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Bush's improbable best hope: China
By Steven Lee Myers
Sunday, October 7, 2007
WASHINGTON: George W. Bush, embattled at home, tied down in Iraq and watching the clock run out on his presidency, has found a diplomatic crutch in an unlikely place: China.
The agreement last week by North Korea to disable its nuclear facilities - announced in Beijing, tellingly - showed just how much Bush's foreign policy has come to rely, for better or worse, on the help of the Chinese.
They might just be the administration's best hope for peacefully resolving the next big crisis on the horizon, Iran's refusal to give up the right to enrich uranium. Or so some in the administration are hoping.
Bush, who spent most of his presidency with a swaggering, go-it-alone style, has increasingly turned to China on problem after problem: from North Korea to Darfur to the repression of pro-democracy demonstrators in Myanmar.
"China has become the first stop for any American diplomacy," said Christopher Hill, the American negotiator in the North Korea talks.
Could China bring Iran around in a similar way? The two confrontations are different in myriad ways, but there are some signs that the answer could be yes.
White House officials, for example, note that China, which had remained in the background at the United Nations when the United States pressed for more pressure on Iran, has now signed on to two rounds of sanctions.
They say it could support a tougher third round if reports expected this autumn suggest that Iran is breaking its commitments not to pursue nuclear weapons.
Experts also say China needs Iranian gas and oil for its economic growth - and while this has made it skittish about imposing tough sanctions, it also makes China eager to avert a war in the Gulf that would disrupt energy supplies.
Still, it would be wishful thinking to call China an ally or even a partner, given its historical and political differences with the United States. China has proved unwilling to go along with much of what the Bush administration has asked of it, especially when it comes to punishing authoritarian regimes.
On that score, China's one-party rulers have always been cautious, calling such measures interference in the internal affairs of others.
Given that history, there are reasons to think that Chinese cooperation on Iran could have its limits. The Korean Peninsula is on China's border, as is Myanmar, and that alone could explain China's interest in reducing tensions there. For the United States, fear of Iran's nuclear capability is linked to fear of Iran's ties to groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, and to its growing influence in Iraq; those are worries whose urgency the Chinese do not seem to share.
And experts who take a skeptical view of the deal with North Korea point out that for all the help China has given, this agreement is just another step on a long road toward the ultimate American goal, which is stripping the North Korean government of the nuclear bombs it has already built. Meanwhile, Americans have had three decades of trying to squeeze Iran economically, while China is counting on retaining Iran as an important economic partner.
"China can be constructive when its interests align with the United States," said Clifford Kupchan of the Eurasia Group, a consultancy in Washington. "In Iran, it seems to have a different agenda."
Nevertheless, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a bipartisan research organization in Washington, said that while some Americans express frustration at what they see as Chinese unwillingness to press Iran, China has already played an active role in trying to resolve tensions that could lead to another military conflict in the Gulf.
He credited what he said were quiet Chinese efforts to win the release of four Iranian-Americans jailed by the authorities in Iran this summer.
With the North Koreans, China's support proved more crucial than anything else. China, which for decades acted as North Korea's protector, responded to the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's nuclear test last year by cutting off military aid and joining the Bush administration's efforts to choke off the country's bank accounts abroad.
A senior administration official said in an interview that China's diplomatic push began even before the test, after Bush assured President Hu Jintao that he wanted a peaceful resolution with North Korea during an outwardly disastrous White House visit in April 2006 in which a protester infiltrated their joint news conference.
Hu dispatched State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan that week for unannounced talks in North Korea that, after some ups and downs, laid the foundation for the deal last week, the official said. "What changed was not them," the official said of the North Koreans, "but the Chinese attitude."
China, by virtue of its permanent seat on the UN Security Council, has always been an important diplomatic player. But its importance to the Bush administration has grown for two reasons: It has become more assertive around the globe, and the administration has exhausted a lot of its options.
"I think we need China almost everywhere in the world because we've disengaged from the rest of the world," Clemons said, criticizing the administration's initial disdain for concerted international diplomacy and citing its preoccupation with Iraq.
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