上周朝鲜核设施非功能化的协议在北京宣布，生动地显示，无论好坏，布什的外交政策已经依赖中国人的帮助。他们可能是政府和平解决地平线下一个大危机（伊朗拒绝放弃铀浓缩的权利）的最好希望。或者政府的一些人正在期盼。
以狂妄、单干的风格挥霍掉大部分总统任期的布什已经在一个接一个的问题上越来越转向中国：从朝鲜到达尔福尔到对缅甸亲民主示威者的镇压。
美国朝核谈判代表希尔表示，“中国已经成为美国任何外交的第一站。”
中国能否以同样的方式说服伊朗？这两种对峙有很多不同，但有一些迹象显示答案可能是“是的（yes）”。
例如，白宫官员指出，美国向伊朗施加更大压力时中国一直在联合国置身幕后，如今已经签署了两轮（温和的）制裁。他们认为如果今秋的报告显示伊朗违背不追逐核武器的承诺，它（中国）可能支持（强硬的）第三轮制裁。
专家还说中国需要伊朗石油和天然气支持经济增长，尽管这令它对实施强硬制裁忧心，但也令它渴望回避波斯湾战争，以免中断能源供应。
但是，鉴于中国和美国的历史和政治分歧，称它为盟友或伙伴仍然是一厢情愿的想法。中国不愿意十分迎合布什政府的要求，特别是在惩罚专制政权方面。鉴于历史，有理由相信中国在伊朗问题上的合作有其局限性。如同缅甸，朝鲜半岛在中国的边界上，仅这条理由就可以解释减轻那里的紧张符合中国的利益。对美国而言，害怕伊朗的核能力和对伊朗与真主党及哈马斯等组织的联系是分不开的；而中国人对这些忧虑似乎没有共同的紧迫性。
对朝鲜协议持怀疑观点的专家指出就中国给出的所有帮助而言，该协议只是迈向美国拆除朝鲜核弹的最终目标的一步而已。同时，美国三十年来试图在经济上挤压伊朗，而中国指望保留伊朗作为重要经济伙伴。
欧亚集团的普库钱（Clifford Kupchan）认为，当利益与美国一致时，中国可以是建设性的，在伊朗，它似乎有一个不同的议程。
中国凭借其联合国安理会常任理事国位子，总是一个重要的外交玩家。但中国之于布什政府的重要性增长有两个原因：它在全球变得更有自信，而（美国）政府则耗尽许多选项。
华盛顿两党连立研究组织新美国基金会（New America Foundation）的克里文斯（Steven Clemons）表示，“我认为，几乎在世界上任何地方我们都需要中国”，他批评政府最初对协调国际外交的轻蔑，并援引它在伊拉克的当务之急。
同时，中国的外交和经济关系远远超出亚洲。克里文斯认为这导致各国对中美态度的微妙转变。“它们把中国视为上升的大国，而不再这样看待我们。”
这些联系赋予中国影响力。而且杠杆作用伴随影响力而来。
在伊朗以及其他地方的谈判上，美国似乎在打赌中国在全球稳定方面的利益将继续提高，因此与美国利益一致的时候比不一致的时候要多。（作者 STEVEN LEE MYERS）（原题：看看谁是忧伤岁月的改造先生）
Look Who’s Mr. Fixit for a Fraught Age
GEORGE W. BUSH, embattled at home, tied down in Iraq and watching the clock run out on his presidency, has found a diplomatic crutch in an unlikely place: China.
Last week’s agreement by North Korea to disable its nuclear facilities — announced in Beijing, tellingly — showed just how much Mr. Bush’s foreign policy has come to rely, for better or worse, on the help of the Chinese. They might just be the administration’s best hope for peacefully resolving the next big crisis on the horizon, Iran’s refusal to give up the right to enrich uranium. Or so some in the administration are hoping.
Mr. Bush, who spent most of his presidency with a swaggering, go-it-alone style, has increasingly turned to China on problem after problem: from North Korea to Darfur to the repression of pro-democracy demonstrators in Myanmar.
“China has become the first stop for any American diplomacy,” said Christopher R. Hill, the American negotiator in the North Korea talks.
Could China bring Iran around in a similar way? The two confrontations are different in myriad ways, but there are some signs that the answers could be yes.
