Prime Minister Boris Johnson and President Joe Biden have begun plotting a “green alternative” to the Chinese Communist Party’s Belt and Road Initiative in the wake of Beijing sanctioning a group of British MPs.
Mr Johnson reportedly raised the idea during a meeting with the sanctioned MPs, including former Tory Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, during a Downing Street meeting on Saturday.
The plan would see Western democracies pour billions into so-called ‘green’ infrastructure projects in developing nations in order to counter communist China’s growing global influence through its debt-trap diplomacy efforts.
The British leader is said, according to The Times, to have pushed for the Build Back Better project with President Biden in a phone call on Friday evening.
A spokesman from Number 10 told The Telegraph that the two leaders “reflected on the significant action taken by the UK, US and other international partners earlier this week to impose sanctions on human rights violators in Xinjiang and expressed their concern about retaliatory action taken by China”.
Taking credit for the green scheme, President Biden told reporters on Friday: “One of the things I suggested we do is — we talked about China and the competition they’re engaging in the Belt and Road Initiative. And I suggested we should have, essentially, a similar initiative coming from the democratic states, helping those communities around the world.”
Through its Belt and Road Initiative, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has sought to expand its global influence by offering billions in predatory infrastructure loans to developing nations in Asia, Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe.
The loans enable the communist nation to indebt poorer countries, which often cannot afford to repay Beijing. Should a government fail to repay the loans, China often seizes the ownership of the properties. The issue is compounded by the fact that Beijing ships in Chinese labourers to work on infrastructure projects, meaning that even more of the economic benefits are consolidated within China.
Mr Johnson said: “We need to come up with an alternative so that countries have a choice. The West needs to do this.”
The prime minister said that and President Biden have already agreed to throw millions of pounds into the foreign infrastructure project. It has been suggested that Britain could divert funds saved from cuts to the foreign aid budget — which was slashed from 0.7 to 0.5 of GDP last year — into the scheme.
While Boris Johnson has often been likened to former President Trump, the British leader’s positions on issues such as migration, free trade, and allegedly man-made climate change are far more in line with President Biden’s neo-liberal globalist perspective.
Johnson, for example, has pledged to reduce Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions to “net-zero by 2050”. According to a report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation last year, the green agenda would cost over £3 trillion, or £100,000 per household.
President Biden, for his part, has stated his intention to “transition” the American economy away from the fossil fuel industry by the year 2030.
The two men have also frequently used the same slogan, “Build Back Better”, which originated during the United Nations’ disaster relief efforts following the 2015 tsunami in Japan, and was later adopted by the World Economic Forum’s so-called Great Reset.
The WEF has said that in the wake of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, governments throughout the world should adopt more socialist-style policies as well as introducing giant Green New Deal-style initiatives.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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