World War III Will Be Pre-Fought on Twitter

I would recommend that readers who have not yet done so create a Twitter account and subscribe to my feed (@chinahand).  To my embarrassment and surprise, I’ve churned out over 800 tweets since I started up my feed last November.

Some of it is meaningless ephemera, of course.  But sometimes the twitter stream carries in it telling or insightful tweets that illustrate the dynamics of debate over US foreign policy as it evolves over a month, a week, or maybe even a day and are worth retweeting.

And, of course, I put in my own two cents worth, hopefully in a telling and insightful fashion, on subjects that are perhaps too fleeting or developing too quickly for a post, but are significant nonetheless.

For instance, I’ve become more attuned to the back-and-forth between US pro-Japan China hawks and the (relative) moderates in the Obama administration and the role of the Abe administration’s role as observer, participant, and victim or beneficiary depending on how the debate evolves.

One set of my tweets addressed the PRC inserting itself into a spat between the United States and Japan concerning Japan’s footdragging in returning a few hundred kilos of weapon-grade plutonium.

On the simplest level, of course, the PRC wishes to sow doubts about the genuinely pacifist character of Japan as it carefully moves to full sovereign status as a military power, but at the same time tries to reap the PR benefits of its seventy-year experience under the so-called “pacifist” constitution by marketing its regional security initiatives as “active pacifism”.

On another level, the PRC appears to be discretely tweaking the United States to live up to the non-proliferation ambitions which justified the rather premature award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama.  So, when the PRC pointedly raised the issue, maybe the US decided to cater to the PRC by making a public issue of the plutonium.

This understandably infuriated the Abe government, which felt that this was a matter to be dealt with discretely between allies and not used as a shaming opportunity by the US in order to pander to the PRC.  Perhaps coincidentally, pro-Japan individuals and outlets in the US pooh-poohed the plutonium issue, and steered attention to the more looming PRC threat.

I think there was another issue at play as well.

Japan, and indeed any technically capable power, does not need weapons-grade plutonium to make a bomb.  Fuel grade will do just as well, thank you, if you’re willing to accept some less desirable yield/size/radiation outcomes.  So the few hundred pounds of weapons-grade plutonium is not really the issue.

The issue is the five tons or so of plutonium metal Japan has in country and the twenty-odd tons it has stored for it at reprocessing facilities in the UK and France (some Pentagon policy types made the rather ad hoc decision to console Japan for US normalization of relations with the PRC by letting Japan be the only US atomic partner, aside from the UK and France, to “close the fuel cycle” i.e. recover plutonium from spent fuel in order to avoid a uranium drought that, one might notice, has not materialized) and the rocket program that Japan, despite its unfavorable location far in the northern hemisphere (which renders commercial launches relatively uneconomical) has spent billions to develop.

Long story short, despite Japan’s vociferous and, in some circles, sincere professions of disinterest in nuclear weapons, it is by design a nuclear power en ovo, and will continue to be one until the Chinese nuclear and conventional military threat somehow evaporates.

As a reminder, I will quote the Prime Minister of Japan:

'It is certainly the case that Japan has the capability to possess nuclear weapons, but has not made them.'

Prime Minister Hata made that statement before the Diet in 1994.  Please keep that in the back of your mind when the issue of Japan’s strategic helplessness comes up.  And that's something that the PRC would like to see injected into discussions of Japan's security posture.

One of the most interesting speculations about Iran’s nuclear program is that it modeled its tiptoe to the nuclear threshold on Japan’s example.  

And, with this background, I always wondered if the US motive for elevating Yukiya Amano to head of the IAEA (after finally seeing the back of the irritatingly independent ElBaradei) was that Amano, a veteran of Japan’s nuclear establishment, knew exactly how the stealth weaponization game was played, and would be disinclined to cut Iran any slack.  And I wonder if sub rosa the quid pro quo was that Amano's steadfastness on the Iran dossier would be rewarded by turning a blind eye, nonproliferation Nobel be damned, on Japan's carefully managed nuclear weaponization capabilities--and the thirty tons of plutonium to which it holds title.

And, to enter into 12-dimensional chess territory, I suspect that the Abe administration is quietly freaked out about Secretary of State John Kerry’s focus on the Middle East, where China, by virtue of its backing of Iran and Syria has a much more significant and meaningful role to play than Japan.

