G7 economies offered an unprecedented $600 billion infrastructure pledge – the first attempt to form a “Marshall Plan” for the developing world in the post-colonial era – at the G7 summit last week. Given the global infrastructure financing gap of $15 trillion before 2040, the G7 commitment is encouraging, if meager. The plan was devised by the world’s largest democracies to surpass China in possessing 21st century global infrastructure.

However, even worse than not competing with China, it would mean leaving much of the developing world to China.

Infrastructure has been at the center of world order and development since Roman times. China has been the willing, ready and capable infrastructure partner of the developing world over the past decade. An African researcher told the London School of Economics that there are no “democratic roads or authoritarian bridges”. The ultimate end of infrastructure is development, not ideology. This echoes the Chinese view.

Conversely, the G7 has asserted that its infrastructure investments will be values-driven. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2021 World Democracy Rankings, twenty-three of Africa’s fifty-four countries are categorized as full democracies (only Mauritius), flawed democracies or hybrid regimes. If the G7 infrastructure pledge exclusively supports democracies, only one country on the strictest standard – or twenty-three countries on the looser standard – in Africa would even be eligible for funding.

Here is a sobering reality for the G7. Since most African and Asian countries are ineligible for G7 investment due to their political fundamentals, China will likely be their main and only financier in the coming decades. In today’s world, less than 20% of the population lives in a full and free democracy, and that number is falling. The rest of the 80% of the world is pushed into China’s economic orbit by the G7’s own fabrication.

The renewed Great Game of the G7 Cold War will create a more fractured world. When China completed laying the PEACE cable along the east coast of Africa in 2021 – providing high-speed, low-cost data access from Djibouti to South Africa and across the Mediterranean to the south of France – it would not have been admirable or economically viable to only provide telecom connectivity to democracies. Infrastructure has minimal impact if developed piecemeal, like a puzzle. The developing world will be more divided and economically unequal if a digital wall is erected against non-democracies and infrastructure only reaches the lands where votes are counted.

There are three reasons why the G7 must restore the lost confidence in its commitment to infrastructure in the developing world.

First, the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment is the metamorphosis of its 2020 version, the Building a Better World. The name change removed reminders of the Biden administration’s failed domestic policy, the Build Back Better Act. After all, when a multi-trillion dollar vision to revitalize America’s physical and social infrastructure has not emerged, how realistic is it that America will now prioritize a $200 billion investment? dollars in infrastructure from Mozambique to Myanmar?

Second, in multilateral engagement, G7 members and the European Union (EU) risk falling into a prisoner’s dilemma. The developing world is watching all nations in the global climate change negotiations, where each country expects the other to act first.

Third, the EU commitment to global infrastructure was 1.5 times greater than the US commitment. Europe has centuries-old roots in Africa and Asia. Will Africa and Asia see this re-entry as neo-colonialism? If Europe is there to support Africa and Asia, why has Europe not done more over the past decades, if not centuries? Why are developing countries presented as geopolitical theaters and not as self-determined agents?

The G7 engagement must not ignore the indigenous desire and aspirations of the developing world and its people. They do not wish to become proxies for liberal or illiberal economic powers. The developing countries of the world are not the winning trophy of a great power. They are their own champions.

Clearly, the G7’s optimal strategy for fostering liberalism around the world is to engage with authoritarian powers, not isolate them. The United States has condescendingly downplayed the importance of countries like Saudi Arabia and the Solomon Islands and backed away from its decades of support for Afghanistan and Myanmar. The result? The oil crisis is biting G7 livelihoods hard, and the global security vacuum has welcomed China’s incursion.

From the perspective of the developing world, perhaps the world’s seven most advanced nations are making a political mistake. Conditioning G7 infrastructure funding on democracy will create a supersized China that will be more self-sufficient in the developing world, defeating the very grand strategy the G7 has set itself to accomplish.

Shirley Ze Yu is Senior Practitioner Fellow at the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the China-Africa Initiative at the London School of Economics. Follow her on Twitter @shirleyzeyu.

Picture: Reuters.