While Iraq continues to dominate the news in America and to haunt the Bush administration, events of potentially greater significance are occurring elsewhere. With little opposition from a distracted Washington, the world’s two largest authoritarian states—China and Russia—are not only taking full advantage of their burgeoning geopolitical opportunities but are using them to undermine America. They are doing so at the same time that others—especially rogue states—are actively attacking both the U.S. and the international system it leads.
True, neither the Chinese nor the Russians any longer promote Marxist revolution; both have abandoned their own decades-long struggle to overthrow and replace the world order. That is why many analysts and diplomats see them today as engaged merely in the normal rough and tumble of great-power diplomacy. But this assessment is radically incomplete.
Of all the issues on which the West interacts with China and Russia, the one that offers perhaps the most revealing test of their intentions concerns the proliferation of nuclear technologies to dangerous regimes. On that test, both of them fail.
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Chinese leaders aver that their nation “has always adopted a serious and responsible attitude toward preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.” As a matter of historical fact, this claim is demonstrably untrue. In the past, China’s rulers openly declared that nuclear weapons in the hands of socialist nations advanced the cause of world peace. On those grounds, Mao promised to spread nuclear-weapons technology to other Communist states and even to members of the non-aligned bloc. Although he adopted a more modest tone after China detonated its first atomic device in 1964, he in fact initiated a policy of selective proliferation.
Thus, beginning around 1974, China helped Pakistan develop the bomb in order to keep India, a common adversary, at bay. Initially, the aid took the form of training for Pakistani nuclear technicians and the supply of elementary technology. In the early 1980’s, however, just as China was beginning to mouth the right words about the dangers of proliferation, it transferred to Islamabad plans for a nuclear warhead and enough enriched uranium for two weapons. A decade later, in 1994 and 1995, the Chinese sold to Pakistan 5,000 ring magnets for use in the gas centrifuges that create weapons-grade uranium.
The latter sale explicitly violated the obligations China had recently assumed under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the global pact at the heart of the world’s arms-control system. Beijing also appears to have supplied Pakistan with nuclear-test data, modern warhead designs, and plutonium technology for which there was no peaceful application. It may even have tested a Pakistani nuclear device on its own soil. According to Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, “If you subtract China’s help from Pakistan’s nuclear program, there is no nuclear program.”
If Chinese assistance to Pakistan has been crucial, extensive, and continuous, that is just the beginning of the chain. The technology transferred by China to Pakistan was in turn transferred from Pakistan to North Africa and across the Asian land mass, from the Middle East to East Asia. The main agent of these transfers was Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s bomb. In effect, as the American commentator John Loftus has put it, Khan became Beijing’s surrogate, trading pieces of Pakistan’s “Islamic bomb” for Chinese access to energy. The arrangement may not always have been a formal one, but the fact remains that, using Pakistan as a front, the Chinese built relationships with Tehran, Riyadh, Cairo, Algiers, Damascus, and Saddam’s Baghdad, to name just the known parties.
China’s complicity with Khan’s affairs was highlighted early in this decade when Pakistan transferred its centrifuge technology to North Korea (with which Khan himself had had a relationship since the early 90’s) and North Korea reciprocated by transferring missiles and missile technology to Pakistan. In 2002, on its missions between Pakistan and North Korea to ferry missile parts and, it is believed, equipment for the enrichment of uranium, a Pakistani air-force plane refueled at a Chinese military base in Lanzhou—a concrete illustration of how China’s two closest allies were able to deal in China’s most sensitive technology, using Chinese facilities to complete the exchange.
When the United States broke up Khan’s ring shortly thereafter, Beijing pressured President Musharraf of Pakistan to conduct his government’s inquiry quickly. That is in fact what happened: a hurried probe, a confession by Khan—and an immediate reprieve. To this day, despite Washington’s close relationship with Islamabad, the Pakistanis have not allowed American officials to talk with Khan—he is kept securely under house arrest—and the details of his China connection remain uninvestigated.
