As the United States beats a haphazard retreat from the world — nixing trade agreements, eschewing diplomacy, antagonizing allies — China marches on with its unabashedly ambitious global-expansion program known as One Belt, One Road.
This constant MSM need to connect everything on earth back to Trump is getting so fucking tedious. Construction of the airport this article concerns was finished (edit: begun) in 2009. It's almost as if China has been executing a long-term plan to build a web of neocolonial economic interests around the world for a pittance of the money the USA spent wrecking the Middle East & Afghanistan and killing hundreds of thousands of random people over the last 16 years; except framing the story that way wouldn't reaffirm NYT readers existing biases.