Browse our analysis section for news and articles on topics such as China's Belt and Road Initiative (OBOR), the world's evolving digital infrastructure competition, and the stakes for U.S. policy.
While China learns from past experience and recalibrates the Belt and Road Initiative, it is giving momentum to competing visions for connectivity that will deliver results during 2021 and the years to come.
Over the next 15 years, more hard infrastructure is projected to be built around the world than currently exists. As our infrastructure is transformed, so will be the economies it fuels, the regions it connects, and the global commons it underpins. These trends are too powerful and potentially beneficial for the United States to stop, and too consequential to ignore.
China and the Philippines are expected to sign billions of dollars worth of Belt and Road deals on Tuesday, as the United States and the Philippines move forward on key issues including free trade talks, reports the Nikkei Asian Review.
On his trip to Asia, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence will play up Washington's efforts to boost infrastructure investment in the region at a time when China is doing the same with its Belt and Road Initiative, according to the Nikkei Asian Review.
On September 18, 2018, the Reconnecting Asia Project and the Korea International Trade Association (KITA) hosted “Looking North: Korea in a Reconnecting Asia,” a half-day conference that explored Korea’s ambitious plans for connectivity.
The tug of war between quantity and quality is now at the center of Asia’s infrastructure contest.
Within the last few years, Iran has demonstrated its strong political will to re-emerge as a regional transportation hub.
As Europe disappears, Asia coheres. The supercontinent is becoming one fluid, comprehensible unit of trade and conflict, as the Westphalian system of states weakens and older, imperial legacies – Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Turkish – become paramount.
There has to be a balance between funding any project that a government politician thinks is a good project versus a very long drawn out review process that could take up to a decade. Somewhere in between, there is something that’s long-term economically valuable.
Iran's Chabahar port could herald the start of a challenge to China's expanding geostrategic links.
Beijing’s star is rising in central and eastern European nations,” reports the Financial Times
This report highlights essays from our Big Question series - an analysis collection that explore the drivers and implications of the massive infrastructure push taking place across the Eurasian continent.
CSIS's leading regional experts discuss how the ambitious connectivity visions of regional powers across Eurasia could re-shape the future of the super-continent.
Earlier this month, the leaders of Japan and India paused to lay the foundation stone for a high-speed railway. The new link illustrates the high-stakes competition underway to connect the Eurasian supercontinent. China has stolen the spotlight, but other regional powers are not standing still.
The Belt and Road Initiative is a major attempt by China to create a diplomatic zone around itself where the United States is not present.
As an Asia Pacific power with enormous economic and strategic stakes in the Belt and Road region, the United States cannot afford to sit on the sidelines and watch these infrastructure developments abroad unfold.
Asia’s infrastructure push could create new alliances, reports FT emerging markets editor James Kynge, drawing upon Reconnecting Asia’s “Competing Visions” map series.
A new link in the North-South Transport Corridor connecting Russia, Iran, and India could have far-reaching implications for economic patterns between Europe and Asia.
Southeast Asia's traditional ties to the West are in flux, and China's infrastructure investment might be a deciding factor in the shake-up, writes Andrew Shearer of CSIS.
There are six areas where the United States can directly influence the soft infrastructure in the reconnecting Asia footprint. All of these must be done in coordination with our bilateral and multilateral partners.
If decades of torrid growth have been the opening scene on Asia’s economic stage, the region’s reconnecting—through new roads, railways, and other infrastructure—could be the next act.
India and China want stronger economic ties, Amy Kazmin reports in today’s Financial Times, but infrastructure investment in Kashmir remains a point of contention.