The Chinese are coming! U.S. think tanks and the Belt and Road Initiative in the Middle East and North Africa

It is now common for U.S. government officials and policy analysts to cite China as the most significant current threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. This article examines how the U.S. foreign policy community mobilizes this “China threat” to make longstanding foreign policy concerns salient in an age of great power competition. To illustrate our argument, we focus on U.S. foreign policy think tanks, which portray infrastructure projects tied to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as threatening to U.S. interests in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This is in spite of the fact that BRI projects remain only a minor feature of the region’s political economy. Drawing on a corpus of 3,006 U.S. think tank reports on the MENA, we use quantitative text analysis to examine how the BRI has been constructed as a threat to U.S. interests in the region — and how, in turn, this threat is used to motivate a range of policy recommendations. The findings point to a downstream consequence of great power competition: the threat posed by China’s BRI can be used to energize longstanding U.S. interests and goals, even in regions where Chinese overseas development finance is nascent at best.