White House officials, for example, note that China, which had remained in the background at the United Nations when the United States pressed for more pressure on Iran, has now signed on to two rounds of (mild) sanctions. They say it could support a (tougher) third round if reports expected this fall suggest that Iran is breaking its commitments not to pursue nuclear weapons.
Experts also say China needs Iranian gas and oil for its economic growth — and while this has made it skittish about imposing tough sanctions, it also makes China eager to avert a war in the Persian Gulf that would disrupt energy supplies.
Still, it would be wishful thinking to call China an ally or even a partner, given its historical and political divisions with the United States. China has proved unwilling to go along with much of what the Bush administration has asked of it, especially when it comes to punishing authoritarian regimes. On that score, China’s one-party rulers have always been cautious, calling such measures interference in the internal affairs of others.
Given that history, there are reasons to think that Chinese cooperation on Iran could have its limits. The Korean Peninsula is on China’s border, as is Myanmar, and that alone could explain China’s interest in reducing tensions there. For the United States, fear of Iran’s nuclear capability is linked to fear of Iran’s ties to groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, and to its growing influence in Iraq; those are worries whose urgency the Chinese do not seem to share.
And experts who take a skeptical view of the deal with North Korea point out that for all the help China has given, this agreement is just another step on a long road toward the ultimate American goal, which is stripping that government of the nuclear bombs it has already built. Meanwhile, Americans have had three decades of trying to squeeze Iran economically, while China is counting on retaining Iran as an important economic partner.
“China can be constructive when its interests align with the United States,” Clifford Kupchan of the Eurasia Group, a consultancy in Washington, said. “In Iran, it seems to have a different agenda.”
Nevertheless, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a bipartisan research organization in Washington, said that while some Americans express frustration at what they see as Chinese unwillingness to press Iran, China has already played an active role in trying to resolve tensions that could lead to another military conflict in the Persian Gulf.
He credited what he said were quiet Chinese efforts to win the release of four Iranian-Americans jailed by the authorities in Iran this summer.
With the North Koreans, China’s support proved more crucial than anything else. China, which for decades acted as North Korea’s protector, responded to the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s nuclear test last year by cutting off military aid and joining the Bush administration’s efforts to choke off the country’s bank accounts abroad.
A senior administration official said in an interview that China’s diplomatic push began even before the test, after Mr. Bush assured President Hu Jintao that he wanted a peaceful resolution with North Korea during an outwardly disastrous White House visit in April 2006 in which a protester infiltrated their joint news conference.
Mr. Hu dispatched State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan that week for unannounced talks in North Korea that, after some ups and downs, laid the foundation for last week’s deal, the official said. “What changed was not them,” the official said of the North Koreans, “but the Chinese attitude.”
China, by virtue of its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, has always been an important diplomatic player. But its importance to the Bush administration has grown for two reasons: it has become more assertive around the globe and the administration has exhausted a lot of its options.
“I think we need China almost everywhere in the world because we’ve disengaged from the rest of the world,” Mr. Clemons said, criticizing the administration’s initial disdain for concerted international diplomacy and citing its preoccupation with Iraq.
Meanwhile, China has steadily expanded its diplomatic and economic ties far beyond Asia. Mr. Clemons suggested that that has caused a subtle tectonic shift in how nations view it and, conversely, the United States. “They see China as an ascending power,” Mr. Clemons added, “and they don’t see us that way any more.”
Such ties give China influence. And with influence comes leverage. In Sudan, the Chinese long resisted American-led efforts to stop the killing in Darfur but this summer lifted their objections to a United Nations and African Union peacekeeping force — perhaps in part because a Hollywood human-rights campaign threatened a boycott of the 2008 Olympic Games, to be held in Beijing, if China did not do more.
Supporters of the democracy movement in Myanmar — Burma to those supporters — also hope to use the threat of an Olympic boycott to force China to lean on the military government there.
Mr. Bush, who accepted an invitation to the games in Beijing next year, did not go so far, but he met in the Oval Office with China’s foreign minister, Yang Jeichi, to privately urge China to intervene with the generals.
Last week, Myanmar’s rulers relented and allowed a United Nations envoy to visit — a diplomatic accomplishment that the Chinese touted, but hardly a breakthrough given reports of continued arrests. “If China is claiming credit for this, they have to show results,” said Jeremy Woodrum of the U.S. Campaign for Burma.
Still, in the Iran negotiations as elsewhere, the United States seems to be betting that China’s interest in global stability will continue to rise, so that it coincides more often than not with American interests.
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