Some see it as a threat. Others have high hopes for it. The Silk Road is China's biggest foreign policy project. It is supposed to ensure that resources from all over Eurasia reach China and that the finished goods "Made in China" can be easily sold everywhere in Asia and especially in Europe.

China's system has long since become a peculiar synthesis of communism, state capitalism and free market economy. The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, the government in Beijing and at its head the "Paramount Leader" Xi Jinping determine where the air of the free market may blow and where the state intervenes to regulate. Everything follows the premise of practical requirements and according to Deng Xiaoping's motto: go through the river feeling every stone with your foot. One launches trial balloons, as once with the free trade zones on the coast, and then follows the next step.

Xi Jinping himself is considered the initiator of the latest, most ambitious and largest project: the New Silk Road. It is intended to secure China's supremacy in Asia, indeed in all of Eurasia. China is thus crossing the most important geopolitical concepts of the British and Americans.

In his 1904 treatise "The Geographical Pivot of History", the British geographer Halford Mackinder referred to the alleged danger that the emergence of a large-scale Eurasian power could isolate Britain. At that time, the British still had the memory of Napoleon's Continental Blockade in their bones. A political-economic coalescence of Eurasia via land routes would marginalise the British role as a maritime trading power and endanger the "Empire". Similar concerns had also led to the British-Russian conflict of interests in Asia in the 19th century.

After the Second World War, the leadership of the Anglo-Saxon world had fallen to the United States of America. During the early phase of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China still considered themselves allies, a Eurasian alliance had emerged as an adversary to the transatlantic naval alliance NATO.

Today, this Eurasian alliance has renewed itself. On the one hand, Russia and China, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, have moved closer together again politically and economically. On the other hand, there are projects like the "Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO)", which is increasingly becoming a military quasi-alliance because of the joint manoeuvres.

China and Russia are integrating the Central Asian states into a concept that is intended to bring Europe and East Asia together. In the process, China increasingly controls the sea routes that connect East Asia via the Strait of Malacca, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. On land, roads and railways are being expanded. In Europe, the Chinese have bought into numerous ports.

For Anglo-Saxon geostrategy, this means that age-old fears are now coming true. A Eurasian economic system is indeed growing together. And the Chinese are directing it. The Europeans are more passive participants. Something is happening to them that they do not yet understand. But sooner or later they will be so involved that it will no longer be possible to disengage. The Chinese already control many ports, for example the Piraeus near Athens. And already today the container port of Duisburg is dominated by trains and barges reloading goods from China. This is the end point of the Silk Road, so to speak.

The Silk Road is thousands of years old

The history of the Silk Road goes back thousands of years. But unlike today, there was no governing power back then. The Silk Road was a network that connected Europe and the Mediterranean region with East Asia by land along various routes.

Even in ancient Rome there were goods "Made in China". The Romans only knew roughly that China was a country in the Far East. But they had no more precise idea of it. The goods had not been delivered by individual traders who could have reported on the country of origin, but through a complex chain of intermediaries.

In the intervening space, in the vastness of Central Asia, numerous state entities had emerged over the centuries that benefited from trade via the Silk Road routes. Cities like Samarkand or Tashkent flourished because of the trade between West and East.

With the new maritime trade routes of the Europeans, the Silk Road lost importance from the 16th century onwards. With its disappearance, Central Asia became impoverished.

This will soon change. The Chinese "Belt and Road Initiative" will revive the old overland routes. The Chinese will exploit these trends to expand their influence in Eurasia. This will inevitably put the Americans on notice. Donald Trump and Steve Bannon have long analysed and addressed this geopolitical danger. Trump's aggressive policy against China also finds a cause here. If China controls and dominates Eurasia, the US is pushed to the periphery. But the Americans will try not to let it come to that.