Is China willing to risk military conflict in Iran?

Last Tuesday China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu reiterated his country’s preference for a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear standoff, rebuffing calls for China to back UN Security Council sanctions against Iran. A China Daily editorial released the same day pushed back against such pressure, deeming the singling out of China on the issue by the U.S. and its allies a “trap,” but remained conspicuously silent on its actual degree of support for the embattled Islamic Republic. Behind Beijing’s poker face, there seems to be hardening determination to stay out of the sanctions issue entirely – even if it means risking the security consequences of a nuclear Iran.

The China Daily editorial makes clear China above all wants to distance itself from any responsibility for the Iranian impasse. It highlighted that, “contrary to the fallacy that China is the major obstacle to the UN’s efforts to impose tighter sanctions against Iran,” other U.S. allies like Italy and Japan have substantial economic ties to Iran. Elsewhere it declares China’s opposition “to tighter sanctions…is a natural result of [China’s] peaceful foreign policy,” a phrasing that avoids commenting on the merits of the situation and suggests the refusal to take action is based only on principled opposition to sanctions in general. Nowhere does it defend Iran on its nuclear policy.

The China Daily editorial bristles at the foreign pressure on China to accede to sanctions against Iran, suggesting China is trying to cast its neutral course as legitimate. The editorial repeatedly denounces the West’s efforts as “coercion,” or a “trap,” echoing the tone of other Chinese commentators on the issue. The TV host and columnist Lv Sining wrote earlier in February that “Iran and the West must not kidnap China” for their own purposes in the nuclear standoff. Sining quotes Shanghai Institutes for International Studies  scholar Zhao Guojun, who recently opined that “If China is forced to fully side with either the West or Iran in opposing one or the other, the harm to China will be enormous.” For China, the strategic costs of neutrality on Iran, which merely risks frustrating the West, might be lower than those associated with taking a hard stance either way.

This striking possibility comes into focus at the end of the China Daily editorial. Conflict with Iran may come about, the article admits, but China will not accept the blame for such an outcome. In reaction to rumors that the U.S. might ask Saudi Arabia to sell more oil to China in a bid to persuade it to back sanctions against Iran, China Daily asserts

[l]inking the issue with oil deals is nothing but a trap so that some in the West could again blame China if peaceful solutions ultimately fail.

The wording “if peaceful solutions ultimately fail,” intentionally phrased to avoid specifying agency, suggests Beijing is fully aware of the potential for conflict and is prepared to let that eventuality occur before it chooses one side over the other. This would seem an apparent rebuttal to the U.S. reasoning for why China should support UN sanctions, which is based on the unseemliness of unilateral support for Iran if that country’s nuclear weapons were to spur regional conflict.

For all of the U.S. rhetoric on the matter, China may well have decided that a nuclear Iran, or even a regional conflict, would actually damage U.S. interests way more than its own. As Georgetown’s Matthew Kroenig recently wrote in the New Republic:

An Iranian bomb, then, won’t disadvantage China or Russia. In fact, it might even help them.  Neither country has hidden its desire to hem in America’s unilateral ability to project power, and a nuclear-armed Iran would certainly mean a more constrained U.S. military in the Middle East.

The logic by which China would gain by an Iranian bomb also applies in the case of a regional conflict, which if it escalated could easily embroil the U.S. for years and sap further its already-strained military and economic resources. If China were to keep its nose out of such a conflict, as China seems to want to do and would be crazy not to, the heavy strategic costs imposed on the U.S. would generally be China’s gain. (A regional war involving Iran would presumably imperil U.S. oil imports as much as it would China’s). While U.S. policymakers may complain that this attitude would be a dangerous abdication of China’s responsibility as a major power, the reality is that Iran is one place where U.S. and Chinese strategists may see things very, very differently.

China’s calculus on Iran is painfully obvious to anyone who has ever heard a reasonable Chinese person talk of their profound gratitude to Bush for starting the Iraq War. Many Chinese believe that the weakening of U.S. military capabilities, fiscal position and international legitimacy due to the Iraq misadventure has laid essential groundwork for China’s rise. I wouldn’t be surprised if many Chinese were not secretly hoping for the U.S. to shoot itself in the foot again.