Zombie China-Pak Nuke Deal

The deal where China sells Pakistan two additional nuclear power reactors, while not as epically zombie-tastic as the Iranian fuel swap, does tend to ebb and flow a fair amount. James noted its most recent rise and fall in late 2008/early 2009. At the moment, it appears as though this zombie is on the verge of breaking loose.

The Financial Times claims that the deal was signed in February, but it didn’t make it into the Pakistani press until late March or the Western press until late April.  And the matter came up at the last Nuclear Suppliers Group meeting, but the Chinese didn’t feel like sharing, so many questions remain.

One of the common threads of these stories is the concept that China and Pakistan were finally freed to ink the deal because of the U.S.-India nuclear deal, which blurred the relationship between being in the NPT and having access to nuclear energy. This might be the answer to the question, why now? And with zombie deals, the timing is always important. Carnegie Endowment scholars are of two (or more?) minds on the relationship between the two bilateral deals. One the one hand, Mark Hibbs wrote in late April that

Chinese officials said last month that export of the reactors to Pakistan would be justified in consideration of political developments in South Asia, including the entry into force of the U.S.–India deal and the NSG exemption for India.

On the other hand, Ashley Tellis disagrees, and says that these claims are “not persuasive.”  Hibbs vs. Tellis is a marquee matchup for any wonk. So, in the words of that claymation referee from Celebrity Deathmatch back in the day, let’s get it on!

Ashley’s first argument is that:

Whatever China is proposing to consummate with Pakistan today in regard to reactor and other nuclear sales, thus, has a long, repetitious, and even convoluted history that bears little causal connection to the U.S.-Indian civilian nuclear initiative.” [Emphasis in original]

I won’t argue that this deal isn’t a zombie that’s been around for a long time. But again, why is it crawling out of the grave right now? Ashley describes the timing thusly:

The U.S.-Indian nuclear accord, then, cannot be held responsible for precipitating Sino-Pakistani civilian nuclear commerce—or its latest iteration. What the U.S.-Indian civilian nuclear cooperation agreement possibly contributed is a change in the psycho-political environment. This change encouraged China to test the prospects for forcing further change in the global nonproliferation system by implementing its own version of “exceptionalism” for its preferred strategic partners—in the hope that other states who acquiesced to the U.S. initiative would feel obliged to extend comparable courtesies to China.

I don’t know if there’s a meaningful distinction between “precipitating” the nuclear deal and merely changing the “psycho-political environment” in a way that “encouraged China” to move forward with the deal. The gun may have been loaded beforehand, but if the U.S.-India nuclear deal flicked off the safety, I would argue that it was a pretty big deal.

Ashley’s key message at the end of the piece is that “The United States, acting in partnership with other NSG members, can still thwart the current version of this initiative, but it will require concerted pressure on Beijing in both bilateral and multilateral fora.” He claims that the U.S. has successfully pushed back on a China-Pakistan deal before, during, and after the U.S.-India deal. If Ashley is to be proven correct in believing that the U.S-India deal hasn’t inhibited U.S. efforts to prevent a China-Pakistan deal, we’ll need evidence that the U.S. successfully pushed back against China after the deal with India was signed, and that it was a lapse in this pressure that created the political breathing room for the deal to be signed.

There’s a 16- or 17-month window during which this lapse would have to have occurred: the NSG granted the Indian waiver on September 6, 2008, the bilateral deal was finalized a month later, and the China-Pakistan deal was apparently finalized in February 2010. So here are the key questions: were there attempts by China to do a nuclear deal with Pakistan during this time frame that were abandoned under U.S. pressure? Was this pressure lifted prior to February 2010? If so, then Ashley may be right that the U.S.-India nuclear deal has had little to do with the China-Pakistan nuclear deal. If not, we’ll have to add “China-Pakistan nuclear deal” to the list of consequences of the U.S.-India deal, right after “indefinite delay to beginning FMCT negotiations.”