Geography plays a crucial role in world politics, in this century as in any other. For a long time, of course, the center of geopolitical power has been the United States, whose influence, Bruno Maçães notes, has “radiated to the maritime edges of the large Eurasian supercontinent.” But now the Eurasian supercontinent is becoming an increasingly integrated space, organized not according to a Western model but according to a Chinese one. Mr. Maçães, a former Portuguese diplomat and China-based analyst, observes that internal Eurasian trade is now close to $2 trillion annually, more than double trans-Atlantic trade and “significantly more” than trans-Pacific trade.
China's emerging mastery of this Eurasian trade zone is described in visionary, granular detail in “Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order.” Mr. Maçães's occasional boosterism for China is more than offset by his ability to explain Chinese logic to the West. Until now, China's so-called Belt and Road Initiative—its plan, announced in 2013, to integrate Eurasia and beyond with a series of infrastructure projects across dozens of countries—has been defined mostly in Western terms. Mr. Maçães takes us inside the Chinese worldview.
While the United States has always believed that it has cornered the market on universal values, the Chinese, Mr. Maçães intimates, have their own brand of universalism stemming from a civilizational serenity: Their innate superiority allows them, they believe, to incorporate other value systems, democratic or not, into their own. So while the West faults the Belt and Road Initiative according to its own model of capitalism—not least for the crushing fiscal debts that the initiative has created in countries like Sri Lanka and Pakistan—China sees the project in imperial terms: a way to influence geopolitics and create its own supply chains to compete with those of the West.
