SEOUL, South Korea has yet to receive any request to join a U.S.-backed global infrastructure initiative seen as a counterweight to a Chinese scheme, the foreign ministry said Tuesday.
During the recent Group of Seven summit in Britain, U.S. President Joe Biden and other leaders of the G-7 club agreed to launch the Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative for developing countries in a move to offer an alternative to China’s One Belt One Road initiative that critics say has saddled recipients with snowballing debt.
“We have received no separate request,” Choi Young-sam, a spokesperson for the ministry, told a regular press briefing.
Choi added that no concrete action plans for the initiative have been announced while reiterating that Seoul can cooperate with any entity as long as it befits its principles of “openness, transparency and inclusiveness.”
The White House has pitched the new initiative as a “values-driven, high-standard, and transparent” partnership led by major democracies to help narrow the more than $40 trillion infrastructure needed in the developing world.
It is largely seen as a move to counter China’s yearslong push to expand its global influence through the One Belt One Road initiative — a grand geopolitical strategy to connect China with Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Europe and Africa through “land and maritime silk roads.”
Source: Yonhap News Agency