Ham-handed attempts by the European Union's Trade Commission to control the flood and protect Europe's own beleaguered textile industry have produced this Chinese clothes mountain. And since the textile trade is mostly in Spain, Italy, Portugal and France, while the consumers who want the cheap Chinese clothes are mostly in Britain, Germany and Scandinavia, the row has set Europe's North against its South.

At the same time, all Europeans have something in common: outrage at rising oil prices, in a continent where gasoline now costs over $6 a gallon. It can cost $100 to fill the tank of the family car, and politicians looking at headlines have started demanding that governments cut back their fuel taxes to give the motorists some relief.

Meanwhile those European diplomats and officials who are left minding the store while their ministers and masters are on vacation have been getting just a touch nervous about the prospects for regional security.

Talks between the tough new Iranian government and Europe's big three of Britain, France and Germany over Tehran's nuclear ambitions have reached an impasse. Sometime this fall, we are likely to see a decisive new step -- an attempt to get the U.N. Security Council to consider sanctions against Iran unless it agrees to abide by an international regime of verification and controls.

But if the United Nations is to get serious about sanctions, China has to agree, or at least abstain. And energy-hungry China is investing over $30 billion in Iranian oil and gas, which will be a powerful incentive for Beijing to say that Iran deserves another chance, and then another.

Those same European diplomats have spent the last 15 years contentedly not worrying about Russia, at least as a threat to Europe's security. Russia's spasmodic bullying of its smaller neighbors, its repression of the Chechens (as ruthless as it has been incompetent) and its return to authoritarian habits over its media and its energy sector, have all been irritating and disappointing, rather than worrying.

But the Kremlin's latest round of military exercises, though they were held half a world away in the Pacific, has given defense officials throughout the West some pause for thought, because for once the Russians were rattling their sabers alongside their new friends, the Chinese.

Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's long-time premier, recently told one visitor he saw a 40 percent chance of war between China and Taiwan in the coming decade. The future of the world would then hinge on America's decision, whether to defend Taiwan or to abandon it, and at the same time abandoning the U.S. strategic role in the Asian-Pacific region.

Wherever one turns these days, from oil prices to Europe's new textile wars, there stands China. Turn from Iranian nuclear ambitions to Russia's new security perspectives, and the key to the future lies with Beijing. Ponder the sky-high costs of shipping or the boom in the steel industry, and there stands the world's fastest-growing market, of 1.3 billion Chinese, all beavering away in an economy that is doubling in size every eight years.

If, along with the Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, one cares to consider the paradox of a massive U.S. trade deficit alongside unusually low interest rates, then the explanation lies with the Central Bank of China and its resolve to keep buying U.S. T-bonds and securities so that American consumers can continue to live beyond their means.

Whatever the question in international affairs, the answer these days seems to lie with China. Those Europeans fuming at the high cost of gasoline have to understand that China has in the past seven years gone from being an exporter of oil into the world's second-leading importer after the United States. China's hunger for energy (closely followed by India's appetite) has created a seller's market for oil that is filling the coffers of the Persian Gulf oil sheikhs and convincing the Iranian mullahs that they can afford guns and butter and nukes on top.

For the moment, China's economy is still medium-sized, smaller than that of Britain or France at conventional exchange rates. But measured by purchasing power parity, or the real cost of goods in different markets, China is already the world's second-largest economy and on track to rival, the United States for the title of No. 1 within 20 years.

Coping with China's growth, and understanding China's ambitions, will be the main challenge of Western statesmen for the foreseeable future - even more than coping with Islamic extremists and terrorism.

And China is starting to show distinct signs of impatience with the current way the world is ordered, starting with the stranglehold the Americans and Europeans still maintain over the global economy. The political decision in Washington to block China's $18 billion bid to buy the U.S. oil company Unocal was a case in point.

And an op-ed article in First Finance and Economics Daily, China's new (and so far only) business daily noted last week: "Currently, the imbalance of the world economy and the intense fluctuation of the currency market are both troubles made by the U.S."

The textile row with Europe has also irritated Beijing. The state-owned China Daily this week accused the EU of old-fashioned protectionism and breaking the spirit and probably also the letter of the World Trade Organization rules. Another paper ran a cartoon showing four naked Europeans huddled together on a dockside, waiting for their Chinese clothes.

And all the Chinese papers note that this problem of textile quotas is just a matter of time. From the year 2008, there will be no such quotas and no such restrictions and the Chinese will be able to sell as many clothes in Europe as they can, while trampling over the corpse of what used to be Europe's textile industry.

The real question is what kind of Chinese superpower is now emerging and that is the question that will loom large over next month's visit to Washington by Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Initially seen as a quiet reformist, Hu has so far proved to be very different with more censorship, arbitrary arrests and suppression of dissent dismaying Chinese intellectuals. Hu has been a foreign policy activist, including bold initiatives such as the wooing of India, the first joint China-Russia military exercise and accelerating China's unprecedented military buildup.

"While outward signs are that the visit will be cordial, there are hints of significant strain," suggests veteran U.S. diplomat Harvey Feldman, now with the Heritage Foundation think tank. "For example, while former Secretary of State Colin Powell frequently called the China-U.S. relationship 'the best in decades,' current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice characterizes it as 'complex.'"

With significant policy differences between Washington and Beijing on North Korea, terrorism, Iran, trade, exchange rates and, of course, human rights, U.S.-Chinese relations are becoming not just problematic, but pivotal. And lurking over the Bush-Hu talks will be China's demand, expressed at the June summit in Kazakhstan with Russia and other Central Asia states, that the United States set a firm date for the withdrawal of their military bases from the region.

So while the Chinese clothes mountain piles up at Europe's ports and as uropean motorists fume at their $100 visits to the gas station, European officials are seeing themselves eclipsed as the world starts to shift back into the old two-superpower mode, where the decisions that matter are made in Washington and Beijing and Europe reverts to the bystander status it thought it had grown out of with the end of the Cold War.

All rights reserved. � 2005 United Press International. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by United Press International.. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of United Press International.

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