Perhaps Barack Obama's trip to China this month was not such a flop after all. Obama was criticized for kowtowing to the Chinese and apparently returning empty-handed, but movement from Beijing last week on Iran's nuclear program and climate change suggests the US president got further than it seemed at first. Obama went to China with three major issues on the table – economic relations, climate change and denuclearization – and seems to have made progress on at least two of them. But analysts said it was unclear exactly how much the US leader had actually influenced the Chinese, or what the long-term impact would be of what was announced last week. “The Chinese were pressed in a very focused fashion on both of those issues,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “I think their position does reflect, in fact, the impact of the Obama visit and of American diplomacy,” he said. China offered rare backing Friday to a vote by the UN nuclear watchdog to rebuke Iran for building a uranium enrichment plant in secret, the first such vote against Tehran in almost four years. China, like Russia, backed the measure, smoothing its 25-3 passage through the International Atomic Energy Agency and departing from an earlier pattern of blocking global attempts to isolate trading partner Iran. Obama stressed in Beijing that Iran's nuclear program could disrupt the Middle East and world energy supplies, experts and administration officials said. The Washington Post reported that US officials had argued that Israel saw Iran's nuclear ambitions as an existential threat, and implied Israel could one day attack Iran to disrupt those ambitions. That argument helped bring the Chinese on board to take a firmer line on Tehran, it reported. “Obama pressed very hard with the Chinese,” Lieberthal said. “And they went the right way today.” On Thursday, Beijing said Premier Wen Jiabao would go to UN-led climate talks in Copenhagen next month and offered its first firm carbon intensity target, pledging to cut the amount of carbon dioxide produced for each yuan of national income by 40-45 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels. Washington gave only a guarded welcome to China's emissions announcement, saying the world would watch progress by the top greenhouse gas emitter. Observers said measuring and verifying implementation would be central going forward. Bonnie Glaser, a China expert and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said China's 40-45 percent reduction target was disappointing, but it was a good sign that they made an announcement at all. “I think the Obama administration is relieved that it got a public statement from the Chinese going into the Copenhagen meeting,” she said. White House officials expressed satisfaction at the developments, which they termed “tangible progress” in the wake of Obama's visit. “These things are incremental, but the president's belief throughout his engagement process and policy is that by having these discussions in a respectful manner and by having these exchanges over time you can develop consensus,” a senior administration official said. Analysts said they were still waiting for movement from Beijing on the US view that China, the largest holder of US foreign debt, should let its yuan currency rise in value. “I don't know what he accomplished in terms of the economic crisis,” Lieberthal said. “I know they had real serious discussions. I don't know if they moved things forward or not.” A White House official said Obama had laid the groundwork on Iran – as on climate – during repeated meetings with Chinese officials. “We were obviously locked into waiting for this (the IAEA board of governors') vote and now we're ... where we thought we would be in terms of reflecting that level of cooperation that we've been able to develop with China on this issue,” he said.
