Adrian-Victor VEVERA^

Abstract. Globalization was made possible by advances in transport and communication which gave rise to unprecedented connectivity and to new dimensions of it today. States invest in strategic infrastructure initiatives to achieve new sources of economic growth, greater influence and to generate strategic value from cross-border interconnectivity and synergies. China has taken the lead with the most extensive initiative, the BRI, for which it has mobilized over a trillion dollar in resources. The US, having fallen back through a long-running ideological bias in favor of private action and against government involvement, but the new Trump Administration is set on reevaluating these approaches as part of its effort to contain China’s rise and retain deterrence as the strong military and technology power. This article systematizes the underlying issues of strategic infra-structure initiatives and analyzes the US capacity to engage in competition with China in this regard, while emphasizing opportunities for the new US Administration.

Keywords: infrastructure, connectivity, transport, energy, sustainability

INTRODUCTION

In the year 2011, first in Chennai (India) and then in Dushanbe (Tajikistan), the Minister of Foreign Affairs for a Great Power proposed a New Silk Road initiative to connect Central Asia and its surrounding regions, thereby using economic growth to foster stability and reduce ethno-sectarian radicalization (Kucera, 2011). The name of that Minister? Hillary Clinton. And the country was the US, with the major goal of fostering development for Afghanistan. As Clinton said, the vision was for the “Turkmen gas fields could help meet both Pakistan’s and India’s growing energy needs and provide significant transit revenues for both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Tajik cotton could be turned into Indian linens. Furniture and fruit from Afghanistan could find its way to the markets of Astana or Mumbai and beyond.” (Kucera, 2011). Nothing came of it. When the CASA-1000 hydropower project between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan started in 2016, only 1% of the funding was provided by the US and most came from the International Development Association. The US had no financial involvement in the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline which was funded by the Asian Development Bank (Rafique and Humayun, 2012). Not for the first time, whether in statecraft or technology, the US’ lack of a follow-through on its lofty goals contrasted with China’s appropriation of the concept after 2013. The One Belt One Road (OBOR) and later Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) had the New Silk Road as one of the seven land corridors (plus one maritime one) of the largest ever Eurasian integration initiative. Ancient branding met modern strategy in the New Silk Road and the later Arctic Silk Road, Medical Silk Road (established during the COVID-19 pandemic), the Digital Silk Road and the Space Silk Road or Spatial Information Corridor, all part of the BRI (Caba-Maria et al, 2020).

The initiative has suffered strong setbacks with the US branding China as a rival and the EU branding it as a systemic rival, with strong diplomatic moves against Chinese-led projects, resistance from countries wary of debt-trap diplomacy or increased Chinese influence (and also of the loss of US support) and the pandemic itself disrupting key projects (Georgescu, 2025). However it stands as a testament to the ability of China to mobilize funding, technology, infrastructure, expertise and its state-owned and private companies for a strategic initiative (Georgescu, 2017) meant to generate a “Chinese century” in support of “China’s peaceful rise” and the “Chinese dream” of building a strong and “moderately prosperous” society that erases its historical “century of humiliation” (Simion et al., 2017). And what of the US? Enervated by the cost in blood and treasure of decades of fruitless adventurism in the Middle East, the American people experienced a populist upsurge that brought Donald Trump to power twice. Many fear that the US would take an isolationist turn and, while that has not happened, Donald Trump’s campaign of reevaluating and renegotiating American commercial, military and economic agreements and his suspicion of interventionism have made US partnerships more brittle than they have ever been in the post-Cold War era. But there is another change – the US recognized that it had a peer competitor and that it needed to start playing the game rather than rest on the laurels of the unipolar moment that had passed anyway. First in technology and then in trade, the Trump Administration has started bringing deliberate policy into focus rather than the laissez-faire of more generous and carefree eras (Caba-Maria et al., 2020). We are already on the third US administration that takes industrial policy seriously as a factor of competition with other nations, regardless of what we think about the individual policy decisions by often chaotic institutions.

The present article argues that the US is taking its first steps in the contemporary era towards strategic critical infrastructure initiatives abroad, as a factor of competition against mainly China. The first steps are already in place, but piecemeal projects cannot deliver the same strategic gains of holistic approaches and significant barriers remain to the US achieving similar levels of engagement as China in deliberate project making for strategic ends. It is ironic that the decades of US policymakers assuming that China would become more like the US have eventually resulted in the US moving more towards China in favoring industrial policy, trade protectionism and an instrumental view that replaces maximizing GDP as the ultimate virtue with building an economy fit for a future war or some other teleological approach.