The fear would be that the PRC would promise—or deliver—meaningful assistance in the Middle East and expect in return a more conciliatory attitude toward the PRC by Kerry.   

So maybe the plutonium incident did indeed represent a bone tossed by Kerry to his Beijing buddies--and a breaking of the original understanding that the US wouldn't make an issue of Japanese nuclear weaponization capabilities.

In any case, on twitter there was a spate of commentary that Kerry was over-focused on the Middle East and was not devoting adequate time and attention to confronting the PRC threat.  Indeed, I was quite struck by the amount of hype devoted to the Chinese salami-slicing menace (the rather cringe-inducing term used to describe the PRC’s incremental steps to improve its de facto position in its maritime realm) and the insistence that the PRC’s thus far successful attempt to dodge militarization of these issues (a key PRC strategy given the overwhelming military superiority of the US) should be short-circuited by an overtly confrontational policy.

I feel pretty confident that a) this approach is nuts b) Kerry & Biden feel the same way and, while engaging in ostentatious chest-thumping against the PRC, are actually interested in reducing tensions rather than increasing them.

However, there’s no Washington constituency for reduced tensions.  The pro-Japanese alliance/China hawk  forces, on the other hand, have the enormous political, security, and financial attractions of a containment regime adding force and determination to their policy recommendations.   The growing enthusiasm for something called “dynamic deterrence”—pushback just short of confrontation—creates an environment of escalation (the PRC, of course, will upgrade its deterrence in response) that looks a lot like a self-fulfilling prophecy masquerading as a security doctrine.  And it pushes US-PRC frictions closer to the military zone where US strategists feel the most comfortable.

For extra credit, questioning the policy undercuts deterrent and is can be considered, in a term bandied about with increasing frequency, “appeasement”. The self-identifying “appeasement” faction is, as one can expect, quite small.

The game in Asia is still economic, and I feel/hope the Obama administration thinks it can let the military/industrial/security/surveillance complex ride the “China threat” gravy train while the business of business goes on.

But if you want to see how the war with China might get fought, check out twitter.

China Sends Iran Back to the IAEA

I have an article up at Asia Times entitled China fine-tunes its Iran strategy.

I read the Chinese tea leaves (People’s Daily and Global Times) to come to the conclusion that China wishes to avoid a UN Security Council vote on Iran sanctions. Beijing fears that any UN vote, with a Chinese yea vote or abstention, or even with a nay vote, will serve as the politically enabling factor for harsh national sanctions that the US and key EU countries are teeing up.

I’m afraid that after Copenhagen, his travails in the U.S. Congress and, most importantly because of his strategy of leaving China as the last sanctions domino to fall (instead of giving Beijing face and reassurance by engaging it first and foremost), President Obama is suffering a credibility and mojo deficit in the eyes of the Chinese, and they will be extremely skeptical of any assurances that he can provide Beijing the opportunity to exert a moderating influence on any post-UNSCR rush to national sanctions.

So I concluded that China would recommend to Iran to try to keep this matter bottled up in the IAEA, despite the replacement of the Iran-friendly ElBaradei with the West-tilting new DG, Yukiya Amano.

I supported this inference with Iranian and Chinese reporting of conciliatory Iranian moves toward the IAEA, and declarations of loyal fealty to the NPT.

Today, there was further evidence of an Iranian charm offensive, in the form of a formal letter to the IAEA re-opening the matter of fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR).

The TRR swap is apparently the great lost opportunity of US-Iran nuclear diplomacy.

To a certain extent, the conventional narrative concerning the TRR swap (Iran would ship its 3.5% U₂₃₅ Low Enriched Uranium to Russia for further enrichment and receive fuel plates for the TRR in return) appears to be correct.

Iran, by not making an open and positive response to the offer when it was officially tendered in October, blew it.

However, I’m of the suspicion that Iran had plenty of help.

The swap was grew out of a request by Iran in June 2009 for help from the IAEA in obtaining new fuel plates for the TRR, an elderly reactor originally provided by the US to the Shah that still produces medical isotopes in Tehran. The Obama administration was brought into the deal, the response from Iran (presumably representing President Ahmadinejad’s views) was positive, and apparently a great deal of open-hand-not-closed-fist excitement ensued in the White House.

