This is the conclusion drawn by two of the Atlantic Council’s “experts,” Martin Casinelli and Caroline Costello who lamented in a Nov. 13 article that when Biden arrived in Lima, Peru for the APEC meeting, he would be outshone by the Chancay mega-port that China’s COSCO Shipping Co., had just built together with a Peruvian firm. The two repeat the worn argument that granting COSCO exclusive operational control over the Chancay port will allow the “Chinese navy and intelligence services to use the port to spy on U.S. naval and commercial ships.”
The only thing the U.S. can offer, they say, is the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP) intended to catalyze private sector investment to the Americas and deepen relations with its 11 founding members. This is supposed to be an alternative to China’s “worrying pattern of state-owned companies which are beholden to the political interests of their government, building and operating ports in strategic waterways across the world.” But APEP “has yet to yield material benefits that rival those of Chinese investments,” and other projects financed by the Development Finance Corporation” will take time to materialize into tangible trade and investment benefits that can be trumpeted as alternatives to China’s.”