But why are strategic infrastructure initiatives so important? In ages past, it was said that “all roads led to Rome”. The saying was ambiguous regarding causality – Rome had built the roads to lead to it and thereby locked its surrounding peoples into an infrastructure matrix with it at its center, with both economic, military and strategic impact. In the globalized world which will persist regardless of efforts at “slowballization” and “fragmentation”, building, owning, operating and supplying critical infrastructures especially for connectivity purposes generate path dependencies which amplify the strategic capabilities of the states that manage this (Georgescu, 2018). Countries operate at the levels they are capable of, but all of those engaged in geopolitical competition through infrastructure construction are pursuing economic growth, greater efficiencies through lower commercial frictions and access to markets, political influence, strategic advantages for connected industries and ultimately the coercive potential of control over critical infrastructures (Caba-Maria et al., 2020). The post-war rebuilding of Europe and development of the world eventually placed the US at the center of a globalized world through organic infrastructure interlinkages. The new multipolar world that China and partner countries, such as Russia or the other BRICS nations, are attempting to build relies on deliberate attempts to generate alternatives or even circumvent the infrastructure topology that gives the US structural power over them, whether in international institutions, in financial and commercial flows or in technological standards (Gheorghe et al., 2018). The US, while struggling with the social, economic and political toll of its decades of investment into globalization (including deindustrialization in its heartland, one-sided free trade, permanent deficits, burgeoning debt and overburdened military), must respond to the revisionism from China. One of the best ways to do is through its own strategic infrastructure initiatives. This article aims to describe the processes and factors involved, to take notes of existing initiatives and to predict likely courses for the US in the context of important constraints.

WHAT QUALIFIES AS A STRATEGIC INFRASTRUCTURE INITIATIVE?

Not every project can be considered a strategic infrastructure initiative. Some are just investments that happen to consist of infrastructures and may possess a strategic dimension for the implementing or operating entity. We need to narrow down the identification and designation of these initiatives, especially to recognize emerging or non-declared strategic moves, as for instance the organization LSEG (formerly Refinitiv) tries to do for BRI projects (Refinitiv, 2019). This helps to identify elements of underlying strategy or, in an opposite manner, to identify underutilized assets from a strategic perspective that could be integrated into a strategically valuable initiative (as China has done through BRI subsuming regional initiatives such as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor or the former 16+1 Initiative between China and its Central and Eastern European partners) (Ross, 2020).

We posit that a strategic infrastructure initiative is defined by a cross-border perspective that links disparate infrastructure projects into a strategic narrative that generates a multiplier of the strategic impact of the individual projects. The strategic dimension becomes a clear, if not overriding, factor in the selection, implementation and operation of infrastructure projects, just as much if not more than profitability, minimization of opportunity costs and other considerations. The BRI is the largest such initiative, with a cumulative 1.175 trillion dollars in investment by 2025, of which 704 billion dollars involved construction contracts (Green Finance & Development Center, 2025). The signature initiative of President Xi Jinping had numerous moti-vations behind it: an extension of the Chinese political economy into the world, the growth of its influence, climbing up the value ladder from an importer of technology and capital to an exporter of both, the creation of new avenues of growth following saturation by traditional Western markets, the graduation to higher value-added exports, the continued existence of the oversized infrastructure building apparatus after the exhaustion of economically viable projects in China, the “Westward Deve-lopment Policy” for its underdeveloped interior through Eurasian connectivity and, of course, the establishment of critical ties that enable it to at least achieve hegemony in its near abroad (Georgescu and Cîrnu, 2016). Not being able or willing to beat the US at its game of alliances and security subsidies, China chose to master an economic game by responding to the unmet need for infrastructure investment in the developing world (G20, 2025), estimated at 3.8% of GDP yearly for developing economies to achieve convergence (or 3.4 trillion dollars) (Burke and Lipshitz, 2018), and corre-sponding to a required 94 trillion dollars between 2016-2040, of which only 79 trillion will actually be available (Mohseni-Cheraghlou and Aladekoba, 2022). This value is already much higher than the 2014 estimates of UNCTAD (the United Nations Con-ference on Trade and Development) which had first measured the difference between private + state + official development assistance (ODA) funding for infrastructure compared to needs (Griffith-Jones, 2014).

Of course, China was not the first to do so. A long list of countries, including South Korea and Russia, planned their own Eurasian integration initiatives, with crossborder projects in transport and energy especially, sized appropriately for their resources, with partnership with other countries and the mobilization of subnational entities, from municipalities and regions to the diaspora business communities (such as the Koreans of Central Asia). We can see the strategic dimensions of infrastructure in the USSR and later Russia’s building of pipelines for oil and gas to Europe, establishing since the 1970s a relationship of dependence that has been described as an “energy weapon” for Russia, utilized as such during disputes with individual countries and also during the early stages of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which had been preceded by insufficient Russian gas deliveries to European storage infra-structure. More recently, Russia’s construction of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines had important strategic connotations, bypassing a restive and hostile Eastern Europe in favor of direct access to the strategic German market. Previously, in 2009, a conflict between Russia and Ukraine had seen the latter use its importance as a transit country to threaten delivery shut-offs to Russia’s Western markets. Other energy projects transit the Black Sea and Turkey to provide both diversification and to strategically counter European diversification initiatives such as the failed Nabucco pipelines. Nord Stream 1 and 2 had even greater strategic implications through their ability to transport hydrogen gas mixes, since Russia had a national strategy in place to use it to power the hydrogen economy strongly promoted by Germany as the future of Europe, thereby cementing Russia as the future strategic supplier for Europe even after decarbonization had taken place (Sukhankin, 2022). An example of a more recent Russian strategic infrastructure project is the recently completed International North-South Transport Corridor between India, Iran and Russia which provided it with an alternative routes to ship oil and agricultural products in the context of the post-invasion sanctions.

