New Silk Road Strategy is a winner

China's new strategy offers the prospect of Central Asia continuing the unparalleled economic boom it has enjoyed over the past quarter century since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Experiences across Africa, the Middle East and Asia over the past 35 years since the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 show that such overall, sustained growth and steady rise in the standard of living is the best inoculation against the appeal of extreme Islamic terrorism.

In contrast, the supposedly pro-democracy and pro-human rights policies the United States has pursued energetically across the Middle East, as expressed and defined in former US president George W. Bush's Second Inaugural Address in January 2005, have served only to undermine stable governments, investment optimism and standards of living throughout that region. These policies have relentlessly generated the very murderous ideologies they were supposed to defeat in the first place.

China's "One Belt and One Road" initiatives, on the other hand, are rooted not in fantasies based on vague, ill-understood pseudo-philosophical principles, but on clear empirical realities of industrial strength, successful economic policies and business realism.

As reported in the Chinese media, the initiatives will reach 4.4 billion people, 63 percent, or almost two-thirds of the world's population, with a collective GDP of $21 trillion, or 29 percent of the world's GDP.

The new Chinese strategies are practical: They can succeed. And they offer the promise of raising the standards of living of billions of people on the most populous continent.

The author is a senior fellow of the American University in Moscow and has the book, Shifting Superpowers: The New and Emerging Relationship between the United States, China and India, to his credit.