Another Silk Road is needed to defeat terror

High on the hills between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, someone has scrawled some old wisdom on the concrete barriers that slice across the old Green Line: "All walls fall".

One can but hope. With Donald Trump now heading for the White House, there is a clear and present danger that America will double down on the neoconservative "clash of civilizations" philosophy that the self-styled Islamic State uses to recruit its foot soldiers of hate.

IS commander Abu Omar Khorasani has already declared the "maniac" in the White House will increase terrorist numbers by "thousands". This is a dangerous moment. Figures from the Global Terrorism Index reveal IS is now the deadliest terror group on earth. Its attacks on 252 cities last year killed more than 6,000 people.

Yet what we face in the Middle East is an insurgency. No-one can kill their way to victory. Peace will require politics, and good politics needs prosperity.

That is why it is time for the West to take a leaf out of China's book and establish a complementary vision for a new Silk Road, to match the ambition set out by President Xi Jinping in 2013.

In the long term, our best defense against a fanatical Middle East is a flourishing Middle East. Today, the cancer of poverty and inequality is as dangerous as any religious division.

Yet, the low long-term oil price is fast becoming an existential threat to regional stability. In many Gulf states, 60-80 percent of people are employed by the public sector. Collapsing oil tax revenues means Arab countries can no longer afford this. The International Monetary Fund forecasts that by 2021, a third of young people may be unemployed.

Over the last 10 years, the United Kingdom has spent nearly 15 billion ($19 billion; 18 billion euros) in aid to countries in the Middle East and South-east Asia. But there is no strategic intent behind it, no grand effort to transform our economic relationship or to build infrastructure that might help countries trade and prosper.

This is why we should learn from the first fruits of China's Silk Road Economic Belt vision that we have seen this year: the new sea, road and rail connections that are transforming the costs of trade across the 65 Eurasian countries described with such wonder by Marco Polo.

Many of these are nations that IS wants to sweep into a new theocratic caliphate in which it would wipe out the extraordinary diversity of modern Islam.

Today, we think of globalization as something new. In fact, it was slowly invented on the trade routes that connected Europe, the Middle East and China. Along these roads moved trade, innovation, ideas, culture - and trust. As we seek new security for new times, this history has much to teach us.

The author is Labour MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill. His latest book, Black Flag Down: Counter-Extremism, Defeating ISIS and Winning the Battle of Ideas was published in November by Biteback Books. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

(China Daily European Weekly 12/09/2016 page12)