Other countries have their own piecemeal efforts, depending on the strength of their strategic vision and the amount of resources they can mobilize (and, as we can see with the US, even rich countries may fail to mobilize resources adequately). Examples include the European gauge railway connecting the Baltic states to Poland, the Via Carpathica road system, the various energy interconnectors such as the planned ones between Greece and Egypt, between Romania and Azerbaijan, between Australia and Indonesia, between North Africa and Europe, or the failed EastMed pipeline that would have connected the gas fields of Israel and Cyprus to Greece via Crete and then to European markets. The latter especially shows how contentious such projects can be – the 2020 signing of the EastMed Accord in Athens indicated a strong start, but the withdrawal of the US in 2022 and the continued objections of Turkey for strategic reasons and based on non-recognition of the Cypriot Exclusive Economic Zone finally sank the project. The EU, of course, has developed its own strategic infrastructure initiatives. Internally, of course, it finances infrastructure build-up in Member States, especially for convergence, but it also understands the strategic and cross-border dimension through the strategic transport corridors (TEN-T) or the Energy Union’s interconnectivity projects. Outside the EU, it has encouraged infrastructure development in areas considered for future EU integration (through, for instance the Western Balkans Infrastructure Facility), in Western Asia (the former Europe-Asia Connectivity) and, in response to the BRI and the designation of China as a systemic rival, it has developed the EU Global Gateway project that will mobilize 300 billion euros in funding.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF STRATEGIC INFRASTRUCTURE INITIATIVES

Figure 1. Strategic infrastructure initiatives – key elements

Figure 1 details the main elements describing the strategic infrastructure initiatives. On the side of the deliverables, we can see that the main current focus for entities engaged in strategic infrastructure initiatives is in transport, in energy, in telecommunications (as seen in the Digital Silk Road and in the row over 5G infra-structure development between China and the US in Europe in 2020) and, increasingly, in computing infrastructure (for instance, data centers for AI, Big Data and cloud computing, supercomputers for high-performance computing capabilities and more). The latter is especially tied to digital emerging technologies such as AI, blockchain, quantum computing and to their dual use capabilities, which have become a battle-ground for superpowers aiming to be the first to achieve accelerate economic growth and strong military capabilities through them, as well as fostering dependencies through early standards setting and monopolization of high-cost and high-expertise value chains (Muşetescu et al., 2022). Both key assets and key resources are involved on the infrastructure development side, and also intangible elements such as repu-tation, trustworthiness, intellectual property rights and goodwill (Gheorghe et al., 2018).

The main considerations for strategic infrastructure initiatives, as seen also in the BRI, are the following:

• The integration of existing infrastructure to assemble an infrastructure network with strategic value in as short a time as possible, profiting from pre-existing links. Russia leveraged USSR energy infrastructure in its growth strategy after the year 2000, to which it added new projects, both in the West and especially the East, where China emerged as a powerful strategic hedge for reliance on Western markets. It then built on top of these efforts through the Eurasian Economic Community and the “Vladivostok to Lisbon” initiative;

• The integration of existing initiatives – as mentioned before, China leveraged the cooperation projects with individual regions which predated the BRI in order to maximize BRI strategic potential from Indochina to Europe and Eastern Africa;

• Shifting production ties – to establish new divisions of labor with partners, which garner strategic importance, for instance through critical dependencies or the monopolization of key markets and product categories. China’s strength in the global production of equipment for renewable energy (solar panels and wind turbines), its strong growth in the telecommunications equipment sector, its explosive growth in the electric vehicles and batteries areas, are all inten-tionally cultivated to establish critical dependencies;

• Ecosystem formation – countries seek to accumulate, dominate or regulate strategic industrial ecosystems, consisting of resources, production, research-development-innovation, support and market delivery. The more they control of it, the less vulnerable they are to hybrid disruption through economic warfare, and the more secure they are in their control of a particular market. China’s dominance of the “rare Earth metals” industry, both for extraction and refining (both very polluting) was leveraged to attract key electronics industry manufacturers in everything from smartphones and wind turbines to LED screens. Steadily, the use of various incentives and instances of protectionism, entire supply chains have ended up moving to China, as seen in the growth of the added value produced in China as part of the iPhone manufacturing process (until US-led friendshoring saw half of production move to India);