However, it would seem largely because of French and Israeli resistance (which, given France’s desire to assert itself in the Levant as a serious power at Iran’s expense, may be one and the same thing), the trust-building measure turned into an adversarial disablement proposal.

According to an authentic-looking internal French government document that was leaked and posted on the Arms Control Wonk website, the French insisted in September that the EU’s “freeze-for freeze” mechanism (a demand, detested by Tehran, that Iran suspend all enrichment work in return for a suspension of sanctions) be part of the deal; that no less than 1200 kg of LEU in a single shipment be involved; and the deal had to be accepted and the LEU had to come out by the end of 2009 before any plates went in.

And, according to the West, it would take about a year to grunt out the 264 pounds of fuel plates (which would be fabricated in France after the Russians enriched the LEU to 19.75%), an assertion that the Iranians found highly dubious.

The way the whole thing played out made Ahmadinejad look like a chump.

Instead of a friendly, historic exchange with the United States (apparently, rapprochement with the United States is not a matter of serious dispute in Iranian circles; the only question is, which political grouping will get to take the credit and reap the rewards), he was supposed to publicly knuckle under to the West in an adversarial process, give up most of his LEU immediately and without negotiation in exchange for nothing, and wait and hope his plates (and political windfall) showed up a year later.

Like I said, Ahmadinejad blew it, but it looks like he had lots of outside and inside help.

If you look at the situation and drew the conclusion that some parties were determined to make sure that Ahmadinejad was deprived of his “Nixon Goes to China” moment with the Great Satan, well, we’re on the same page.

The current Iranian approach to the IAEA on the TRR has been rejected by the United States and we may very well be looking at nothing more than diplomatic kabuki as both sides gird themselves for the struggle to decide whether the Iranian issue is addressed by a UNSC resolution.

That the Obama administration has given up on its noble aim to engage with Iran is indicated by the rather inexplicable decision to acquiesce to Israel’s assumption of a high profile role as sanctions cheerleader to the EU, Russia, and even China.

Israel is, of course, not a member of the NPT or IAEA , allegedly maintains an undeclared and highly destabilizing arsenal of 200+ nuclear warheads, and proliferated in a major way to the South African apartheid regime.

Not exactly the poster child for the NPT and IAEA.

Which may be another reason why the Chinese would tell the Iranians to push the IAEA angle.

The United States might have a compelling reason to dig a grave for the Teheran Research Reactor swap.

Opponents of the deal—call them cynics, cooler heads, Iran-haters, or, perhaps professional paranoiacs—could seize on the problem that the uranium in the fuel plates that Iran got back would be significantly enriched—from 3.5% up to 19.75%--and apparently in a form that could, without much ado, be used as feedstock for enrichment to weapons grade (80%).

According to Arms Control Wonk, the plates in the Tehran Research Reactor are simply sintered U₃O₈, and Iran already has the chemistry and processing know-how to needed to turn that kind of plate into feedstock for weapons-grade enrichment.

And, at 19.75% enrichment, the West would have already done most of Iran’s enrichment work for it.

Jeffrey Lewis of AWC, offered a useful analogy along these lines: imagine a box filled with 100 tennis balls, of which four are red (U₂₃₅)and the rest white (U₂₃₈). To upgrade the red balls to 20% of the total, you have to throw away 80 tennis balls for a ratio of 4 red to 16 white. To get to 80% red balls, you just have to throw away another 15 balls to get your final ratio of 4:1.

The West would be throwing away 80 of the tennis balls on Tehran’s behalf, and apparently it’s relatively trivial for Iran to take care of the remaining 15.

So the wonderful and thrilling humanitarian gesture of providing new fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor could be construed, and probably was construed, by Iran’s legion of informed critics, as a potential acceleration of Iran’s weaponization program.

Oops.

ACW’s Geoffrey Forden proposed that the plates be fabricated as a uranium-beryllium compound, based on the idea that separating out beryllium is a difficult and novel technical task and Iran would have to expend time, money, and conspicuous effort to develop new technology and processes in order to extract the uranium from the fuel plates for the dreaded weaponization breakout.

