TIMING is everything. In international diplomacy as in comic delivery, getting your lines in precisely the right place at the right time is the key to success.

When the European Union’s leadership, led by President Chirac, decided a year ago to push to end the arms embargo it placed on China after the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, the timing looked opportune.

The prime motive was commercial. China was enjoying a continuing economic boom, cementing its image as an El Dorado for European businesses. Beyond weapons sales, China’s leaders made clear that they would see the lifting of the embargo as an opportunity to open their markets to all kinds of European companies. “When they think of China, they just see gold bars,” one diplomat said of the EU. But the move also had enticing political advantages. Not all Europeans shared M Chirac’s vision of a “multipolar” world in which alternative regional sources of power would challenge, or at least mitigate, US supremacy.

But, with Iraq still looking a mess, it was not unreasonable to assume that many would be sufficiently uncomfortable with US actions not to complain too loudly. And though it was known that the Bush Administration would react with hostility to the idea, European diplomats also judged that America’s own relations with China were such that it would be difficult for Washington to get really upset.

After a rocky start in the early days of the Bush Administration, since September 11 2001, US-Chinese relations had been steadily improving. In late 2003 President Bush warmly received Wen Jiabao, the new Chinese Prime Minister, to the White House.

And everyone in European capitals was aware that the US was caught in an economic embrace with Beijing. China’s central bank was propping up the US economy by lending most of the money to finance the US’s vast fiscal deficit.

Above all the European démarche came at a time when Europe’s leaders were growing increasingly confident of their role in the world, with a new constitution in the works that would formalise a common foreign policy with a single foreign minister. China offered a chance to show how a united EU could assert itself on the world stage.

Lifting the arms embargo was, in short, a win-win situation, and Europe’s leaders decided they should seize the day. The plan was to take action in June, but in the past two weeks that equation has become considerably more complicated. It is not only that the issue has come to a diplomatic head just as China has begun to flex its muscles in a way that has reminded people why the arms embargo was imposed.

It is happening just as the US is revisiting its foreign policy assumptions in a way that will have significant implications for Asia and Europe.

The poor timing could not have been better underlined than by last week’s hapless visit of Annalisa Gianella, the special representative of Javier Solana, the man who would be the EU’s foreign minister.

Just as Ms Gianella was doing the rounds in Washington, getting assailed from all sides in the US Government about how ill-advised a move to lift the embargo would be, China’s parliament was passing legislation that threatened to invade the renegade province of Taiwan should it formally declare independence.

Worst of all for the Europeans, the US is also rethinking its approach to Beijing and the contours of its broader foreign policy. For the past three years virtually every aspect of US policy has been subordinated to the global War on Terror.

But this year there has been a steadily growing confidence in Washington that policy in the Middle East is heading in the right direction. Elections in Iraq and the Palestinian Authority, popular unrest in Lebanon and signs of political reform in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have given the US real cause to hope that its approach is working, and that it is leading to a reappraisal of global priorities.

The US is not back to a pre-September 11 mindset in foreign policy, but it has stopped seeing the entire world through the prism of Middle Eastern terrorism.

Managing China may still be the biggest challenge of the 21st century, and with his commitment to promoting democracy around the world it is hard to see how President Bush cannot take a less accommodating line towards China, especially if it continues to rattle the sabre against Taiwan.

Intriguingly, earlier this month the US signed a new defence pact with Japan, which included for the first time an explicit reference to the mutual interest in security in the Taiwan Straits.

The EU has now got cold feet about lifting the embargo. What looked like such a smart move a year ago has now put the EU in the uncomfortable position of choosing between seriously irritating the US or angering China.

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