• Technological dependencies – countries try to foster technological dependencies to achieve systemic influence by increasing their lead so much that it becomes infeasible for a country to invest enough to reduce its dependence completely on them and to achieve early dominance in related industries. One example is the US early dominance over 4^th generation communications technology which saw the smartphone revolution and the rise of US champions dominating the global market for operating systems, apps and other technological fields and having strong advantages in the electronics themselves. China has been trying to replicate this early lead in 5G (Seely et al., 2019). In a US Department of Defense report, analysts warned that “China is on a track to repeat in 5G what happened with the United States in 4G” which is that its lead in the 5G rollout will enable its preferred architectures, standards and spectrum to become the norm and be adopted by all other market entrants (Medin and Louie, 2019). This has an impact on the creation of new products and services and achieving market dominance – “Chinese internet companies will be well-positioned to develop services and applications for their home market that take advantage of 5G speed and low latency. As 5G is deployed across the globe in similar bands of spectrum, China’s handset and internet applications and services are likely to become dominant, even if they are excluded from the US” (Medin and Louie, 2019). It is not enough for the US to exclude China from its market. The US cannot, on its own, maintain a supply ecosystem with high research and development investment allocation for it to maintain capabilities and alleviate the perceived costs and risks of Chinese dominance – “manufacturers indicated there was not enough demand to justify re-establishing manufacturing capacity in the West”. Just like mobile operating systems such as Symbian and Microsoft Windows disappeared because the lack of scale left them unable to keep up technologically and attract investment on apps on their platforms, so too can the US lose its ability to remain on the cutting edge (Seely et al., 2019). This was one of the reasons for the constant travels of US policymakers through Europe in the summer of 2020, exhorting its European allies to shun China in the development of their own 5G networks. We can give as examples then-State Secretary Mike Pompeo’s warning that intelligence exchanges, especially in the “Five Eyes” and NATO, are under threat from the integration of Chinese-manufactured 5G equipment, and would prompt a reduction in cooperation between the US and offending countries, or the July 2020 tour of four major European powers by the then-National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien and his Deputy, Matthew Pottinger. It is anticipated that AI will see similar winner-takes-it-all dynamics, which is why there is such an intense competition to be the first to achieve scaled implementation of paradigm-changing AI applications in weaponry, product design, industrial control systems, cybersecurity and more (Muşetescu et al., 2022);

• Institutions and institutional infrastructure – countries try to cement their infrastructure advantages by institutionalizing relations with partner states and also by building institutional infrastructure that enshrine their influence. What the US achieved with the Bretton Woods system of institutions (the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund) plus subordinated entities (the WB consortium) and ancillary infrastructure such as the SWIFT interbank payment system (operated by a Belgian company) is what China is trying now to achieve with the BRICS Group, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Chang Mai Initiative and the CIPS (Cross-border Interbank Payment System). Other countries see institutions and institutionalized infrastructure the same, as sources of critical dependen-cies resulting in potentially also undue influences or dangers (such as the potential for sanctions), leading them to pursue strategic hedging by affiliating themselves to the newly formed alternatives.

The strategic issues in play are the aforementioned critical dependencies, which can be exploited in a coercive manner if need be or leveraged for strong opportunity costs to any defection, technology standards with systemic impact, the security of supply (for instance, for food or energy), the formation of trade routes (with attendant impact on economic growth and industrial stimulus) and, lastly, the sustainability of a country’s involvement in conflict. China had already considered the latter as seen in its campaign to secure natural resources for its growing industry and also to extend its control to the first island chain in the South China Sea, giving its navy and submarines free access to the world ocean and to the strategic freedom it represents (such as a feasible nuclear triad through hard to detects nuclear-armed submarine). The US also considers conflict sustainability to be important. This drives both its considerations over the vulnerability of Taiwan, the potential of maritime blockades to coerce Chinese behavior to something more acceptable for them and the US’ own capacity to reliably project power in other regions, such as the Indo-Pacific, in case of a conflict.

Lastly, the priorities for the strategic infrastructure initiatives, aside from security and the related resilience issue (Alipour et al., 2021), are profitability and other strategic imperatives. With recent US initiatives and the lines of criticism addressed to Chinese projects such as the BRI, we have seen also the rise of considerations such as sustainable funding, environmental impact, ethical labor use and other values-based approaches. The BRI has gone through a “greening process” which has seen commitments on greener technology usage and lower involvement in polluting in-dustries (Georgescu, 2025), though some doubt the effectiveness or sincerity of such moves.

Figure 2. The stakeholders for strategic infrastructure initiatives

Figure 2 outlines the variety of stakeholders for strategic infrastructure ini-tiatives, both in the originating country or entity and in partner ones. This complexity is apparent also in non-Democratic or authoritarian state-led initiatives, since the complexity of infrastructure development and operation as well as the many levels of interaction with partner societies which can result in influence gain require multistakeholder approaches. Even the BRI has people-to-people contacts as a main priority, expressed also through regional and subnational interactions between provinces and between municipalities. Allies and state partners are of course important (especially for the US, since China eschews formal partnerships and its “unlimited partnership” with Russia is the only one that comes close). Civil society groups, academia, sectoral organizations such as trade, professional or industry bodies are also important. We must not forget how important multinational companies are as the actual implementers and operators of critical infrastructures, not to mention as a filter for projects on the basis of profitability and access to resources (a major role in project selection to increase sustainability, something that China has struggled with). Powers interact not just with friends, but also with their systemic rivals and it is an added factor of complexity in the globalization paradigm that such strong rivalries have appeared in interlinked countries such as the US and China or the EU and Russia. We have mentioned before the strong role of technology in current strategic infrastructure initiatives on the basis of their dual-use impact and their capacity as a force multiplier, which is why technology providers are listed separately as stake-holders to distinguish them from other multinational companies, such as those in mining or construction. We must also remark on the importance of entities within supply and production chains which countries seek to integrate to achieve new effi-ciencies, security of supply and sources of power and influence. Lastly, international organizations matter as forms of institutionalizing power dynamics and for collective decision-making with legitimizing potential, which explains why China has vied to improve its status within the existing frameworks (for which it has been a major beneficiary, such as through World Bank-led official development assistance) while nurturing its own alternatives over which it exercises stronger structural control.

