Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said, “We support an arms embargo against Burma and have been engaged in discussions with various countries on the matter.” China is one of the nations holding veto power at the United Nations, and few expect it to support the arms embargo. But analysts said India’s decision could force China to think of options short of an arms embargo to pressure the Burmese junta.

In the 1990s, China became Burma’s most important trading partner, according to Amnesty International, providing more than $2 billion worth of weapons and military equipment, including tanks, armoured personnel carriers and artillery pieces such as howitzers, antitank guns and antiaircraft guns, some sold at below-market prices. “The Chinese clearly are sensitive to the emerging role they are playing,” Durbin said in an interview. “We have an obligation to continue to remind them we need their help in stopping some of the outrages in the world.”

In her year-end news conference last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said “when the monks were in the streets, there was an energy in the international community to try to do something about it”, but now that momentum has dissipated. “It’s our responsibility, along with others, to try to keep a focus on that effort,” she said. “We will return again and again to the Security Council to discuss this issue. We will return again and again to those states that have influence, like China, to move this forward, because there needs to be a process of political reconciliation.”