. “The Belt and Road Initiative follows a path different from the Marshall Plan.”
However, it is unclear how effective the Washington-backed initiative will be at holding back unsustainable BRI developments. Blue Dot Network organisers claim the initiative will serve as a catalyst for private finance, but it will have no lending function of its own. BRI, in contrast, is underwritten by billions of dollars from Chinese state-owned banks and companies.
America’s role in Asia was in the spotlight at the Asean summit, where Mr Ross and Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, led the US delegation. President Donald Trump’s decision not to attend was widely noted by regional press, and several south-east Asian leaders sent lower-ranking officials to an Asean-US summit on Monday in a move viewed by Washington as a snub.
When asked at a press briefing whether Mr Trump should have come, Carlos “Sonny” Dominguez III, the Philippine finance secretary, said: “That would be nice, but I suppose he has other issues to address, and most of them are domestic at the moment.”
According to the annual Asia Power Index published by the Sydney-based Lowy Institute, which measures countries’ influence on economic relationships, military capability and other partners, the US remains the pre-eminent overall power in Asia, but became a “net underachiever” in 2019 as China gained ground.
“The US remains an important, but not the primary economic player in Asia,” said Hervé Lemahieu, head of Lowy’s Asian Power and Diplomacy Programme, noting that China now outranked it on trade. “They’ve got to get used to that.”
-Source FT.Com