Unfortunately, just as careful cooks don’t lightly substitute margarine for butter in their recipes, responsible and careful operators of nuclear reactors apparently don’t toss in a brand new type of fuel plate without furrowed brows and lots of technical and safety hand-wringing.

It would be understandable if the Iranians wondered if the US was going to assist Iran with a crash-reengineering and retrofit of the Tehran reactor for the uranium beryllium fuel—and take responsibility if things didn’t go right—and looked at this kind of hocus-pocus with a jaundiced eye.

I suppose, when this chapter in the endless history of the US-Iran nuclear dispute is penned, we’ll find out if the issue of the potential proliferation risk of the new fuel plates was covered ahead of time during the excited White House confabs over Iran’s offer, or came up later as one of those classic “Ms. Titanic-meet-Mr. Iceberg” oh sh*t moments.

If the latter was the case 1) Ahmadinejad would have been suspected of setting a perfidious trap and 2) the White House would backpedaled away from the deal at light speed to avoid appearing to be Iran’s dupe and 3) thrown up a bunch of roadblocks in order to reduce the perceived proliferation and political danger.

In any case, with the help of the revelation of a secret Iranian enrichment facility near Qom (known by Western intelligence for over three years, but somehow not revealed until the eve of the formal conference between Iran and the West on the swap at the beginning of October 2009 and necessitating a critical report by the IAEA in the last month of ElBaradei’s term; bad luck, Mr. Ahmadinejad!), the Tehran Research Reactor deal became a theater for heightened suspicions of Iran’s proliferation intentions and not the confidence-building diplomatic exercise it was originally intended to be.

And the inevitable outcome of suspicion is, apparently, sanctions.

Funny ‘bout that.

China Hand Article on Alleged Syrian Reactor Up at Japan Focus

At the invitation of Japan Focus, I wrote an article about the alleged nuclear facility in Syria.

Since the Syrians steadfastly deny that there was a reactor at al Kibar and the physical evidence has been bombed, buried, and dismantled into oblivion, I ended up writing more about the creaky Non-Proliferation Treaty regime that the International Atomic Energy Agency and its Director General, Mr. ElBaradei are charged with safeguarding.

The article is entitled Twilight of the NPT? and it’s available here.

The NPT was originally conceived as a disarmament/peaceful use of nuclear energy/better world kumbaya group hug sort of thing.

But that hasn’t really happened.

The current IAEA mission is more of a projection of US security concerns and an effort to protect the nuclear monopoly of the US and its friends and allies.

ElBaradei is caught in the middle as he tries to advance the IAEA’s traditional mandate of promoting safe and peaceful exploitation of nuclear energy and the United States—the IAEA’s biggest funder and most active stakeholder—uses the IAEA mechanism to impede the spread of any nuclear capability to our antagonists, especially in the Middle East.

ElBaradei and the Muslim nations of the Middle East appear to have a symbiotic relationship.

ElBaradei needs the Muslim nations to demonstrate the IAEA’s relevance in dealing with states that the US can’t or won’t negotiate with; and the Muslim nations need ElBaradei as their sole, shrinking portal to a legal, internationally acknowledged nuclear capability.

And, I suppose, one could say that the United States needs the IAEA for the imprimatur of international legitimacy it provides for Washington’s unilateral nuclear concerns, but the fact is that the US has spent more time and energy sidelining the IAEA than it has spent basking in the agency’s multilateral aura.

One of my favorite ElBaradei-related media quotes concerns the revelation that the United States’s NSA wiretapped ElBaradei’s phone in an unsuccessful search for dirt that could be used to deny him a third term.

It elicited a resigned shrug from the IAEA:

In Vienna, where the IAEA has its headquarters, officials said they were not surprised about the eavesdropping.

"We've always assumed that this kind of thing goes on," IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said. "We wish it were otherwise, but we know the reality."

Yeah, whatever. Fuggedaboutit.

As the Washington Post put it, “eavesdropping, even on allies, is considered a well-worn tool of national security and diplomacy”.

The message that nuclear wannabes in the Middle East would have extracted from this incident, other than the unwelcome image of a “well-worn tool”, would be threefold:

First, the IAEA is transparent, or at least highly vulnerable, to penetration by US intelligence services and the IAEA lacks the capability, funding, and/or will to protect the security of its communications.

