The most important diplomatic signal of the past fortnight was not the choreography of Donald Trump’s summit with Xi Jinping, nor Vladimir Putin’s arrival in Beijing days later. It was the contradiction between them.

China wants to look like the indispensable power in both rooms. It wants Trump to recognize that no global settlement is possible without Beijing. It wants Putin to understand that Russia has no better strategic rear than China. It wants Tehran, Pyongyang and Islamabad to know that China has channels where others have slogans. But beneath the grandeur, Beijing’s message is becoming clearer: it does not want a world in flames. It wants leverage, not disorder. It wants dependency, not escalation. It wants the status quo, adjusted in China’s favor, but not blown apart.

That distinction may now matter for Ukraine, for Hormuz, and for the wider architecture of crisis management.

At the Trump-Xi summit, the hardest words were reportedly over Taiwan. Xi warned that if the issue were “handled poorly,” China and the United States could “collide or even enter into conflict,” pushing relations into an “extremely dangerous place.” Yet at the same banquet, Xi also said of the U.S.-China relationship: “We must make it work and never mess it up.” That is the Chinese position in miniature. Red lines must be asserted. But systemic rupture must be avoided.

The same logic applies to the Strait of Hormuz. China is Iran’s most important oil customer and a major buyer of Gulf energy. It has no interest in a precedent where the United States dictates terms in the Gulf. But it has even less interest in a prolonged closure of the world’s most sensitive energy artery. Reuters reported that Trump and Xi’s talks focused partly on reopening Hormuz, with Xi apparently interested in buying American oil to reduce China’s dependence on Middle Eastern supplies. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that China had an interest in resolving the crisis because “many of its ships are stuck in the Gulf” and a global slowdown would hurt Chinese exporters.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s language was revealing. Beijing called for “continued and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)