The G7 sketches a development-finance initiative to counter China’s

JOE BIDEN believes that America and its rich allies must offer poor countries an attractive alternative to Chinese loans and investment. It is not enough, he thinks, just to put pressure on them to spurn business with Beijing, the approach many argued was taken under Donald Trump. Today the White House said Mr Biden and his G7 counterparts have agreed to form a multilateral rival to China’s Belt and Road Initiative that would offer such an alternative, at least in theory. The Biden administration is trying to sell it as an ambitious programme to build hundreds of billions of dollars’-worth of infrastructure in the developing world on friendlier, greener and more transparent terms than China offers. But there is much less here than meets the eye.