The New Silk Roads

Peter Frankopan, a professor of global history at Oxford University, published The Silk Roads: A New History of the World in 2015, a book that sold more than a million copies by recentering world history on Asia rather than the West. The New Silk Roads, published in 2018, serves as both a sequel and a standalone update, arguing that the countries along the ancient Silk Roads, the overland and maritime trade routes that linked China with Europe and Africa for millennia, have become the most consequential actors in 21st-century global affairs. Rather than recounting distant history, Frankopan offers a thematic analysis of contemporary geopolitics, tracing how economic and political power is shifting from the West toward Asia at a pace and scale he compares to the transformations that followed the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama, albeit in reverse.

Frankopan begins by establishing the material basis for this shift. The Silk Roads region controls nearly 70 per cent of global proven oil reserves, approximately 65 per cent of proven natural gas reserves, and the majority of global production in wheat, silicon, and rare-earth elements essential to modern technology. He contrasts this resource wealth with the optimistic world of the early 1990s, when the Cold War had ended and agreements on Korean denuclearization and China-India border disputes promised a cooperative future. In the quarter-century since, economic trajectories across Asia have been extraordinary. Measured by purchasing power parity, a metric that adjusts for differences in the cost of goods between countries, China's GDP rose from 39 per cent of that of the United States in 2001 to 114 per cent by 2016, while more than 800 million Chinese were lifted above the poverty line. India's transformation has been similarly dramatic: The number of Indian households with disposable incomes over $10,000 grew from 2 million in 1990 to 50 million by 2014. The ripple effects reach deep into Western life, as investors from the Gulf, China, Russia, and Central Asia have acquired iconic assets from English football clubs and the Waldorf Astoria hotel to Harrods and Warner Music.

Against this Eastern dynamism, Frankopan presents the West as fragmenting. Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Climate Accord, and the Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), while launching an escalating trade war with China. In Europe, the far right gained ground, Hungary erected barbed-wire border fencing, and Britain voted for Brexit, with Boris Johnson, then a leading Brexit campaigner, calling the EU a "job-destroyer engine" (29). Frankopan argues that where the story in the West is about separation and the re-erection of barriers, the story across Asia is about deepening cooperation.

The institutional architecture of that cooperation is extensive. Frankopan surveys the Asian Development Bank, the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which represents countries with a combined GDP of nearly $30 trillion. Across Central Asia, new railway bridges, pipelines, and transit corridors are proliferating. The Trans-Anatolian Pipeline linking Azerbaijan's gas fields with southeastern Europe became operational. A landmark agreement on the long-disputed legal status of the Caspian Sea was reached. Border disputes that once threatened military conflict began to be resolved. Yet Frankopan also documents severe challenges: a catastrophic water crisis across Central Asia, drought so extreme that 97 per cent of Iran experienced some degree of it, escalating Iran-Saudi antagonism, and declining press freedom indices across nearly all of Asia.

The centerpiece of Frankopan's analysis is China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), President Xi Jinping's signature policy announced in 2013. Xi frames it as a revival of the ancient Silk Roads, calling it "the project of the century" (67). By mid-2015, the China Development Bank had reserved $890 billion for approximately 900 projects, and over 80 countries had joined. Flagship projects include the $60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a $13 billion rail link in Malaysia, and an $8.7 billion railway in Kenya. Frankopan identifies three motivations: securing energy and agricultural resources as China's demands grow and domestic pollution worsens; deploying excess industrial capacity from China's transition away from manufacturing; and stabilizing its western frontier, particularly Xinjiang province, which holds the country's largest gas fields and half its coal deposits. In Xinjiang, Frankopan documents the severe repression of the Uighur Muslim population, including the detention of hundreds of thousands in "re-education camps" (76) that Beijing initially denied existed.

China's strategic expansion extends well beyond Central Asia. In the South China Sea, artificial islands equipped with landing strips and missile systems create a military buffer zone. Ports acquired or controlled by Chinese companies stretch from Greece to Sri Lanka to Djibouti. In Africa, approximately $20 billion in Chinese financing went to roads and railways between 2000 and 2014, with Xi pledging an additional $60 billion. In Latin America, more than $220 billion in loans was issued over 15 years. Critics warn of debt-trap dynamics. The 99-year lease of Hambantota port in Sri Lanka, obtained after the country defaulted on Chinese-financed construction debt, strikes many observers as neo-colonialism. Yet Frankopan notes that approximately 85 per cent of BRI projects proceeded without difficulty, and China increasingly showed willingness to restructure debts.

The US-China rivalry dominates the book's later chapters. The National Defense Strategy warns that China seeks "the displacement of the United States to achieve global pre-eminence" (129), while Admiral Philip Davidson, commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, tells the Senate that "there is no guarantee that the US would win a future conflict with China" (113). Frankopan presents the American response as erratic and self-defeating. Trade tariffs raised prices for American consumers. Sanctions on Russia pushed Moscow closer to Beijing. The withdrawal from the JCPOA benefited Chinese companies that replaced Western ones in Iran. Pakistan, publicly criticized by Trump, turned to China for a $2 billion credit line and to Saudi Arabia for $6 billion. The US courted India as a counterweight, but India maintained deep ties with Russia, which supplied nearly two-thirds of its arms, and India's defense minister denied any talks about joint naval patrols with the United States.

Frankopan contrasts the proliferation of national development strategies across Asia, from Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 to Kazakhstan's Bright Road initiative, with the conspicuous absence of any coherent Western strategy. German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel warns that "China currently seems to be the only country in the world with any sort of genuinely global, geostrategic concept" (179). Technology competition intensifies, with China accounting for nearly half of global artificial intelligence startup funding by 2017. The Bank of England warns that China's credit boom is "one of the largest ever recorded" (203), while former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger cautions that a divided Atlantic would turn Europe into "an appendage of Eurasia" (218).

Throughout the book, Frankopan acknowledges that Silk Roads countries are deeply flawed, with poor records on human rights, controlled media, and repressive governance. He notes the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi operatives, the mass detention of Uighurs in China, and the arrest of activists across the region. Yet he argues that the direction of change is clear. Quoting a ruler of the ancient Zhao kingdom from nearly 2,500 years ago, he concludes: "A talent for following the ways of yesterday is not sufficient to improve the world of today" (230). Understanding what drives this transformation, Frankopan contends, is the first step to preparing for it; trying to stop it is an illusion.