The New Corridor Competition Between Washington and Beijing

Despite not garnering much attention at the time, an announcement in September from the leaders of the United States, the European Union, and India marked an important new direction in foreign policy. At the G20 Summit in Delhi, the trio unveiled an agreement to build a gigantic transnational economic corridor that would enhance both physical and digital connectivity between Europe, the Middle East, and India. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the vision—a major infrastructure initiative under the umbrella of the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII)—as a “green and digital bridge across continents and civilizations.” A second initiative, the Trans-African Corridor, would stretch between Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Zambia.

These corridors represent a new way of thinking about geography by tying countries, regions, and continents together in radically new ways via connective infrastructure—and offering the prospect of accelerated economic development as a result. But the United States and its partners are late to this game, and the two new corridor initiatives are attempts to recapture initiative and influence from China, which has been developing hundreds of infrastructure projects across Eurasia and Africa with its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) over the past decade. They also borrow from the Chinese playbook of the past decade in startling ways—a tacit recognition that China’s focus on urbanization, infrastructure, and international order-building is bearing fruit.

The projects are a direct response to the BRI, which, as we argue in our new book The Belt and Road City, puts urban corridors and infrastructure-building at the heart of its vision for a reshaped international order. Although the importance of transnational urban infrastructural corridors to economic development and integration has long been established (and predates the BRI), the BRI is the first modern example of an explicit linkage between transnational corridor-building and great power geopolitical strategy. And where earlier urban corridors operated on a smaller scale—sometimes national, other times transnational—the corridors that China is creating are immense and transnational. For its many failings, the BRI remains nothing less than an attempt to reorient and reconnect large swaths of the world economy and to tie it into an evolving Sino-centric international society—or so policymakers in Beijing may hope.

The two new corridors cover regions in which the BRI has not gained a significant foothold yet which are strategically important. The ambitious India–Middle East–Europe economic corridor plans to move commercial goods, data, and energy across a number of strategic regions via new railways, ports, undersea cables and other digital components, and essential sustainable energy infrastructure. It will link up countries and regions that sometimes have had difficult relations, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, and Israel.

The Trans-African Corridor will do the same for the countries it connects: a new railway will link the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Katanga region and northwestern Zambia to global markets through Angola’s Lobito Port. This project is also notable because it signals a new development in the relationship between the U.S.-led PGII (via the G7) and the EU’s Global Gateway initiative, which also connects geopolitical objectives with infrastructure investment. EU leaders hope that the Trans-African Corridor, if successful, can serve as a model for similar projects in other parts of the world.

The two corridors are worthy of attention for a number of reasons. First, they demonstrate a new, significant step in geopolitical competition between China and the United States and its partners. These two great powers—and to a lesser extent the European Union—are now vying for leadership over the development of the world’s evolving sociotechnical systems and emerging transnational connections.

Second, the new corridor initiatives act as a hinge for U.S. President Joe Biden’s domestic economic and foreign policy agendas. They are one part of Washington’s push toward a new grand strategic vision amid a watershed moment in world politics—one in which the United States’ unipolar moment has dissipated, and the outline of a bipolar or even multipolar world is unclear. In a speech last April on renewing American economic leadership, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan explicitly linked U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy to domestic economic well-being.

Third, the corridors represent a shift in thinking about geographical space. They are transnational—crossing national boundaries and tying people together (as well as dividing them) in new ways. They are also a distinctive new feature of the nexus between urbanization and global capitalism, which great power states are responding to and trying to shape. There have long been trends—sometimes captured in the catchall concept of globalization—toward transnational logistics and transport integration, which are part of the rescaling of the capitalist economy away from the national level to the transnational. These trends are becoming more fully tied into geopolitical competition as China’s influence grows and Beijing uses corridor construction as a way to reorient the global economy.

Fourth, transnational corridors are upending the way policymakers must think about time. These corridors are long-term investments—measured in decades, perhaps centuries. They do not mesh well with the short-term electoral cycle or the ephemeral media cycle. China has put a completion date of 2049 on the BRI, which illustrates that Beijing is thinking about grand strategy and international order-building in the long term. Democratic states with ambitions to shape the world to their own preferences must come to terms with this fact. This kind of strategic competition requires a stretching of the temporal horizon in ways that the mid-twentieth-century architects of the Marshall Plan or the strategy to contain the Soviet Union would have well understood.

The corridor approach being deployed by China, and now by the United States and its partners, will go a long way to shaping life for billions in terms of connectivity, economic opportunity, and climate adaptation. These are among the reasons the next decade of corridor competition is so important for the shape of international order. Cities and their connective infrastructures create path dependencies that, once developed, last for many generations. And, more than this, these connections have baked into their material forms the values of the societies and economies that build them. An open and democratic city (and its connecting infrastructural tissues) will look and feel very different from a city based on a technological model of surveillance and state control. That is why the types of infrastructural models and the technologies upon which they are based matter so much today. It’s also why the geopolitical contest for the future will take place via the development of infrastructure and the ability to enroll allies in that transnational undertaking.

And there are distinct differences between China’s BRI approach to corridor-building and the emerging Western-style approach. One difference is crucial from the vantage point of the United States. The BRI corridors eventually connect to Chinese ports or cities—for example, Gwadar Port links the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to the Persian Gulf, and Kyaukphyu in Myanmar links the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Economic Corridor to the Indian Ocean. However, although the India–Middle East–Europe economic corridor will pass through hubs in a number of partner countries, it does not immediately connect to U.S. cities or ports. The same is true of the Trans-African Corridor.

The United States has not used economic development in quite the same way as China has, where highly political state interventions and a distinctive brand of state capitalism are at the core of the model. One big question is how the United States and its partners could develop a model of leadership around transnational corridors that reconfigure the role of the state and private enterprise in ways that could also meet the challenge of China’s state-directed grand strategy.

Although the terms and tactics of corridor development will differ dramatically from those of the BRI, the U.S. approach seems to confirm that infrastructure corridors will be a core feature of the emerging great power contest over the shape and form of international order. Their centrality to competition also speaks to a new turn in thinking about the intersection of geopolitical competition and infrastructure.