A deepening row over a European Union proposal to lift a 16-year-old arms embargo on Beijing threatens to undermine the prime minister’s efforts to encourage transatlantic reconciliation during the president’s fence-mending visit to Brussels and Germany this week.
Washington is concerned that ending the embargo will enable China to obtain sensitive military technologies that may be used against American aircraft carriers if a war breaks out over Chinese claims to Taiwan.
A sudden increase in US- Chinese tension last week forced the arms embargo issue to the top of the president’s European agenda. Beijing reacted furiously after Porter Goss, director of the CIA, warned that “improved Chinese capabilities threaten US forces in the region”.
Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, also expressed concern about the expansion of China’s navy and claimed that Beijing was buying “a great deal of relatively modern equipment” from Russia.
China promptly accused Washington of “severely interfering” with Chinese internal affairs. The row is complicating US and British hopes of persuading Beijing to put pressure on North Korea to end its nuclear weapons programme.
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Bush is expected to urge the prime minister to lobby for a reversal of the European plan when the two men meet for a private breakfast in Brussels on Tuesday. But European officials said that Blair had little chance of halting an initiative that was supported by both France and Germany.
The British are keen to expand their own arms sales to China, which is reportedly seeking advanced electronic warfare technologies made by Britain’s BAE Systems.
Officials in Washington warned that Europe had failed to grasp how seriously America regards the Chinese threat to occupy Taiwan, whose status has been disputed since Mao-Tse-tung seized power on the mainland in 1949.
“The Europeans don’t feel this is their problem,” said one senior official. “They need to understand just how much the Americans feel it is theirs.”
Discussions on Capitol Hill about the president’s visit to Europe were dominated by embargo concerns last week. One congressional hearing was told that while Iran’s nuclear weapons programme had previously been the “bad” issue between Washington and Europe, the “ugly” issue was now the arms embargo.
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“To stick their finger in our eye when the Bush administration is reaching out its hand (to Europe) is a bad thing,” a congressional foreign affairs committee was told by John Hulsman of the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a former State Department official at the Council on Foreign Relations, warned: “We are heading for a train wreck if we don’t figure out an agreed strategy for dealing with this.”
The China row threatens to undermine the resolve of both American and European officials to relaunch a transatlantic relationship that soured badly after the US-led invasion of Iraq. Even Iran had appeared to recede as a bone of contention as Bush last week went out of his way to play down threats of a military assault.
The president told interviewers that “you never want a president to say never” about the use of military force, but rumours about impending military attacks were “just not the truth . . . we want diplomacy to work”.
The White House is also co-operating with Europe over investigations into Syria’s alleged involvement in the murder last week of Rafic Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister.
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Picking up where Condoleezza Rice left off on her recent ice-breaking visit to Europe as the new US secretary of state, Bush will arrive in Brussels tonight “armed to charm”, said one US official.
Despite his concerns about Iran and China, he will publicly make up with both President Jacques Chirac of France and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, the sternest European critics of his war in Iraq.
He will also offer unprecedented declarations of American support for the European Union and its constitutional process, and will receive in exchange what John Bruton, the EU ambassador in Washington, described last week as “a very strong signal” of European willingness to support reconstruction in Iraq. Nato hopes to announce at a summit on Tuesday that all 26 members have agreed to participate in some way in the alliance mission to train Iraq’s military.
Yet behind the scenes he will be pressing hard for European concessions and it may not be long before old antagonisms resurface. Bush and Chirac will meet in Brussels for a reconciliation dinner on Monday night, but Chirac has led the drive to sell French weapons to China and sources on both sides confirm that the two men simply do not get on.
White House officials are still smarting from the memory of the 2003 G8 summit in Evian, at which Chirac presented Bush, a well known teetotaller, with several bottles of wine and brandy. The gift was perceived as a calculated insult, and Richard Perle, a former Pentagon adviser and leading right-wing hawk, last week urged Bush to confront Chirac over France’s supposed ambition to turn the EU into a rival superpower.
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“He should present the evidence we have that France is . . . attempting to construct Europe as a counterweight to the United States,” said Perle.
Schröder is also in America’s bad books over a recent speech he made in which he dismissed Nato as “no longer the primary venue where transatlantic partners discuss and co-ordinate strategies”.
German officials have since been backpedalling furiously from what appeared to be a suggestion — anathema to Washington — that the EU is more important as a military power.
Bush’s visit will end in Slovakia with a difficult meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
The formerly warm relations which developed after Bush declared that he had “gazed into (Putin’s) eyes and seen his soul” have given way to serious American concerns about what one official has described as “a creeping totalitarian tinge”.