THE EXISTING US STRATEGIC INFRASTRUCTURE INITIATIVES

The US has some current initiatives – however, analyzing them reveals some key characteristics of the US system that distinguishes it from the Chinese one. Generally, the only projects with global scope are those related to the US security umbrella. Chalmers Johnson spoke about the US “empire of bases”, a network of more than a thousand bases of all sizes with complex infrastructure supporting rapid deployment and strong force projection in any part of the world. The creation of this network is key to US global presence and has continuously evolved to generate new burden-sharing arrangements with host nations, new supply configurations, elements to support new missions such as drone warfare and missile defense and the inte-gration of partner nation forces with sufficient logistics capabilities to cover their needs. This is a significant achievement and has recently seen significant expansion in Eastern Europe, with projects such as the ongoing Mihail Kogălniceanu airbase expansion to become the largest NATO base in Europe.

US limitations on strategic infrastructure initiatives in the civilian realm become apparent when analyzing its other efforts. For instance, the US was one of the main factors behind the development of the Three Seas Initiative or Intermarium linking the Baltic Sea, Black Sea and Adriatic Sea. This initiative started from the observation that Eastern Europe has developed East-West connectivity to connect to the main economic partners to the West, but not North-South connectivity that enables economic integration, new efficiencies and new possibilities related to military mobility. The 3SI proposes to address the need for investment in North-South transport, energy and digital infrastructure. However, despite fears in Brussels and Berlin that the 3SI was an exercise for American bloc-building in Eastern Europe, similar to the China – CEEC Initiative (formerly the 16+1), the US insisted that funding for projects needed to come from private resources, maybe concentrated by the Three Seas Initiative Investment Fund. The US only provided a billion dollars in seed money, which is not enough for the completion of any sizable project let alone the Via Carpathica Highway or the Gdansk – Constanţa railway or the Alexandropouli – Constanţa railway.

Despite the objections to the contrary by US officials, another US initiative was seen as a direct response to China’s BRI. However, the Blue Dot Network is a purely institutional and financial initiative started in 2019 by the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation (now International Development Finance Corporation), Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Japanese Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) and now located under the OECD. It is a system of certification for infrastructure projects which “exemplify quality infrastructure principles as set out in the G20 Principles for Quality Infrastructure Investment, the G7 Charlevoix Commitment to Innovative Financing for Development and the Equator Principles. The Blue Dot Network aims to promote quality infrastructure investment that is open and inclusive, transparent, economically viable, financially, environmentally and socially sustainable, and compliant with international standards, laws, and regu-lations” (Georgescu, 2025). It addresses any infrastructure project, not just those of countries that have chosen to become members and the role is probably to give a set of guidelines that China’s partner countries could invoke to constrain China’s strategic options in maximizing its benefit from implementing BRI projects, thereby lessening their overall impact. The first four infrastructure projects were certified in April 2025.

There are also examples of bilateral projects with the potential for expansion and replication. The most recent one, which also covers emerging digital technology, is the future AI data center known as Stargate UAE which is being built in Abu Dhabi by US-based company OpenAI, in partnership with the United Arab Emirates. This project will be part of a broader $500 billion AI-focused investment and is expected to be one of the largest in the world, with a capacity of 1 gigawatt, and a first phase of 200 megawatts operational by 2026. The project was announced by Donald Trump during his first 2025 Middle Eastern tour as part of a strategic partnership and the facility will be part of a larger 5-gigawatt campus and is a key part of the UAE’s bid to become a global AI hub. Such investment also tracks with the US-led AI Partnership for Defense, which includes also non-NATO countries such as the Indo-Pacific partners and countries like Bahrain.

Projects such as these exhibit the US insistence on burden-sharing between public and private entities and between participating states, which can be read as a limit to the US capacity (or political will) to mobilize resources for non-military projects with perceived asymmetry in gains. It is ironic that the US could build over 2,000 km of highway in Afghanistan to support military mobility, but its current strategic culture does not allow it to do something similar in Eastern Europe.

US ADVANTAGES IN STRATEGIC PROJECT DEVELOPMENT

The United States continues to have significant advantages should it pursue strategic infrastructure development abroad as part of a new grand strategy for a new “American century.” These factors are, however, in continuous flux and certain advantages are steadily eroding as the country continues its decline relative to the rest of the world in a dynamic and competitive environment.

