Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw heads to Beijing this week to kowtow before the Middle Kingdom, and tell his Chinese hosts that Britain's long opposition to removing the European embargo from selling arms to China is about to end.

Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair explained personally to President George W. Bush that Britain could no longer hold out against the majority opinion in the European Union, and the ban that was imposed after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 would have to be lifted.

It would be replaced by an EU code of conduct, Blair said, that would restrain sales of arms that could worsen tensions with Taiwan or change the balance of power in Asia.

The U.S. have an entirely legitimate and understandable interest both in the effectiveness of the EU's system of arms control and in issues of regional stability in that area, Straw said. There will be intensive discussions with the Americans.

But Bush was not mollified by the British explanations, and U.S. officials see this as a grim augury for future EU-U.S. relations, just as Bush is heading over to Brussels next month for a trip that was supposed to mend fences, to smooth over bygone rows over Iraq and start off the second term with a new determination to strengthen Transatlantic ties.

The British went ahead despite explicit warnings from U.S. officials that there was a strong risk of retaliation by Congress, both by clamping down on technological cooperation between U.S. and European arms manufacturers and limiting access to the U.S. arms market.

Britain would suffer most, with BAE (British Aerospace) and Rolls-Royce the two biggest foreign suppliers to the Pentagon, with broad security clearances that deem them to be virtually American companies.

The Americans are not the only ones offended by the British and EU decision. After his talks in Beijing, Jack Straw will then fly to Tokyo for talks with Japan, which is preparing to defend the southern remote islands off Kyushu and Okinawa from possible invasion amid rising security concerns about China, according to papers published Sunday by Kyodo News.

The plan calls for a dispatch of 55,000 members of the Ground Self-Defense Force as well as warplanes, destroyers and submarines in case the islands are attacked.

Recent incursions by a Chinese nuclear submarine into these Japanese waters (some of them also claimed by China), along with Japanese plans for oil drilling, point to regional tensions that go far beyond Taiwan as Asia adjusts to the emergence of China as a regional superpower.

Why would Britain do this? The first answer is that it may have had little choice. There was a strong majority in the EU, led by France and Germany, that is determined to lift the arms embargo.

During previous tussles over the issue, Britain had been backed by the Dutch, Swedes and Danes, who pointed out at an EU summit last year that it was less than sensitive to propose lifting the embargo when some of the pro-democracy students arrested at Tiananmen Square were still in prison.

But these allies were shifting their own position under pressure from their own exporters who want to no restrictions on their access to Chinese markets.

If Britain is offending the Americans out of solidarity with Europe, why is the EU doing this? In economic terms, the EU is looking to its future; last week, new trade statistics were published that showed the EU to be China's biggest trade partner, ahead of the United States and Japan.

Another reason is that the EU reckons the U.S. plays a hypocritical game in the region, changing the balance of power by agreeing to rearm Taiwan, while at the same time pumping foreign investment into China, and accepting a trade deficit with China that now exceeds $100 billion a year. If China is now an economic powerhouse, American trade and investment policies made it so.

And if arms embargoes are so important, just how did China acquire U.S.-made jet engines for its J-8 jet trainer and light attack warplane? China than sold these warplanes to Myanmar and Pakistan, two countries on which the United States had imposed arms sanctions. What did the U.S. do about this? Nothing.

Moreover, the Europeans mutter, what about those fines on U.S. high-tech companies for allowing the leakage of satellite technology to the Chinese?

Still, the European motives are less than convincing. The EU is an economy with an $11 trillion GDP; it does not need arms sales contracts that are unlikely to be as much as $10 billion a year - less than 0.1 percent of GDP.

Even if the code of conduct means anything, the Chinese are unlikely to be in the market for any big weapons platforms with the exception of super-quiet French or German submarines.

China already buys Su-30 fighter-bombers and Kilo-class submarines and Sovremenny-class destroyers from Russia. China is already building its own AWACS technology and cruise missiles.

If China could get the EU arms embargo lifted, they will bring pressure to Russia, which also has some restrictions on its arms sales and technology transfers to China, notes Arthur Ding, a specialist on China's military at Taiwan's Institute of International Relations. If the EU lifts its embargo, that could pressure Russia to lift its restrictions.

What the Chinese want from the Europeans are the high-tech sub-systems, like radars and sonars, avionics and command and control systems, high-performance engines and missile guidance technology, fire-and-forget and look down-shoot down radar systems.

These are the products that currently give the U.S. military their decisive technological edge over the Chinese. (And using that traditional loophole of dual use technology, for both military and civilian use, China has already bought some $280 million of European-made dual-use technology in the last decade, half of it from France, including British radars, French helicopters and missiles and German submarine engines.

We really are quite worried about helping China arm itself, and that goes well beyond Bush to most security specialists here, says Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, a top Washington think-tank. The issue is not human rights or political reform in China.

We really think war is possible over the Taiwan Strait and that it could easily pit the United States against China. Lifting the EU embargo is not only disquieting, it is dangerous.

It also signals the growing European acceptance of the argument that France has been making for the past decade, that the current era of American strategic supremacy will not last forever and that new superpowers like China are already beginning to emerge, with India likely to follow. Within a decade or two, the United States will still be the mightiest of the great powers, but no longer the sole hyperpower.

China will be supreme in East Asia, the EU will be master of its own region and India may dominate the Indian Ocean.

Like the 19th century balance of power in Europe between France and Germany, Russia and Britain and Austro-Hungary, this could be a reasonably stable system, so long as there are no great rivalries for scarce resources like oil and gas or control of the Persian Gulf, or sudden tensions over smaller allies like Taiwan or Israel.

This is the looming new world order, brought into being by China's economic boom, by the Bush administration's skill at breaking old alliances and by Europe's reluctance to continue accepting the kind of American leadership provided by Bush.

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