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It is true that the breakup of Khan’s global network, along with Libya’s nuclear about-face, represented a setback for Beijing. Indeed, it seems to have caused something of a reevaluation. “China is really located in a very, very difficult position,” asserts Yan Xuetong, a professor at Tsinghua University, who has noted that the country is itself surrounded by nuclear neighbors: Russia, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. In fact, no other nation has more of them. And the consequences of this encirclement are bound to get worse. One looming problem for China is the nuclear agreement between India and the United States. Another is blowback from the erratic North Koreans, who can as easily point their nuclear-tipped missiles north and west toward mainland China as east and south toward South Korea, Japan, and the United States.
Yet Beijing has still not stopped playing the proliferation card; to the contrary, it persists in regarding it as its strongest tool for accomplishing its most important foreign-policy objectives. Take the North Korea issue. The Chinese supply approximately 90 percent of that country’s oil, 80 percent of its consumer goods, and 45 percent of its food. They account for more than half of Pyongyang’s foreign trade. China is the only nation that has pledged to defend Kim Jong Il’s regime with military force and that consistently provides diplomatic support. And yet, despite its great influence over its destitute neighbor, Beijing has not seriously pressured Kim to give up his nukes.
Why not? The invariable answer is that any attempt to resolve the crisis would roil all of North Asia as Pyongyang lashed out to prevent its disarmament. China, according to this argument, fears being inundated with untold numbers of new North Korean refugees, adding to the estimated 300,000 already now living in its northeastern provinces. Besides, we are told, by means of the status quo China can use North Korea as a buffer against South Korea, can keep Japan at bay, and can obtain diplomatic leverage over a Washington intent on disarming Kim. Finally, pundits say Beijing sees North Korea as a bargaining chip that can be used to persuade Washington to abandon Taipei.
China undoubtedly seeks these advantages, but they hardly explain recent policy. For one thing, Korean refugees would more likely move south in a crisis than north. Then, too, a unified Korea in Beijing’s hegemonic orbit would serve as a better barrier than the one provided by North Korea alone. Besides, the threat now posed by Kim is already prompting Japan to rearm and build missile defenses of its own. If an arms race starts in North Asia, the result would be the nuclearization of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, a development that would further erode China’s relative strength in the region and eliminate most Chinese military options against the Taiwanese.
On balance, then, North Korea is a liability for Beijing; realistically, the world’s oddest bilateral relationship, as it has been called, no longer serves China’s interests. Even the Chinese seem to realize this, although they remain divided over what to do about it. The competing views on this subject—academic experts and foreign-ministry officials are largely in favor of ending Pyongyang’s nuclear programs, while Chinese generals maintain close ties with their North Korean counterparts—have resulted in the directionless diplomacy that some Westerners mistakenly refer to as “nuanced.” Until Beijing can develop a consensus to change long-held policies, it will continue to promote multilateral negotiations so as to avoid having to make decisions. Liu Jianchao, a government spokesman, expressed the truth well in early 2004: “It’s China’s hope that the process of the six-party talks can go on and on.”
Even if this analysis is wrong, and if it should turn out that the Chinese have in fact been colluding with the North Koreans in what the analyst William Triplett has characterized as “one of the most successful denial-and-deception operations ever mounted,” the result is the same. Beijing has bought for Kim Jong Il the one thing he has needed most in order to arm himself: time. Sustaining one of the world’s most dangerous autocrats with material and diplomatic support, it has permitted him, among other things, to start a uranium-weapons program, eject international inspectors from his country, disconnect their monitoring devices in his nuclear facilities, fire up his Russian-designed reactor, resume construction on two other reactors, reprocess 8,000 fuel rods, and test a nuclear device.