The first and most important advantage is the access to private and public capital that the US can count on. US-based entities have access to very liquid capital markets both in the US and abroad, with a variety of financing options and instruments in advantageous terms. This is set to continue regardless of the Trump Admini-stration’s forays into protectionism and restrictions to movement and access, which mainly concerns goods and people, not services or capital mobility. In a Public-Private Partnership for a strategic infrastructure initiative, the implementing entities, which will be mostly private, can also count on access to US public funding through the federal government. The ability of the US to finance long-term budget and commercial deficits is a testament to the continued demand for US bonds and for dollars in the global financial superstructure. While the early 2010s saw the global liquidity take refuge from the Global Financial Crisis in American debt instruments, pushing interest rates to negative in real terms (when the US also missed the chance to expand debt to finance infrastructure renewal), that era appears to be over. However, current interest rates remain under historical norms.

The second advantage, alluded to before, is the demand for dollars and US debt instruments that is built into the global economic system, which helps mobilize funding for US projects and entities and also creates the underlying factors for low interest rates. The first side of this systemic dominance is the reliance on Treasury Bills as a “riskless” debt instrument for bank portfolios as part of the management of capital reserves. This is seen also in how many sovereign wealth funds and pension systems throughout the world maintain substantial US Treasury instrument positions, as opposed to those of other countries, cash or other assets. The second side is the maintenance of the petrodollar system, whereby most global oil transactions are settled in dollars, which accrue to oil exporting nations. This sets up a petrodollar cycling process involving investment in assets, strategic purchases and development through dollars, as seen in the case of the Middle Eastern petrostates such as Saudi Arabia. Originating in the 1970s, the petrodollar system is key to America’s extraordinary financial capacity. Thirdly, even though the company that runs the SWIFT interbank payment system is located in Belgium, global financial transactions overwhelmingly take place in dollars somewhere along the transaction chain, covering 90% of transactions. French President Francois Mitterand called this financial power “the exorbitant privilege” of the United States.

The third advantage is the system of alliances and partnerships that the US has built in the post-WW2 era. While many blame the first and second Trump Admi-nistrations for squandering goodwill and political capital for the US in their attempt to renegotiate longstanding economic ties, the existing political capital and institu-tionnalized ties created by the US over decades cannot be eliminated overnight and provides the US with significant leverage and incentive to attract other players into its preferred strategic initiatives. Whether through international organizations, the UN system, bilateral agreements including Free Trade Agreements, strategic partnerships including on security, the US is at the center of a web of multilateral and bilateral ties of interest that it can leverage to obtain support for grand projects.

The fourth advantage that the US possesses is its position at the frontier of technology and science. While many contend that China is on its way towards becoming a comparable actor, especially in its chosen field, the US maintains the largest known technological edge in a host of different technologies, from digital technology and telecommunications to biotech and robotics. Where China has excelled, and this has prompted discussions over the necessity of the US to develop its own strategic infrastructure initiatives, has been in mobilizing public and private resources for scaling the use of technologies in an international setting, such as through the Digital Silk Road to expand its 5G infrastructure footprint with far more transmission stations in China and abroad than US based entities have managed to build.

Last, but not least, despite the bureaucratization and slowdown of large projects throughout the Western World, also felt in the US, the United States retains significant capabilities in complex project management and implementation, both in the private and the public sector (if we consider, for instance, the role of the SeaBees, the US Naval Construction Forces, in building infrastructure such as hydropower facilities, roads and more). Pursuant to the prioritization of clear policies for ace-lerating the delivery of strategic projects under motivation of geopolitical conflict with China and other revisionist actors, such as Russia, the US can mobilize these project management capabilities, both from within and from allies and partners, to achieve important results in the field.

US DISADVANTAGES IN STRATEGIC PROJECT DEVELOPMENT

The US nevertheless suffers from growing disadvantages when it comes to its capacity to implement strategic infrastructure project not just in other regions, but also domestically. Many of these are mirrors of its advantages, which are steadily eroding.

For instance, the growth in national debt and in yearly government deficits has cast doubt on the US capacity to handle further growth in debt. The rise in interest rates from an admittedly very low level has brought, in confluence with its booming debt (which sits at 34 trillion dollars today compared to 20 trillion dollars in 2016), a rise in yearly debt servicing payments that will surpass one trillion dollars in 2025, compared to 250 billion dollars in 2021. This is equivalent to 20% of government revenues and higher than the famously large US defense budget. Sustainability is now in question and risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially as US systemic rivals continue developing alternatives to the Western and implicitly US-led world order.

In the financial sphere, we see countries trying to divest from American assets to increase their economic sovereignty, develop alternative ties, and reduce their exposure to US sanctions following the unprecedented sanctions on Russia firstly in 2014 and then after 2022, when notable first took place such as the blocking of Central Bank assets (and now the discussion on their expropriation, in addition to the already seized accrued interest rates), the freezing out of key parts of the Russian financial system from SWIFT and the start of secondary sanctions. Russia’s actions following the 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea are indicative of this approach – it reduced entirely its use of US debt instruments as part of Central Bank and Sovereign Wealth Fund portfolios, it started dedollarizing its trade with select countries such as China (managing to bring dollar trades to 56% of total and 46% of China trade by the eve of the 2022 invasion, with even energy trade being settled in rubles and renminbi), it reduced its national debt in dollar-denominated instruments by half and lowered debt overall by 200 bln dollars.

