For decades, the United States framed development policy primarily as a humanitarian enterprise — an effort to reduce poverty, strengthen governance, and advance democratic values. 

Those goals remain important. 

But the strategic environment in which development operates has changed. The rise of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has made clear that infrastructure finance, industrial supply chains, and development banking are not peripheral to geopolitics; they are central instruments of it.

If future administrations seek to rebuild a U.S. development sector that has been dismantled over the last year, they will need to do so with a clear-eyed understanding of this new landscape. 

The most promising evolution in recent U.S. policy has been the recognition that development finance can serve industrial strategy as well as humanitarian goals. 

Development policy can no longer be justified — or designed — solely as aid. It must also function as geoeconomic statecraft. 

And if it is to be sustainable across party lines, it must be anchored in clearly articulated strategic and industrial objectives that resonate beyond any single administration.

China Has Already Established the Model

The first Trump administration correctly identified the BRI as a major strategic challenge. Yet Washington lacked the institutional tools and financial agility to respond at scale. 

China’s model — state-backed financing, rapid execution, and high tolerance for risk — enabled it to secure infrastructure, energy, and mineral access across Africa, Southeast Asia, and parts of Europe.

Meanwhile, U.S. development efforts were fragmented. Agencies such as USAID and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) focused primarily on development outcomes, often with limited coordination toward broader geopolitical objectives. 

From the perspective of partner governments, the U.S. was slow to assemble financing packages and bring substantial capital to the table, particularly for large-scale infrastructure. 

China, by contrast, often arrived with a more integrated, plug-and-play model — state-backed finance bundled with construction capacity and, in many cases, access to downstream export markets. 

Anti-corruption standards and environmental safeguards — however desirable from Americans’ perspective — also contributed to longer U.S. timelines. 

The result was a widening perception gap about reliability and speed, even when U.S. offerings were ultimately higher in quality and governance standards.

As a result, Chinese firms and financiers gained footholds in ports, telecommunications networks, and critical mineral supply chains that underpin emerging industries, from batteries to renewable energy systems. 

By the time the Biden administration launched the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment in 2022, the U.S. was responding to an ecosystem that had already taken shape.

The Lobito Corridor Shows What U.S. Development Finance Can Do

The most promising evolution in recent U.S. policy has been the recognition that development finance can serve industrial strategy as well as humanitarian goals. 

The Lobito Corridor project, launched during the Biden administration, illustrates this shift. The corridor links the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia — major producers of cobalt and copper — to the Angolan port of Lobito on the Atlantic. 

With more than $4 billion in U.S. commitments, and over $6 billion when including G7 partners, the project is designed not only to improve regional infrastructure but also to diversify global mineral supply routes. In practical terms, this means supporting supply chains critical to electric vehicles, battery storage, and other clean-energy technologies.

It also reflects a broader lesson: When the U.S. government provides meaningful risk mitigation and long-term commitment, it can catalyze private capital that would otherwise hesitate to enter frontier markets.

Lobito is not a rejection of development principles. It is an integration of them with strategic and industrial priorities. 

That integration — if institutionalized — offers a path toward development policy that can command durable political support because it links overseas investment to domestic economic resilience.

How the U.S. Can Approach Development Strategically 

If projects like Lobito are the model, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) must be the institutional engine. 

Created in 2018 in response to concerns about China’s growing influence, the DFC has demonstrated flexibility and a willingness to assume political risk. By late 2024 it had committed roughly $12 billion across more than 180 projects.

Yet scale remains a constraint. To compete effectively in an era of geoeconomic rivalry, the DFC will need expanded authorities and capital, as well as clearer strategic integration with U.S. industrial policy. 

That integration could mean prioritizing projects that secure semiconductor inputs, battery materials, rare earth processing, and clean-energy infrastructure — areas where supply chain resilience is now a national priority.

Equally important is coordination. A more effective model would better integrate the DFC with USAID, the Export-Import Bank, and relevant industrial policy initiatives to provide technical assistance, infrastructure finance, export support, and access to U.S. markets. 

In an era of geoeconomic rivalry, that balance is not a betrayal of development’s mission. It is the condition for its survival.

Rather than scattering projects across dozens of countries, the U.S. may need to concentrate resources in corridor-style clusters that build durable economic ecosystems tied to strategic priorities.

At the same time, the objective is not to counter China everywhere it operates. Instead, it is to secure supply chains and industrial capabilities that matter for the U.S. while supporting economic development in partner nations on terms that are transparent, sustainable, and mutually beneficial. 

Strategic focus requires selectivity. Trying to match the BRI project for project would dissipate resources and obscure priorities.

The End of the Innocence

Political durability in the U.S. will not emerge automatically. It will depend on whether development policy is perceived as advancing concrete national interests — industrial resilience, secure supply chains, technological leadership — rather than as discretionary foreign assistance. 

A more explicitly strategic orientation does not abandon humanitarian objectives; it embeds them within a framework that is more likely to survive changes in congressional control and presidential leadership.

For many in the traditional development community, this shift will be uncomfortable. Development work has long been animated by a sense of humanitarian purpose, and understandably so. To describe it as part of geopolitical competition can feel like a loss of innocence. 

Yet such innocence was always partly an illusion. American development institutions were born during the Cold War, when initiatives such as the Marshall Plan and even the Peace Corps advanced both moral and strategic aims. 

The challenge today is not to abandon humanitarian commitments, but to accept that they operate within a competitive world where power and principle are inevitably intertwined. 

A development policy that acknowledges its strategic context need not become cynical; it can instead become more responsible —clear-eyed about power while disciplined by principle. 

In an era of geoeconomic rivalry, that balance is not a betrayal of development’s mission. It is the condition for its survival.