On why “transactional” geopolitics is a losing strategy—and why infrastructure, relationships, and long-term alignment matter more than bullying.
Transactional geopolitics is a fantasy
I’ve been listening to something on the Belt and Road Initiative, and it immediately pulled me back to a point I’ve made before: Trump’s transactional approach to international relations is just… not how the world works.
(If you want the broader moral argument behind this, it connects directly to what I’ve written about mutual aid, geopolitics, and why the “law of the jungle” story is mostly propaganda.)
How empires actually grew: relationships, enforced or otherwise
Think historically: how did Great Britain grow? How did the U.S. grow? Not because they were “tough negotiators,” but because they created a world built around alliances, economic ascendency, and common interests with willing partners; in addition to pulling—sometimes brutally—other regions and countries into their sphere, as “making friends” often happened at the barrel of a gun.
Either tactic though carrot or stick, built relationships. As even colonization didn’t just extract resources. It exported language, institutions, and dependency. People learned English because English was the gateway to survival and mobility inside the colonizer’s systems.
The West didn’t just “trade.” It built a world where other countries had to route themselves through Western institutions, Western finance, Western rules. And later, the IMF and World Bank became part of that architecture—loans and “help” were tied to structural adjustment and policy/economic conditions that often meant privatization, austerity, and forced market openness. (That whole era has a long paper trail, and it’s not a romantic one.)
What Belt & Road is doing instead: build the conduit
Here’s the part that matters: whatever you think of China (and I’ll get to the critiques in a minute), Belt & Road is fundamentally an infrastructure-and-relationship building strategy.
It’s closer to the old proverb: “Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach them to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.” Except on the level of states and economies: roads, ports, rail, power, logistics, and infrastructure—the conduits of growth.
I’m not a neoclassical economics guy. I don’t worship “growth.” But as the world economy exists today, infrastructure is the lubricant. Infrastructure is what makes it possible for a place that has always been peripheral to get themselves deeper into 'the market,' and stop being peripheral.
If you’re in inner area Makeni in Sierra Leone (or anywhere else in the Global South), you can’t industrialize or decentralize production without the basics. When I spent time there fifteen years ago, there wasn't even proper electricity. You simply couldn’t realistically build a factory outside the capital. But if roads, electricity, and transport networks shift, ports and connections to larger markets develop, suddenly you can. Suddenly you don’t have to squeeze everything into one coastal city. Suddenly local economies can breathe.
And here’s what I keep coming back to: you don’t have to bribe someone to build a road in the same way you have to bribe (or coerce) a country to restructure its entire ownership regime. Structural adjustment wasn’t “just help.” It was a reformatting of societies along specific lines that people inside them didn't always go along with without huge incentives.
This is not “mutual aid”—but it’s relationship-building finance
Let me be clear: I’m not naïve about this. Belt & Road isn’t some pure gift economy. There are state interests, strategic interests, corporate interests, reputation interests, and geopolitical leverage comign out of it.
But even with those interests in play, there is a difference between:
- “We will fund infrastructure that expands your capacity, builds ties over time, and is mutually beneficial to us both”
- versus “We will give you money to implement the policies and infrastructure projects we think you should have and that will benefit our interests and companies.”
If you want an everyday analogy: if you’re repairing your roof and a neighbor comes over and says, “Do you need help?”—and they actually help—something changes. A relationship forms. Trust forms. Not because anyone is an angel, but because practical solidarity creates social glue. That neighborly gift is also often reciprocated in time, further strengthening the bond.
This logic resonates with me living in rural Italy now, as people here don’t do business of any consequence with people unless they sit down, drink coffee, share a meal, talk, build a human bond. Relationship comes first. Deals come second.
The hard part: Belt & Road has real criticisms
To keep this grounded: yes, there are serious critiques of Belt & Road—debt sustainability, transparency, environmental damage, uneven labor practices, and the strategic use of ports and logistics corridors. There’s also an entire debate about whether “debt-trap diplomacy” is reality or an over-simplified narrative that doesn’t fit the data.
Even very recent reporting shows the sheer scale of Chinese policy-bank lending under Belt & Road, and the concern that some countries are now paying more in debt service than they receive in new financing.
So no: this isn’t a fairy tale. But that's not what I'm writing about. I'm writing about trust. And even the critiques don’t erase the core strategic insight: if you build infrastructure and relationships across the Global South while your rival burns bridges, you are shaping the future alignment of the world.
The Global South isn’t “catching up”—it’s re-centering
Here’s my blunt prediction (climate chaos aside, because obviously that can disrupt everything): in 50–100 years, the global economy will look completely different.
Africa will foundationally matter geopolitically in a way the West still refuses to emotionally accept. South America will matter more. Asia will keep growing and diversifying. And when that world takes shape, the question won’t be “Who talked the toughest?” It’ll be: Who built relationships? Who built capacity? Who built lasting networks? Who treated partners like partners?
The U.S. can barely keep trust with Europe right now. It pushes and bullies its 'allies' backs up against the wall, to the point where they are looking for other more diverse options. And Europe itself is increasingly exposed as hypocritical—especially when it claims universal “values” and then selectively applies them. Meanwhile, countries across the Global South are making a rational calculation about who actually shows up, who builds, who cooperates, and who doesn't try to humiliate them.
The deeper point: different civilizational logics
At the deepest level, I think this is also about political culture. The aggressive profit-maximizing, extraction-first logics that Euro-American countries have exported across the world are not natural law. These are historical products of European capitalism and imperial expansion—exported outward, often by force.
And while China isn’t “communist” in the old sense, the political logic of the Communist Party still isn’t identical to American-style individualistic corporate capitalism. While steeped in modern international relations practices it doesn’t approach the world with the same reflexes. The same uncompromising and condescending colonial logics. And that difference matters in how relationships are built, narrated, and sustained.
Related posts
- America First and the Myth of Going It Alone
- Mutual Aid vs. Transactional Power
- The Age of Dependency
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