Ben Shapiro

Belt and Road was an initiative or what they called the Silk Road Initiative.

It was designed to basically create massive debt traps for countries.

They would give them free money.

The money was not free.

It'd be attached to constraints.

Those countries which were poor would take the loans.

And then Beijing would basically foreclose on the loans and take control of property and strategic areas and all the rest.

And countries were joining up because, hey, free money.

But it turns out that countries have been leaving the Belt and Road Initiative.

And even Chinese investment in Belt and Road has been dropping pretty precipitously.

According to the Institute of International Studies in Australia, Panama, Italy, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, all of them have been moving away from the Belt and Road Initiative.

According to that institute, Panama's withdrawal exemplifies this dynamic.

Following US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's visit and warnings regarding Chinese influence over the Panama Canal, Panama chose not to renew its Memorandum of Understanding with the Belt and Road Initiative, a decision celebrated by Washington,

According to Foundation for Defensive Democracy, China has quietly begun to pull the plug on BRI infrastructure spending.

China's overseas development financing shrunk from a high of more than $80 billion in new funding in 2016 to around $5 billion in 2021.

In Africa, the numbers are particularly stark.

They dropped from $30 billion in 2016 to $1 billion last year.

And again, a huge part of this also is because China totally screwed all of planet Earth with the COVID pandemic.

All right, coming up, President Trump is going to be discussing a wide variety of issues with Xi Jinping in China.

We'll go through all of those.