America’s hot-and-cold relationship with China just blew a little warmer. Last Wednesday, Beijing for the first time agreed to take part in drafting a UN Security Council resolution for new sanctions against Iran.
This would be the fourth round of UN sanctions aimed at pressuring Tehran to halt its nuclear program. So far, efforts to give those sanctions real bite have foundered on the implicit threat that China (and perhaps Russia) would veto them in the Security Council. Both countries have extensive economic ties with Iran, and China, invoking its own unhappy experience with European imperialism, traditionally has championed “non-interference” in other countries’ internal affairs.
So it may be significant that, having tried and largely failed to “engage” Iran on the nuclear standoff, the White House has apparently successfully engaged China to deepen Tehran’s international isolation. But there are already signs that Beijing is not quite ready to jump this particular Rubicon.
Iran’s nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, wasted no time in jetting off to Beijing for meetings with Chinese officials. “Many issues came up in talks on which China accepted Iran’s position,” Jalili told reporters. “We jointly emphasized during our talks that these sanctions tools have lost their effectiveness.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a statement that offered no hint that Beijing has changed its attitude toward Iran’s drive for nuclear capabilities, instead calling on all parties to “step up diplomatic efforts, and show flexibility, to create the conditions to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue through dialogue and negotiation.”
All this suggests we’re in for protracted haggling in the Security Council over language that, in the end, probably won’t induce the Islamic Republic to stop enriching uranium in defiance of UN strictures. The fundamental problem is not that China is indifferent to nuclear proliferation or intent on “protecting” a valuable trading partner. The fundamental problem is that China doesn’t seem ready yet to assume the responsibilities of global leadership, as we would define them.
From Sudan to Iran, China puts the amoral pursuit of its own interests – in these cases, assuring access to the energy it needs to fuel its rapid growth – ahead of larger conceptions of international cooperation and order, or even its own undoubted interest in stemming nuclear proliferation. The idea of “enlightened self-interest” that underpins U.S. internationalism has an unnatural and vaguely sinister ring to officials in the Middle Kingdom. For now at least, it’s hard to imagine the historically self-contained and inward-looking Middle Kingdom spending trillions of renminbi, say, to support a Pacific analogue to NATO, or an architecture of international institutions dedicated to collective problem-solving.
The Obama administration nonetheless deserves credit for nudging Beijing toward an outward view of global obligations commensurate with its growing geopolitical weight. But in the crunch – pressuring Iran to forsake nuclear weapons – we’d do well to have realistic expectations of how far China is really prepared to go.