Countries are also understanding that their holding of US debt can become a source of leverage should they decline to refinance that debt or to sell it on the secondary markets at a significant loss.

The development of alternative international financial infrastructure and frameworks to those created or managed by the US and its partners also reduces US strategic leverage and resources. In the case of Russia, another answer to the 2014 sanctions was to create its own SWIFT alternative, called the Financial Messaging System, and its own payment processor, Mir. Its inability to promote these among users abroad does not mean that other have not found more success, such as China with its Cross-border Interbank Payment System (CIPS). CIPS participants are located in 119 countries and regions around the world and their activities cover 4,900 banking institutions in 186 countries. As of March 2025, CIPS had 170 Direct Participants and 1,497 Indirect Participants. Among Indirect Participants, 1,091 participants were from Asia (including 560 from the Chinese Mainland), 260 from Europe, 59 from Africa, 34 from North America, 33 from South America, and 20 from Oceania. In 2023, CIPS processed 6.6133 million transactions, totaling RMB123.06 trillion (17.09 trillion dollars), with yearly increases of 50.29% in transaction numbers and 27.27% in value respectively (CIPS, 2025). Since finance is seen in both Europe and the US as a critical infrastructure, we can even say that the Chinese strategic infrastructure initiatives are now achieving their goal of reducing US leverage over the world and its ability to reliably incentivize cooperation, also through negative reinforcement. Certainly, whether we are discussing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as an analogue to the World Bank or the Chang Mai Initiative as an analogue to the International Monetary Fund, the new challengers are not yet able to take the place of established entities, which is why their own rhetoric highlights alternatives, diversity and multi-polarity (Mureşan and Georgescu, 2019). Few countries have decided to cast their lot exclusively with the rising group increasingly organized by China and these are mostly rogue states or states under heavy sanctions constraint (such as North Korea and Iran, respectively). Mostly, they are used for strategic hedging by fearful or ambitious actors in Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere. In itself, this is a problem, as there are fears that the burgeoning “petroyuan” trade between China and Qatar and China and Saudi Arabia may affect the viability of the petrodollar system and its cycling properties.

The offshoring and outsourcing of US manufacturing, especially key areas of the production cycle such as metallurgy, shipbuilding and increasingly high added value activities in electronics, advanced avionics and hulls and in robotics, can also present a challenge. Any US-led strategic infrastructure project will necessarily involve numerous foreign suppliers, which may create security and logistics concerns, espe-cially if China itself has to be mobilized to assist in the building process. US politicians will also likely object to projects abroad for the economic benefit of others (seen through the current populist lens) that does not result in the cycling of US and other funding through US manufacturers and other economic entities, but the capacity is no longer there. It has been noted that Donald Trump’s plans to promote the reindustrialization of the US while simultaneously enacting protectionist measures runs into obstacles related to the sourcing of the steel, cement, industrial robots, producers’ goods such as CNC machines which must be imported for the new factories, including from China, and which will then be subject to high tariffs. Similar depen-dency issues will be found in US-led strategic infrastructure initiatives abroad.

The greatest US disadvantage is, however, to be found in the existing bias against the mobilization of public resources for projects abroad. Unlike China, whose political system has enabled strong support for its companies in international setting and also the mobilization of public funding for corporate interests, the primary ideology of current US elites appears to be against the use of the overwhelming US financial advantage to support infrastructure projects with multiple beneficiaries directly. This is the result of both fears of such programs being politically contested internally, as well as a belief in the power of the private sector in selecting, building, and managing projects in the most efficient way possible as opposed to the government. This is by no means a universal sentiment in the US, but it has been politically ascendant, and it informs numerous developmental approaches, including in existing strategic initiatives such as the Blue Dot Network and the Three Seas Initiative, as described in a previous section. The fact that the main US reply to China’s BRI, the Blue Dot Network, is focused solely on critical infrastructure project governance as a means to restrict or constrain Chinese projects from an environmental, financial, labor and technological standpoint on the basis of sustainability (Martin and van der Putten, 2020) rather than offering a state-led alternative source of infrastructure funding indicates the main limitation of US approaches.

THE LIKELY NEXT STEPS

With the likely assumption that the US will not irreversibly damage its rela-tionship with key partners over the renegotiation of trade, economic, investment and migration relations, especially when it remains unmatched as a security partner, what opportunities may we see for strategic infrastructure initiatives?

