The Belt and Road Initiative failed because government-operated central planning creates waste and debt traps, whereas the U.S. approach puts private companies in the driver's seat to build commercially viable platforms.

Whenever you have central planning and really government bureaucrats effectively allocating large pools of capital, there's a lot of waste because vendors massively overcharge things. There's a lot of waste because there's a lot of roads to nowhere. And what happens is, China will basically deploy capital to its own companies that then basically write IOUs to the host country. And the host country realizes that these projects have gained a reputation for being in debt trap because China will say, we'll build a road as a loan, except the company building the road is Chinese. And so China can basically decide what the price is. ... We're approaching it totally differently. And because we're approaching it by putting our companies in the driver's seat, it's actually, in a lot of ways, it's much more ethical because the deal is structured in a way that's really meant to be a true joint venture and one that will be optimized for commercial viability, not just for political purposes.

verbatim transcript · starts at 9:03