Dominating Global Juggernaut? On China, it's too early to tell.

• Author: Trivedi, Atman

One of the most-repeated but misunderstood foreign policy stories centers around Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai's rejoinder to Henry Kissinger, in the early 1970s, when asked about his views on the impact of the French Revolution. As the anecdote goes, Zhou famously replied, "It is too early to tell."

Here's what really happened: Zhou mistook the question as an invitation to weigh in on the student demonstrations roiling Paris in 1968. But the confusion, as American diplomat Chas Freeman remembers, was naturally "too delicious to invite correction."

That episode in history evokes China's Belt and Road Initiative in two key respects: First, the hype and emotions surrounding China's rise and "the project of the century," as Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi trumpeted Belt and Road last year, make it susceptible to misunderstanding. Second, the Belt and Road Initiative's ambiguous, open-ended, and long-term character counsel in favor of patience and circumspection in evaluating its impact.

Boosters think China's big idea can transform relations across over sixty-five countries in Eurasia, Africa, and beyond by building and linking transportation corridors, logistics hubs, and facilitating trade. Emerging market infrastructure needs are no doubt massive. The Asian Development Bank estimates that between 2017 and 2030, Asia alone will require $26 trillion in investments just to maintain present growth rates and account for climate change.

Beyond an estimated $ 150 billion a year pouring into Belt and Road countries, China has invested serious resources to launch Belt and Road events and tell Belt and Road stories. That reflects the scheme's status as President Xi Jinping's signature development and foreign policy initiative. Its ambitious geographic scope, financial backing believed to be somewhere in the range of $ 1 trillion to approaching $4 trillion over time, and China's dogged efforts to frame a narrative of open borders and open trade in a connected world--at a moment when parts of the West have turned inward--has created an aura of formidability for many. These perceptions are important; they are already pulling smaller countries towards China's gravitational field--and can foster dependency, in the absence of feasible alternatives.

But look closer, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Jonathan Hillman has done, and the narrative of a juggernaut based on openness is contradicted by some inconvenient facts: First, depending...