Why Belt and Road cannot replace maritime trade in war

Is the Belt and Road Initiative a strategic folly, and can it provide a wartime alternative to seaborne trade?

It has peacetime value, but wartime resilience and sufficient overland trade capacity remain doubtful; swift Chinese downfall does not follow from those concerns.

Belt and Road's problems do not establish the swift Chinese downfall proposed in the question. In this November 2025 assessment, its infrastructure projects remain disjointed and costly to connect across multiple countries. They have peacetime value, but their continued operation during a conflict is judged doubtful. The further issue is how much trade an overland alternative could carry compared with maritime transport. No traffic figures establish that it could replace seaborne commerce.