Infrastructure as Structural Power: A Neorealist Comparison of the Belt and Road Initiative and Global Gateway

Global infrastructure competition is a new battlefield for major powers to compete for structural power. Through an integrative neorealist framework based on three dimensions: rule-setting, financing model, and geopolitical operation, China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the EU's Global Gateway serve as geoeconomic tools that represent China's offensive institutional balancing to reshape global governance rules and the EU's defensive institutional balancing to maintain existing norms and safeguard economic security. Comparative analysis reveals that the competition extends beyond infrastructure scale to a deeper conflict over rule-setting authority, illustrating infrastructure's role as a core instrument of geoeconomic competition in an anarchic international system.