The American obsession with President Donald Trump and the investigation into untoward Russian influence is distracting us from China's bid to displace the United States when it comes to global leadership. The latest major step is the "Belt and Road" initiative, which officially kicked off this week.
Aimed at building infrastructure to connect China to a range of Asian countries, it's sometime described as a Marshall Plan. But that analogy doesn't go far enough. Infrastructure is how you dominate. Thus, Belt and Road is more like the 19th century creation of railroads across continents — or an effort to build an Eisenhower Interstate System for an entire region of the planet.
China hopes for economic benefits, to be sure. But its geostrategic ambitions are equally or more important to Belt and Road. While Trump turns the U.S. inward — and while the frozen U.S. political system can't even agree on domestic public works spending — China is using infrastructure to assert global leadership.