Second, it should be assumed that the content of any communication and the result of any site visit will find its way to Langley or the NSA.

Third, any nuclear program, peaceful or otherwise, has to be kept secret from the IAEA during the planning and construction phases when it is most vulnerable to US challenge and disruption.

So, the conclusion I have drawn from Syria’s bizarre decision to build a secret nuclear facility within bombing range of the Israeli air force is that Syria wanted a nuclear capability and believed that if they built a facility small and plausible enough to be presented as a harmless civilian project, they could reveal it prior to fueling and get it blessed by ElBaradei and the IAEA with little more than a stern tongue-lashing (and, possibly, an understanding wink).

Of course, that possibility was forcibly pre-empted by Israel’s bombing raid.

China Surprise for the IAEA Iran Dossier

Update: After Iran's PressTV reported--in no less than four articles but without any basis in the AP story or, apparently, any reporting of its own--that Chinese diplomats had leaked the IAEA story, their version has finally caught up with reporting from other outlets.

In the latest article reporting the Chinese government denial, the characterization "The Associated Press published a report Wednesday saying China provided the IAEA with intelligence linked to Iran's alleged attempts to make nuclear arms." is employed.

The previous version of the article read "On Wednesday AP quoted two senior Chinese diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as saying that China has provided the IAEA with classified intelligence to use in its probe into Iran's nuclear program. "

But the AP article read "The new development was revealed by two senior diplomats who closely follow the IAEA probe of Iran's nuclear program. One commented late last week and the other Wednesday."

Certainly the AP story doesn't identify Chinese diplomats as the source of the leak. And, according to my thinking, there is little reason to assume Chinese diplomats would do the leaking.

So it appears likely that the "China leaked it" was a simple flub by PressTV that didn't get caught quickly because everybody was either out of the office physically or out to lunch mentally for Iran's Nowruz New Year's holiday. 4-4-08


There is a certain amount of excitement in the non-proliferation blogosphere—or at least, over at Arms Control Wonk —about an AP report that China has provided the IAEA with information on Iran’s nuclear weapons activities.

This item is being taken as support the narrative that everybody—even China, which has consistently blocked onerous UN National Security Council sanctions against Iran—is concerned enough about Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions to support the International Atomic Energy Agency in continuing to keep the Iran dossier open.

The AP report stated:

China, an opponent of harsh U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran, has nonetheless recently provided the International Atomic Energy Agency with intelligence linked to Tehran's alleged attempts to make nuclear arms, diplomats have told The Associated Press.
...
A Chinese decision to provide information for use in the agency's attempts to probe Iran's purported nuclear weapons program would appear to reflect growing international unease about how honest the Islamic republic has been in denying it ever tried to make such arms.

Damien McElroy of the Daily Telegraph, apparently recycling the AP story, went straight for the throat in his lede:

China has betrayed one its closest allies by providing the United Nations with intelligence on Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear technology, diplomats have revealed.

I think that’s a fundamental misreading of the situation.

I believe that China sees the best hope of resolving the Iran crisis as implementation of the grand bargain by which the United States regularizes relations with Iran--and that China accepts that the most effective, if risky, bargaining chip Iran has is its nuclear program, just as North Korea did.

In my view, China believes that a sea change in US policy toward Iran is the pre-condition for progress—certainly not sanctions, or America’s continued efforts to keep the IAEA’s Iran dossier open, and Iran in sanctionable, pariah-state status.

I could be wrong—yes, it might happen—but I don’t see any Chinese eagerness to add new unresolved items to the IAEA’s Iran dossier by passing on tittle-tattle about Iran’s nuclear weapons activities.

Maybe the Chinese simply supplied some information or opinion in response to an IAEA query, and provided the United States with a spinnable moment.

So I look at the AP story as a pro-US leak designed to convince the world that “everybody, even the Chinese” want to keep beating Iran with the IAEA stick.

If one looks at U.S. actions since the NIE was leaked, it should be clear that, although military action is off the table, U.S. hostility and a penchant for zero-sum confrontation are still driving our Iran policy.

In fact, it looks like the Bush administration is working overtime to put the NIE behind it and find as many reasons and methods to confront Iran as possible.