China has enabled Kim to do all these things, moreover, without paying a price. After Pyongyang’s test of its plutonium device last fall, Beijing, with Moscow’s help, worked effectively to water down an American-backed resolution in the Security Council. In the event, the United Nations could bring itself only to adopt a ban on the sale of luxury goods and other slap-on-the-wrist measures, all of which Kim has ignored. Outside the UN, Beijing has deflected almost every American initiative to disarm North Korea by means of the six-party talks. This past February, the Bush administration, pressured by China, had to reverse six years of firm policy and accept an interim deal that will provide North Korea with aid—a million tons of heavy fuel oil—without requiring it to give up a single bomb or ounce of plutonium.
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Nor is North Korea just about Korea and China. It is also about the Islamic Republic of Iran, and therefore about both China and Russia together.
In August 2003, inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) found traces of bomb-grade uranium at a newly-constructed nuclear facility in Natanz, 200 miles south of Tehran. Other Iranian plants were likewise found to be contaminated with highly enriched uranium. The Iranians at first claimed the suspicious particles came from imported components, an assertion difficult to square with their previous boasts that the program was entirely homegrown. Then they professed ignorance as to the origins of the contaminated equipment.
It could have come from Pakistan’s Dr. Khan, who is thought to have sold bomb-grade uranium and centrifuges to Iran. On the other hand, it could have come directly from the Chinese. In 2003, reports surfaced that the IAEA had identified China as a source of Iran’s enrichment equipment; similar reports, including from Iranian dissidents and American intelligence, suggested that China had sold either centrifuges or centrifuge parts to the mullahs. In 2004, China secretly sent beryllium, used to trigger nuclear weapons. In addition, Chinese nuclear-weapons specialists were working in Iran at least as late as the end of 2003. Beijing has repeatedly violated pledges made to the United States in 1997 to stop aiding specific Iranian projects.
And here is where the second authoritarian giant enters the picture. Over strenuous American objections, Russia has been building a reactor for Iran’s first nuclear-power project near Bushehr, a city along the Persian Gulf. Similarly disregarding Western protests, Russia has delivered to Iran a sophisticated missile-defense system that is being installed to protect its nuclear sites. “We think that the people of Iran should have access to modern technologies, including nuclear ones,” Vladimir Putin declared in February.
The Iranians are just a few steps away from mastering those “modern technologies.” The help they have received from China and Russia is not only technical and material but diplomatic. For almost a half-decade, Washington has had a sense of urgency about Iran’s enrichment program, and today, after the failure of Britain, Germany, and France to make any headway in stopping Tehran, the West Europeans do, too. (At least they do most of the time.) But as for Beijing and Moscow, which claim to share the West’s concern, they essentially contend that the international community has plenty of time in which to fashion a solution. They have, therefore, frustrated Washington’s attempts to mobilize European support for effective—i.e., coercive—measures.
China’s underlying motive is easy to understand: it wants Iran’s clean-burning gas. Although Washington has had some success getting European and Japanese companies to postpone or scale back energy contracts with Iran, it has not been able to persuade China’s state-owned energy behemoths to do the same. Last year, for instance, three giant Chinese enterprises—Sinopec, China National Offshore Oil Corporation, and PetroChina—signed large energy deals with their Iranian counterparts; this year, China National Petroleum Corporation will conclude another such agreement. All this provides a critical economic lifeline for the Iranian theocracy.
Russia’s motives are more complicated. Some in the Kremlin appear to be troubled by Iran’s nuclear aspirations, leading Western optimists to discern in every sign of friction a turning point in Russian attitudes. In March, for example, Russia, citing Iran’s failure to make payments, withdrew its technicians from the Bushehr project, a move widely interpreted in the West as a sign that the Kremlin really wanted to halt enrichment. By April, though, Russia and Iran had signed a protocol on resolving payment disputes and the project now looks to be back on track.
