The New Silk Road is substantially the world’s biggest infrastructure project but it is much more than that: what it has, and what the B3W so far lacks, is strategic coherence. The result is the “Build Back Better World” initiative (already shortened to B3W) centred principally on sub-Saharan Africa. The Summit resolved that the only solution is to meet the threat through competition. In reality, stopping China spreading its economic, social, political and military influence through its New Silk Road initiative is almost impossible, short of using hard power. While President Biden tried hard but failed to build a solid consensus against China, with the EU taking a far less hawkish stance (“cooperation not confrontation”), nevertheless the western democracies are concerned that General Secretary Xi is stealing a significant strategic march. Having reached agreement on the Covid vaccine-rich countries needing to help the vaccine-poor nations to help try and break the virus’s ability endlessly to circulate around the globe mutating as it goes, the central thrust of the Summit was the reassertion of ‘western values’ and confronting the threats posed by autocracies, in particular China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Trump was scheduled to have hosted the 2020 summit, cancelled thanks to Covid much to the relief of many heads of government after the car-crash episode in 2018 when Trump, having just announced his tariff war, refused to sign the common economic statement.Īpart from the simmering tensions between the UK, Ireland (not represented at the talks), the EU and the US (the latter officially the guarantor of the Belfast Agreement) caused by the all-too clearly failing Northern Ireland Protocol as part of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, the overall tenor was the restoration of diplomatic kumbaya, normal service largely resumed.
Nobody can deny that the most recent G7 Summit hosted by Boris Johnson in Cornwall was a very different experience from its predecessors when Donald Trump was representing the US.
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