Sino-American Thaw Puts Iran to the Test

Iran was not invited to the Nuclear Security Summit, which opened Monday, on Barack Obama’s initiative, at the Washington Convention Center. The summit evoked the specter of an atomic terrorist attack, in a capital more barricaded than ever. But this country, which the international community accuses of having put in motion a military nuclear program in violation of its agreements, must be at the center of every bilateral conversation. Forty-seven heads of state and government begin a ballet of meetings and discussions on the best method to secure the stocks of fissile material and nuclear arms disseminated across the world.

All the analysts are waiting to learn more about the substance of the long tête-à-tête held between the American president and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao. According to an American spokesperson, the Chinese acknowledged sharing Obama’s worries vis-à-vis Tehran and confirmed the sending of a delegation to the U.N. to negotiate a list of sanctions against Iran. A Chinese source had always insisted on the pursuit of negotiation, a sufficiently sibylline formula to cast doubt on the real intentions of Beijing. But the two men had talked at length about Iran. The meeting was an opportunity for the two grand powers to reset a relationship heavily shaken by several episodes — from the Goggle affair to the announcement of an American arms sale to Taiwan, bypassing the Dalai Lama’s visit to the White House and the question of the undervaluation of the yuan.

President Obama did not hide his desire to come to a resolution concerning Iran before the Non-Proliferation Treaty Conference, which will be held in New York in May. According to American sources, he had to pressure Hu Jintao in this respect.

Strategic Patience

The key question concerns the type of sanctions that the Chinese — and the Russians — will accept for a vote. Washington pleads for a “hard” resolution that is likely to force Tehran to reconsider its nuclear plans and to choose reintegration into the concert of nations. It was the American “strategic patience” that allowed the emergence of an international consensus on Iran, noted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sunday.

But Beijing had severely expressed its opposition to any sanction that would affect the Iranian energy sector, since Iran represents a crucial partner. Clinton recently traveled to Saudi Arabia to convince the Saudis to take the place of Iran in matters related to oil supplies, in case of energy sanctions. But there is little chance of those. The Russians were also hostile to the idea, for analogous reasons, even if they hadn’t excluded them prior to the Obama-Medvedev meeting in Prague last week.

Monday, as he prepared to rejoin Washington, President Dmitri Medvedev reiterated on ABC his opposition to any sanction that affected the energy supplies of the Iranian population, to avoid a “humanitarian catastrophe.” “I don’t think on that topic we have a chance to achieve a consolidated opinion of the global community on that,” he said, a remark that does not only concern Iranian energy exports. Tehran already announced that it doesn’t perceive itself as bound by any of the decisions from the Washington Summit, with the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic virulently denouncing the “dishonorable nuclear threat” sketched by Obama against his country. The underground presence of the Iranian problem demonstrates all too well the difficulty for America to convince the international community to proceed on nuclear security and the reduction of arsenals, while the question of proliferation remains so uncertain.