The point is that although the Russians from time to time may show ambivalence about Iran’s ambitions, they generally view it as in their interest to support the mullahs’ regime. In part, Moscow may be desirous of rewarding the Iranians materially for not having complained about the brutal suppression of Islamic Chechnya. But there are more fundamental and long-range interests at play. Having ceded the Muslim Middle East to Washington immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin now clearly aims at reasserting its influence in this crucial region of the globe. Then, too, Iran is seen by the Russians as a counterweight to Turkey. And there are purely commercial issues as well: despite its own mineral wealth, Russia may well wish to invest in Iran’s large oil and gas reserves, if not immediately then soon.
As the historian Niall Ferguson has observed, Russia, thanks to its own extensive energy reserves, is the only major power that has no vested interest in stability in the Middle East. It certainly perceives no vested interest in making things easier for the United States anywhere. For great-power reasons of its own, then, it has done what it can to allow Tehran to continue its bomb-building activities with impunity. In so acting, it has effectively become a co-conspirator with Beijing, helping to give real meaning to the two countries’ 2001 treaty of friendship and to their constant declarations of solidarity and “strategic partnership.”
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And what has Washington done in response? Its approach—generally labeled “constructive engagement”—is based on the assumption that the overwhelming attractiveness and strength of the West will ultimately work to integrate both of these large and growing powers into the international system. The best way to do that, according to this conception, is to give China and Russia a stake in shaping and maintaining the existing global order—to make them, in the State Department’s hopeful formulation, “responsible stakeholders.”
The policy is not without some apparent successes to its credit. As its supporters point out, China has indeed made great strides in accommodating itself to the world. In the late 1960’s, Beijing had only one ambassador abroad—and even he was almost recalled. Today, it maintains diplomatic relations with over 160 nations, is a member of a multitude of multilateral institutions and regional organizations, and has signed numerous global treaties and conventions—including international human-rights covenants. For the first time in its six decades of existence, the People’s Republic is working inside the international system.
The Russian Federation, too, the planet’s largest supplier of hydrocarbons, has appeared to reconcile itself to the existing global order. True, it has initiated, under Putin, another historic cycle of Russian expansionism, but that in itself hardly makes it a replica of the old Soviet Union; nor are we engaged in another existential struggle with it. Although Putin did once refer to the dissolution of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” he is not trying to create another multicultural empire. If his policies look aggressive, that is largely because we are comparing them with Boris Yeltsin’s. In a sense, the Kremlin today is merely regaining its balance and reverting to its typical brand of diplomacy.
In pursuit of engagement, the United States has consistently worked, inside and outside the halls of the UN, with both China and Russia. Indeed, the Bush administration, as its more hawkish critics rightly contend, has all but subcontracted its North Korea policy to Beijing, allowing it to take the lead on a matter of vital importance to the security of the world. Similarly, Washington has attempted to persuade Moscow to use its influence with Tehran. The administration even tentatively agreed to proposals to allow Iran’s enrichment to take place on Russian soil; if implemented, this would have given Russia the role of managing and monitoring the Iranian nuclear program. Apart from the fact that this would have left two culprits to plot as they pleased, one may doubt that it would have prevented the Iranians from acquiring the technical knowledge to enrich uranium on their own.
In brief, big-power cooperation, or the semblance of cooperation, has come with a steep price: lowest-common-denominator compromises. In August 2002, for example, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a dissident group, disclosed the existence of secret nuclear locations, including the underground uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz. It took almost four years, until July 2006, before the Security Council called upon Iran to stop its enrichment of uranium. And it was not until the end of December that the UN imposed sanctions on Tehran for having failed to do so.
What took so long, and why has nothing come of the effort to this day? Russia, with support from China, first prolonged discussion within the IAEA board of governors and then objected to referral of the matter to the Security Council. When the United States did finally manage to put Iran on the council’s agenda, Russia and China, each of which wields a veto, refused to consider sanctions, which meant that the July 2006 resolution contained no enforcement measures. Then, when it came time to respond to Tehran’s continued intransigence, the pair, over two long months, diluted proposal after proposal until the sanctions that eventually emerged last December—limited bans on enrichment materials, technology, and ballistic missiles, as well as freezes on certain companies and individuals—were essentially meaningless.
