To Exit Free Trade and Build Infrastructure at Last: The North American Belt and Road Initiative

The world is currently seeing a new paradigm of cooperative relations and economic development take hold, from its initiation in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, across Eurasia, Southwest Asia, and Africa. It is also watching the major power centers of Europe, on London’s lead, insist on rejecting this new paradigm in favor of geopolitical “zero-sum, win-lose” economic policies and war confrontations with Russia and China.

In the center is the Presidency of Donald Trump: disrupting the confrontation with Russia to the murderous fury of the geopoliticians and their media; fully intending to build a new U.S. economic infrastructure and restore the American industrial worker; but in a hardening trade confrontation with China which threatens his peace diplomacy in Korea and his early good relationship with President Xi Jinping; and with his infrastructure plans having gone nowhere thus far.

There is hope, as Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche observed today, that President Trump will rethink participation in the Belt and Road Initiative and join in, as Japan has recently shifted its policy on this. This might occur as a result of the United States’ very attempts to oppose and compete with China’s New Silk Road in Africa and Southeast Asia, which have been intensified by announcements by Secretary of State Pompeo in recent days.

But a much better way for the confrontation policy to change, is through the proposal of independent Congressional candidate Kesha Rogers, running in Houston’s 9th C.D. against incumbent and “impeachment” leader Rep. Al Green. That proposal, quoting Kesha Rogers: “We should replace NAFTA with the North American Belt and Road Initiative (NABRI), as part of the global Belt and Road Initiatives, or World Land-Bridge, and the creation of a production-oriented New Bretton Woods international financial system.”

The candidate focuses on five areas of development: A North American infrastructure bank or credit institution; a North American Water and Power Alliance; building corridors of high-speed rail and industrial development through the Americas; bringing the Maritime Silk Road through the Caribbean and through the expanded Panama Canal and other new crossings; and sharing on the frontiers of space science.

For President Trump and his constituents fired up to support him against “Russiagate”; for the American workers waiting for NAFTA to be ditched and new infrastructure to get built at last; and for Mexico and its new President-elect, it is the happy solution, and the best.