China condemns the United States’s war on Iran as illegal and wants it to stop immediately. But Beijing will not let the war get in the way of Donald Trump’s visit later this month.
When China’s foreign minister spoke to reporters in Beijing on Sunday morning, he was careful to avoid saying anything too impolite about the United States in advance of Trump’s visit at the end of March.
And he made clear that the US war against Iran has not made Beijing any less enthusiastic about the prospect of hosting the American president and improving relations between the world’s two most powerful countries.
But in his remarks about the war, Wang Yi was uncompromising in his condemnation of its unlawful and reckless nature and he called for an immediate ceasefire.
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“Seeing the Middle East engulfed in flames, I want to say that this is a war that should not have happened. It is a war that does no one any good,” he said.
“The history of the Middle East tells the world time and again that force provides no solution, and armed conflict will only increase hatred and breed new crises.”
China’s reticence in offering more than rhetorical support to Iran since the start of the US and Israeli attacks surprised some western commentators in view of the friendly relations between Beijing and Tehran.
But the various axes (of evil, upheaval or autocracies) between Washington’s adversaries live more in the imagination of foreign policy hawks than in reality and Beijing has long avoided formal alliances and security commitments to its partners, rejecting what it calls “bloc mentality”.
China imported 13.5 per cent of its crude oil from Iran last year but it has more than one billion barrels in reserve, enough to replace three months of imports, and has been buying more oil from Russia as well as shifting at breathtaking speed towards renewable energy.
But China’s economic relationships with Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are more important than its energy relationship with Iran, and Beijing has asked Tehran to consider the “reasonable concerns” of the neighbours it has attacked in retaliatory strikes.
More important than any of China’s ties in the Middle East is the opportunity for a reset of its economic and military relationship with the US under Trump. Both sides have avoided antagonising one another in recent weeks and China has conducted no military drills around Taiwan since the start of the Iran war, a signal perhaps that Beijing is not seeking to exploit that conflict.
The US decision to go to war without United Nations authorisation, its assassination of the supreme leader Ali Khamenei and the bombing of civilian targets have, however, given Beijing a chance to affirm its commitment to the UN and international law.
Wang said yesterday that these principles are at the heart of Xi Jinping’s Global Governance Initiative (GGI), one of a series of Chinese diplomatic initiatives that also deal with security, development and culture.
“The most explicit message of the GGI is that the leading status of the UN must be upheld, not challenged. The central role of the UN must be strengthened, not weakened,” he said.
“The UN is not perfect, But without the UN, the world would only be worse. Creating parallel structures outside the UN, or worse still, putting together various exclusive blocs and circles is unpopular and unsustainable.”