The US Treasury Department has escalated its financial blockade against Iran, putting the entire Iranian banking sector on its money-laundering/terrorism watch list as of March 20.

We’ve stepped up measures to damage Iran economically by attacking the Iran-related entrepot trade carried out in the UAE and Bahrain, most recently by blacklisting an Iran-linked bank in Bahrain.

The US government, through our European allies, has labored mightily but unsuccessfully to create problems for the Teheran regime by disrupting its gasoline imports.

And, lest we forget, CIA Chief Michael Hayden on March 31 followed up President Bush’s imputation of nuclear weapon ambitions to Iran with his own suspicions :

Asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether he thought Iran was trying to develop a nuclear weapon, Hayden said, "Yes," adding that his assessment was not based on "court-of-law stuff. . . . This is Mike Hayden looking at the body of evidence.".

Hayden’s use of the “court of law” formulation is telling.

The Iranian position is, We’re a sovereign state in good standing and we deserve due process. Unless the IAEA can come up with hard evidence supporting the allegations beyond a reasonable doubt, it should close the dossier and the U.N. should lift the sanctions.

The US position is, assuage our unassuagable doubts—thereby taking the decision to close the Iran dossier out of the hands of the IAEA.

And, as long as that’s the criterion for keeping the Iran dossier open (and the sanctions on), then anything that comes over the transom, regardless of its provenance or chain of custody, is grounds for justifying the persistence of those nagging doubts.

In other words, the U.S. is gaming the sanctions regime just like the Iranians and, whenever there’s a chance that the IAEA looks like it might close the dossier, leaks something to keep the pot boiling.

And that’s why the Chinese are correct to point out that the key to resolving the crisis lies in a change of policy in Washington, and not by continuing sub rosa warfare against Iran by use of sanctions.

Of course, with every U.S. presidential candidate falling over him or herself to proclaim undying hostility to Iran, Beijing—and Teheran—are probably in for a long wait.

As an interesting/puzzling sideline, Iran’s Presstv media outlet--pretty much the only English-language Iranian outlet operating over Nowruz, the Iranian new year's holiday--has chosen an odd and apparently incorrect framing for the China story: that “Chinese diplomats” leaked the news that China had provided classified information on Iran’s nuclear program to the IAEA.

The AP report described the sourcing as follows:

The new development was revealed by two senior diplomats who closely follow the IAEA probe of Iran's nuclear program. One commented late last week and the other Wednesday.

There’s nothing in the article implying that the Chinese dished to the AP’s business reporter in Vienna, George Jahn.

I waited for Presstv to pull or modify their report, but they never did.

In fact, they repeated the assertion that Chinese diplomats were responsible for the leak in three followup articles, including the one containing the Chinese government’s formal denial that any communication took place:

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said Thursday that the report was "totally groundless and out of ulterior motives.'' The Chinese official did not provide any further details.

On Wednesday AP quoted two senior Chinese diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as saying that China has provided the IAEA with classified intelligence to use in its probe into Iran's nuclear program.

China has repeatedly opposed the imposition of further sanctions on Iran, in the United Nation Security Council, and has constantly called for a diplomatic solution to Iran's nuclear standoff with West.

MGH/MMN

Strange.

I’d expect that crack correspondents “MGH/MMN” are due for a stint at Iran’s holiday camp for careless correspondents and sloppy editors as soon as their bosses get back from New Year's vacation, but maybe there’s more here than meets the eye.

China Jumps Off the Iran Sanctions Merry-Go-Round

China’s response to the new UN Security Council sanctions on Iran provide a useful perspective on Chinese policy and its movement toward a new, post-Bush and post-terror alternative doctrine for managing international crises.

The story of the Iran nuclear crisis can be summed up with the acronym SSDD:

Same Sanctions Different Day

There is certainly a feeling of deja vu as months of concerted flailing by the United States have only served to produce another inconclusive Iran sanction.

It’s a reflection of what might be called the post-Cold War, post-veto United Nations environment.

The United States might be willing to go on the record with a veto when, particularly in matters of Israel, the sense of the UN is against it.

But it looks China has a stronger interest in upholding the image of the UN as a valid arena for crisis resolution and compromise.

Therefore, when an undesirable resolution is coming down the pipe, China concentrates on diluting and muddling it, make sure there are no onerous interpretative or enforcement elements, voting for it, then hurrying to the spin room to explain what its vote really meant.

