The news cycle serves up another helping of high dudgeon from His Majesty’s Government, this time regarding China’s ‘huge arsenal’. One almost expects the Foreign Secretary to flourish a lace handkerchief and swoon. Yet, as we tut-tut at Beijing’s military build-up, Tokyo busily denies its own militarist revival.
The irony is so thick you could cut it with a katana. This is the same Britain that, not so long ago, lectured the world on ‘ethical foreign policy’ while our arms sales fuelled conflicts from Yemen to Ukraine. We are a nation that specialises in moral preening, forgetting that our own empire was built on gunboats and opium.
The real crisis is not China’s arsenal, but the intellectual decadence of the West. We comfort ourselves with gestures, with press releases, with the illusion that we still command the moral high ground. Japan’s protestations of peace ring hollow as it expands its military role, conveniently ignoring Article 9 of its own constitution.
Meanwhile, we in Britain prattle on about the ‘rules-based order’ as if it were a fixed constellation rather than a shifting set of interests. The truth is that we are living in the twilight of the Pax Americana, and the rituals of diplomatic outrage are merely the death throes of a failing order. History will judge us not by our sanctions or statements, but by our capacity to face reality without the crutch of imperial nostalgia.
Instead, we cling to the comfortable fiction that we are the guardians of civilisation, while the new powers build their arsenals and laugh behind their hands.