In the main, the Trump Administration will try to follow up on its industrial policy efforts in strategic domains such as shipbuilding, microchips and military equipment with some strategic infrastructure initiatives to cement the formation of a mainly economic bloc opposed to the rise of China and its revisionist partners. It will need to do this to counter the effects of China’s own strategic initiatives. However, the US will be unable to match its capacity to mobilize state and private resources directly for projects decided politically. Rather, the US will try to achieve a fusion of public and private governance in project identification and selection, in which state seed money or loan guarantees try to precipitate the coagulation of private funding from a variety of sources that would account for the largest share of the project cost. Particular emphasis will be placed on the technological ecosystem that will underpin the project, especially as it concerns digital emerging technologies, telecom equipment and producers’ goods such as industrial robots. With the recent discovery of backdoors in Chinese-made electric transformers, we might see very stringent rules across the board. The use of legal and administrative frameworks, voluntary codes and best practices incentivized economically through subsidies, insurance premia and certifications will take the place of government-mandated de-cisions or direct negotiation which are features of the Chinese model. Despite fears of the Trump Administration breaking completely with the elements of the Washington Consensus, the values-based approach will remain important in the implementation of the projects, partly out of conviction and partly out of the need to differentiate US-led projects from Chinese ones or to provide an apparently objective standard that China could adopt for future projects, thereby alleviating certain concerns. The values-based approach emphasizes environmental issues, labor issues, debt sustaina-bility and other factors. The Biden-era rhetoric of an “alliance of democracies” might make a localized comeback, but the Trump Administration will be opportunistic in its partnerships.

What will be missing from the projects will be a multidimensional scope. In line with the limitations on the Administration’s capacity to coordinate very large stakeholder networks to achieve funding and other requirements without state fiat or coercion, the strategic infrastructure projects of the US will likely involve clear geo-graphic corridors and single domain approaches to make them more manageable, unlike the more integrated approach of the BRI.

We envision similar projects to the following proposals:

• An Alaska – Japan – South Korea energy corridor involving the building of new infrastructure in Alaska to tap into insufficiently exploited energy reserves. Due to political and environmental opposition, Alaska has a single liquefied natural gas terminal that mainly supplies Japan, while most of its gas is either flared or reinjected into the ground;

• A US – Canada – Europe energy corridor involving gas and oil pipelines built from Alaska to the East Coast of the US to deliver non-shale energy resources to European markets and ensure lower prices through security of supply. The project might involve East Asian LNG shipbuilders;

• Greater support for North-South infrastructure as part of an expanded Three Seas Initiative with Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova as full members, rather than partners. A particular emphasis will be placed on military mobility. Given the general difficulty of making Public-Private Partnerships in infra-structure work in Europe, the US will likely need to ensure access to funding through new debt instruments, including by arranging US buyers for Eastern European debt instruments such as growth-linked bonds;

• A Western hemisphere 5G network with trusted technology vendors, starting from a national proposal from the first Trump Administration;

• A unified NATO space asset network for military-grade space services including Earth Observation, communications, positioning/navigation and timing, and anti-satellite operations; The US would be motivated to do so to counter EU strategic autonomy through existing assets such as the Galileo global navigation satellite system, the Copernicus Earth Observation constellations and the future IRIS² secure government communications constellation;

• A unified Western space infrastructure for Moon exploration or exploitation starting from the current Artemis Initiative;

• A network of state-backed national AI data centers with shared costs and an implicit reliance on US AI solutions vendors;

• A network of standards developing and setting bodies made up primarily of the National Institute for Standard and Technology in the US and the Joint Research Centers of the EU (mediated by the EU – US Trade and Technology Council) to establish standards for post-quantum data security and to have them be adopted in the West and key partners;

• Public-Private Blockchain infrastructure for government service in the US and partner states, including for space-based and AI-based blockchain applications;

• Greater use of forums such as the G7 Partnership for Sustainable Infrastructure to mobilize partner funding and support for various branded projects.

CONCLUSION

The globalized world was made by infrastructure of all types that facilitated interconnectivity, reduced trade frictions and achieved new economic efficiencies. States have deliberately pursued infrastructure development in cross-border spaces in order to achieve strategic objectives through greater integration in concrete geo-graphic spaces or economic domains. While China leveraged its control over society, the economy and the state and private companies in order to mobilize all of its resources to build the BRI, the United States of America has been, to a great degree, complacent because of a myopic confidence in its global hegemonic status. While no country has dethroned it, revisionist actors such as China can now counter the US in key regions of interest through the concentration of forces and other resources. Following radical political shifts caused by the costs of US hegemony accumulated over more then five decades and by the quite natural progress of the rest of the world which resulted in a relative decline of the US, the new Trump Administration is learning from others to develop a new Grand Strategy for the 21^st century to be an American Century. This shift has already been felt in the Biden Administration, as protectionism, unilateralism and a retreat from multilateralism seep into the US political DNA. Other features of the emerging US shift include a focus on industrial policy and state-led coordination of strategic initiatives in dual-use fields whether in space, cyberspace or in emerging digital technologies. What we have not seen yet is a strategic infrastructure initiative on par with that of China. We have described the Three Seas Initiative, the Blue Dot Network, the new AI Center in Abu Dhabi and other initiatives, but none approach the scope of China’s BRI. We contend that the US can initiate numerous projects that can serve to check China’s spreading influence or that of partners such as Russia, but there are systemic limitations in place that make it unlikely that the US will copy China’s capacity to mobilize resources, at least absent a war economy footing. Even the projects that we have already described are equivalent to a paradigm shift for the US, which will have responded to the pressure and challenge posed by China to develop a more deliberate approach to strategic infrastructure initiatives, which will require greater coordination with partners and with private companies.

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