Parag Khanna is author of "The Future Is Asian: Commerce, Conflict, and Culture in the 21st Century," released in February from Simon & Schuster. The opinions in this article belong to the author. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN) As leaders and officials gather in Beijing this week for the second Belt and Road summit, they will do so nearly three decades since the key economies of Asia began stitching back together the Silk Roads that linked them before five centuries of colonialism and Cold War.

Belt and Road has been dismissed, particularly in the United States, as neocolonial debt-trap diplomacy, destined to collapse under the weight of financially spurious projects. Such hubris has not served America well in the past, nor does it today. Biding time is hardly a viable strategy against the force of history.

It isn't too late for America to help shape Eurasia's future in this direction, but it would require a meaningful grand strategy of promoting multipolarity across the world's largest landmass rather than posing a false choice between America and China.

Asians have spent the past three decades relentlessly capitalizing on each other's comparative advantages in energy, food, industrial goods, technology and more. By the time of the 2008 financial crisis, Asians were already trading more with each other than with the rest of the world, insulating them considerably from the demand shock.

In the decade since, China has taken the lead both diplomatically and commercially in promoting infrastructure as a global priority. In the mid-2000s, after traveling and tracing Chinese infrastructure projects around the world, I wrote, "China is winning the new Great Game because it is building the new Silk Roads."

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