The New Silk Roads

May 20, 2019
The dawning “Asian century” will orbit an axis stretching from China to the Mediterranean, according to this sweeping but underwhelming primer on globalization. Updating his history The Silk Roads, which identified Western-ish Asia as history’s motor, Frankopan, professor of global history at Oxford, surveys the present-day burgeoning of trade, construction, and economic relationships knitting Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, the Central Asian “stans,” and the Middle East with China, Russia, and India. The book is mainly about China’s rise as its “Belt and Road” initiative funds trillions of dollars of transport and energy infrastructure across Asia, Africa, and Latin America to facilitate trade, gain access to resources, and win geopolitical influence. Counterposed to Chinese dynamism is Frankopan’s portrait of a divided, inward-looking Europe and an erratic, isolationist United States under Donald Trump—he summarizes Trump’s foreign policy message as “ ‘We’re America, Bitch’ ”—in an increasingly “irrelevant” West. He does note that Silk Road nations still suffer from corrupt, repressive governments, economic instability, and ethnic and military tensions. There’s not much new in Frankopan’s observations on Asian economic developments, and they probably won’t convince doubters that the region’s coalescence matters much to a rich, self-sufficient country such as America. The result is a weak brief for a globalist vision that doesn’t quite connect the dots.