Black at Milken: exporting capital markets is the strategic instrument.

$205 billion is an enormous number, but let's remember China's Belt and Road is conservatively $1.5 trillion. But you don't want to be equal to $1.5 trillion because then you're just recreating state capitalism. What's much more valuable is putting together capital stacks that incentivize private capital to come in, and then you're building markets and enduring partnerships where U.S. capital, other allies' capital, is coming into a region.

Milken is where the doctrine''s financial architecture gets stated most cleanly. Private capital stacks beat state capital because they build self-sustaining markets. The implicit comparison with Belt and Road inverts the spending contest into a structural one. China builds dependency at scale. The doctrine builds participation.

The phrase that earns repeating is "exporting the American system." Capital markets and rule architecture are the export, and the export is the leverage. Allied terrain is where that export takes physical form, with U.S.-aligned operators reading the same rule set on the ground that capital reads from New York.