Case in point: Resolution 1803, the third round of sanctions on Iran.

There have been some attempts in the Western press to present the vote (14-0 with Indonesia abstaining) as a sign of world resolve to pressure the Iranians for refusing to give the IAEA the answers it wants about its allegedly abandoned weapons program, or suspend uranium enrichment.

Courtesy of Xinhua, let’s see what Chinese-language coverage had to say (all translations by China Matters):


[The resolution] emphasized diplomatic efforts, resumed dialogue and negotiations with Iran...balance between sanctions and encouragement of negotiations

[There are] strict limits on targets of sanctions...sanctions are “reversible”, temporarily or even permanently if Iran takes positive steps to implement the Security Council resolution...

[D]ifferent countries have different interpretations of the resolution...roots [of deadlock] are in the severe lack of mutual trust between the United States and Iran. If this problem is not resolved, then there will be no breakthrough on the Iran nuclear question.

To increase mutual trust, the concerned parties all have to pay attention to the positive content of the resolution—promoting discussions.

As China’s permanent representative to the United Nations said...the purpose of the resolution is not to punish Iran, it is to encourage the revival of a new round of diplomatic efforts...only relying on sanctions will not resolve the problem, military action is an even less productive route.

...neither the United States nor Iran closed the door on negotiations for good [!!!—ed.]

To summarize for those unwilling to wrestle with Xinhua-speak:

The root cause of the Iran problem is distrust between the United States and Iran. The problem can only be solved by discussions between Washington and Teheran. These sanctions are face-saving bullsh*t.

Wang Guangya, the PRC ambassador to the UN, helpfully laid out the Chinese position in Xinhua’s English-language coverage as well.

Just in case anybody didn’t get the message, the article is entitled Chinese envoy: New UN resolution aims to reactivate diplomatic efforts on Iran :

On the issue of sanctions, Wang stated:

These [sanctions] "are not targeted at the Iranian people and will not affect the normal economic and financial activities between Iran and other countries," Wang said after the vote. "All the sanction measures are reversible."

Emphasis, as they say, added.

I might point out that sanctions that “do not affect the normal economic and financial activities between Iran and other countries” are not particularly effective or intimidating.

In this context, it should be noted that Stuart Levey, head of Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, has been crisscrossing the world working to convince the world’s governments and banks to tighten up financial sanctions on Iran...just as Treasury attempted, with a spectacular and, at least in China Matters, well-documented lack of success, to suffocate North Korea financially.

The North Korean sanctions failed because China refused to be intimidated by the threat of sanctions against Chinese banks—despite the demonstration project on Macao’s Banco Delta Asia—and declined to cut off North Korea’s international financial dealings.

Wang Guangya just made the announcement that China will do the same for Iran.

Business as usual, no matter what Washington says.

Big-picture-wise, I’ve asserted frequently that Iran recapitulates North Korea, not Iraq.

In other words, the Chinese, the Russians, and enough Europeans rejected the U.S. strategy of escalating pressure on, and progressive concessions by, North Korea, so the United States finally had to abandon zero-sum and switch to win-win negotiations.

Same thing with Iran.

The other powers don’t care enough about our goals to kick Teheran’s ass on our behalf.

Just the opposite, maybe.

In its Chinese-language coverage, Xinhua made the interesting choice of bookending its lead article on the UNSC vote with a piece of think-tankage by Tian Wenlin of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations entitled What the Iran Nuclear Crisis Tells Us :

Tian argues that the lesson of the Iran nuclear standoff is that imbalance in military strength is a root cause of international instability.

Looking at the four conflicts [First Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq War], the bigger the discrepancy between US and opposing forces, the easier it is to provoke an American desire to attack...Saddam Hussein voluntarily destroyed his weapons of mass destruction, thereby allowing America to attack without worry. In the opposite example, North Korea...

On the Iranian nuclear issue, the top Iranian leadership has been completely unyielding, since they are completely clear that if they showed weakness, the United States would take an inch and want a mile, demand further concessions without end at Iran’s expense.

Ahmadinejad said, “If this question is resolved, the United States would bring up human rights. If human rights were resolved, they’d bring up animal rights.”