From 2002 to the present, in other words, Beijing and Moscow have insisted on continued “dialogue” even as Iran has shown no sign whatsoever that it is willing to talk in good faith. Whenever the mullahs openly refuse to cooperate, China and Russia protect them with threats of veto. This technique was on display in March when the Security Council was finally considering a second set of sanctions. No one thought the proposed measures would actually deter the ayatollahs; even before they were enacted, the French were talking about the need for a third and tougher set. Beijing and Moscow, however, while pleading concern for the possible adverse effect of sanctions on the Iranian people, would simply not agree to anything that might have a chance of actually changing the behavior of the Iranian leadership. Under no circumstances would they, or will they, allow restrictions to impinge upon their diplomatic or commercial relations with Iran.
There will undoubtedly be additional Security Council deliberations when Tehran ignores the much-watered-down March measures. But Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has consistently maintained that the UN cannot stop his country from enriching uranium, and about this his judgment has been absolutely right: diplomacy, after all, is proceeding much more slowly than enrichment. As he contemptuously noted last December, speaking on the grounds of the old American embassy in Tehran, the Security Council deliberations are nothing more than a “muppet show.”
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“We must prepare ourselves to rule the world,” Ahmadinejad declared in January 2006 to the Iranian people. Can the world stop him? At this moment, the critical element is time. In the meantime, as diplomacy fails, other nations, having lost confidence in the nonproliferation system, are taking steps to ensure their own security. In December 2006, the six oil-rich Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council announced they were considering a regional nuclear-energy consortium, which could end up being the precursor to six new weapons programs. Russia has declared its willingness to transfer nuclear technology to the group. Yemen also wants to participate in the joint effort. In January, Jordan’s King Abdullah, while announcing that his country wanted its own reactors, implied that this civilian program would be a stepping stone to a nuclear arsenal. Egypt, which secretly experimented with fissile material in the 1980’s and 1990’s, will soon begin a nuclear-energy program of its own. From all appearances, Algeria and Syria have also been conducting nuclear-weapons research.
As George Tenet said when he headed the CIA, “The ‘domino theory’ of the 21st century may well be nuclear.” At this point, there is little stopping the dominos from falling. Unless history goes into reverse soon, every nation that wants the bomb will get the bomb. Eventually, terrorists too will put their hands on a nuclear device. Al Qaeda has declared that its new project is to bring about an “American Hiroshima,” and Iranian officials dare to say they have “a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization.”
In this new era, in which the global community is far less able to prevent atomic weapons from falling into the hands of people who might actually use them, the world desperately needs more than one superpower acting to restrain proliferation. Russia was once such a superpower, but it has switched sides and is aggressively sharing civilian nuclear technology with regimes maintaining incipient weapons programs. China was never such a power, and shows few signs of becoming one in time.
If there is any short-term logic to Chinese and Russian assistance to nuclearizing regimes, it is that both nations have concluded proliferation is inevitable; that they believe they can better control the consequences of the spread of nuclear weapons if they themselves are proliferators; and that they intend to benefit from the situation as much as they can before the international system ruptures. This is indeed short-term thinking, with a vengeance. If these two countries cannot cooperate with Washington on something that is fully as much in their own long-term interest as in the West’s, there is little likelihood they will ever become responsible members of the international community.
Washington has exacted no price from either country for its obstructionism. To the contrary, in the name of engagement, the United States has helped them strengthen themselves—by providing technical and financial assistance, by cooperating on security matters, and by paving their entry into global commerce. (China, with American support, joined the World Trade Organization at the end of 2001, and Russia will become a member soon thanks to an agreement signed with Washington last November.) But what is the point of our trying to integrate these nations into an international community that they are in fact destabilizing? If we fail at this time to use against them the leverage we have—especially in the form of access to our markets, capital, and technology—we will soon end up in another global struggle, this one far more chaotic than the last.
