By Taylor Coplen, Spring 2026 Marcellus Policy Fellow

The rise of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has created a perceived need for the United States to offer a more serious answer to Chinese infrastructure finance. Current U.S. strategy increasingly centers on the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) as a more investment-oriented tool for competing in the roads, ports, power systems, digital networks, logistics corridors, and industrial facilities through which future trade, standards, supply chains, and political influence are being shaped. Yet this strategy risks being weakened by a mistaken assumption: that competing with China requires displacing, quarantining, or cleanly separating American-backed projects from Chinese-funded infrastructure.

Existing analysis already shows that many Global South states resist binary alignment in U.S.– China competition because they seek access to multiple sources of capital, technology, trade, investment, and diplomatic leverage. This paper accepts that premise but argues that infrastructure adds a material reason why forced alignment fails. Infrastructure is not a set of isolated assets that can be sorted neatly by geopolitical sponsors. Ports require roads, customs systems, power, logistics, and industrial zones. Factories require transport, electricity, water, supply chains, maintenance, and access to markets. For countries seeking growth and strategic autonomy, disaggregating American- and Chinese-linked infrastructure would produce fragmented and incoherent systems.

The DFC will therefore fail if it treats Chinese-funded infrastructure as a contaminated landscape from which American finance must withdraw. The relevant question is whether American firms, finance, standards, services, and institutions can become consequential within those systems. Congress and DFC leadership should evaluate projects by whether they improve reliability, reduce bottlenecks, strengthen maintenance, diversify dependence, shape standards, expand commercial access, support supply-chain resilience, and preserve partner-country maneuver space. Some sensitive sectors require tighter restrictions, but selective exclusion zones are different from a general doctrine of separation. The DFC should compete inside integrated infrastructure systems, not try to split them apart.