[Faced with Iran’s unyielding determination], the United States unwillingly abandoned its intent to attack.

China rising paranoiacs will find a goodly amount to chew on in Tian’s conclusion that military strength—specifically naval strength and aircraft carriers, lots of them!—are necessary to secure China’s economic progress.

Non-proliferation types, of course, will find interesting the unstated premise of Tian’s article--that it might be OK, or even desirable, for Iran to have the bomb so it can continue to resist US pressure.

But on Iran matters, I think the selection of the piece is more significant in that it once again places the onus for the Iran nuclear crisis on the United States.

Tian eschews the ‘nutty mullah’ narrative in favor of blaming the United States for its destabilizing overreliance on coercion backed by its military superiority.

His piece reinforces the theme in the main article that it will take U.S. engagement and concessions, and not a campaign of ostracization orchestrated by the United States and imposed through its allies to come up with a solution.

Especially, of course, since China has signaled its resolve to deploy its diplomatic and financial good offices to break any attempt to construct a meaningful U.S.-led economic blockade of Iran.

America's dubious takeaway from this round of sanctions can be assessed by exploring the key subtext to the UN jibber-jabber--the US attempt to task the IAEA with a brief to investigate discrepancies in the Iranian account of its weapons-related activities more forcefully.

Bush administration gamesmanship with the IAEA was perhaps crucial in stiffening Chinese resolve that the sanctions be meaningless.

The Bush administration, keen to orchestrate another round of sanctions and obviously unhappy with its own intelligence agencies NIE discounting Iranian nuclear weapons-related activity, had worked successfully to put Iran’s alleged weapons-related activity and intentions back on the table at the IAEA working level using the so-called Laptop of Death--purportedly smuggled out of Iran in 2004 and containing evidence of illicit nuclear weaponization activity.

The last minute presentation at the end of February by the IAEA to the international diplomatic community before the UN vote, employed Laptop material and some additional videos provided to the IAEA by the US or our friends.

It showed purported Iranian activities in the area of nuclear tipped missiles, and triggered a door-slamming fury by the Iranians.

Just when the Iranians thought that the discussion could be defined to the manageable issue of what they were or weren’t doing with their uranium enrichment program, the whole amorphous and open-ended issue of what the Iranians might have done, thought about, or intended to do with weaponized nuclear material was reopened by the United States.

The IAEA was compelled to keep the allegations on the front burner.

There was some talk that the presentation was an effort by the IAEA chief verification guy, Olli Heinonen, to undercut El Baradei and express distaste for his grandstanding, Iran-friendly diplomacy.

But I think it’s more likely that the IAEA felt it had an obligation to assess the credibility of the allegations, and also to co-opt the accusations and make sure that it kept control over the whole Iranian nuclear portfolio and out of the hands of the US even though the alleged issues—about missiles and triggers—would seem to be beyond its conventional non-proliferation brief and expertise.

The United States perhaps came out of the episode feeling rather smug that it had paved the way for the third round of sanctions.

The US had also been able to put the NIE behind it, drive the IAEA into a corner, control the public debate on Iran’s program, prevent the IAEA from ever closing the Iran case by turning the debate to virtually unprovable questions of intent, and provide an opening for the U.S. to monitor and second-guess the IAEA's work inside Iran.

But our gains look pretty minimal.

The Russians (with Chinese support) briskly 86’ed the US plan to build on the UN Security Council vote by obtaining a get-tough-on-Iran resolution from the IAEA board of directors under the pretext that the new (toothless) sanctions under UNSCR 1803 were sufficient.

So what did the Bush administration really get from this most recent round of Iran diplomacy?

It looks like what it got was a meaningless UNSC resolution that the Chinese have already pledged to undercut; continued IAEA independence and control over the Iran portfolio; a frustrated Iranian sense that the U.S. is still committed to confrontation; growing international awareness that trying to accommodate the US through the mechanisms of the IAEA is probably futile; and, I expect, an emerging global consensus that a united front is needed not against Iran but against the United States in order to pressure it to engage in meaningful direct negotiations.

For good measure, we elicit the assertion of a Chinese doctrine that it is US employment of military power—and not terrorism—that is the root cause of global instability, and that increased military investment by China is the necessary, inevitable, and justified response.