Iraq is an example of how recent instability in American-Middle Eastern relations has opened the door for China to expand its influence in the region via investment projects and an exploitation of local politics.

China’s rich trove of ancient wisdom expands the imagination about global governance. Its perspective deserves a place at the table. After asking what our current world is, we must not forget to ask ourselves what the future world could be.

The US and the West can excoriate China all it wants on China’s debt traps, lack of transparency, and pernicious diplomacy. But unless the US and the west come up with better solutions, that dirt road, for the developing world, is still a dirt road.

China has gifted security technology to a number of foreign nations, stretching from Ecuador in South America to Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia. Whether such technologies are part of China’s BRI efforts to construct ‘a community of common destiny’ or are backed by some other ulterior motive is unclear.

Due to Pakistan’s flawed policies, Iran has become the new favorite BRI country of China in the South Asian and Middle Eastern region.

China has the potential to help countries all over the world leapfrog over coal, but so far it has fallen short, contradicting the green rhetoric China has repeatedly used to describe BRI.

The Belt and Road Initiative is slowly evolving from a mere label describing various ad hoc projects into a formal institution. The Second Belt and Road Forum underscores progress in creating multilateral architecture.

The second Belt and Road forum showed that despite persistent challenges, the initiative is an evolving one and will continue to gain international support. However, its success will depend on its ability to integrate and reconcile an increasing number of actors and interests.

Critics often claim that China is using its massive “Belt and Road Initiative” as a form of coercive “debt-trap diplomacy” to exert control over the countries that join its transnational infrastructure investment scheme. This risk, as Deborah Brautigam of John Hopkins University recently noted, is often exaggerated by the media. In fact, the BRI may hold a different kind of risk – for China itself.

It is impossible to predict the full environmental impact of the Belt and Road Initiative, so it is critical that Chinese authorities take full advantage of every opportunity to consciously build a greener Belt and Road.