The news that Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un have pledged stronger ties is hardly surprising. It is the predictable handshake of two men who understand that their legitimacy rests on the suppression of dissent and the veneration of the state. The UK Foreign Office, in its official analysis, will no doubt wring its hands over the implications for global security. But let us drop the pretence. This is not about security. This is about the death rattle of the post-war liberal order.
The real story here is not the summit itself but what it reveals about the intellectual bankruptcy of our own elites. We spend our days drafting sanctions and issuing stern warnings, yet we fail to acknowledge that the axis of illiberalism is not merely a geopolitical inconvenience. It is a mirror held up to our own decadence. The Victorians knew how to project power. They built empires not on endless summits but on the quiet assurance of gunboats. Today, we offer advisory missions and condemnations. The result is predictable: the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
Consider the historical parallels. The recent rapprochement between Beijing and Pyongyang echoes the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a temporary arrangement of convenience between two ideological rivals. But unlike 1939, we no longer have a Churchill to rouse us. We have bureaucrats parsing the language of joint statements while the nuclear clock ticks louder. Xi and Kim understand something our diplomats do not: the only currency that matters is power. Human rights, democracy, the rule of law – these are luxuries for the comfortable, not necessities for the ascendant.
The Foreign Office analysis will likely focus on the denuclearisation angle, the possibility of a new arms race, the strain on the US alliance. But these are sidebar issues. The core truth is that the era of liberal dominance is over, and our elites lack the imagination to name it. We are living through the fall of a civilisation, and like the Romans before us, we are too busy with our baths and our bread to notice that the barbarians are at the gate. The Xi-Kim pledge is a symptom, not a cause. The disease is our own moral exhaustion.
Let us not mince words. The UK's response will be a masterpiece of vacillation – a bit of condemnation, a pinch of dialogue, a dash of sanctions. It will be utterly ineffectual. We have become a nation of shopkeepers in the worst sense: focused on trade, afraid of conflict, enamoured of process. Meanwhile, the autocrats laugh all the way to the nuclear bunker.
The intelligent reader will scoff at my pessimism. They will point to the fading of the pandemic, the resilience of Nato, the triumphs of technology. But I am not convinced. The Xi-Kim alliance is a reminder that history does not progress in a straight line. It cycles. And we are now in a phase where the strongman archetype is ascendant, just as it was in the 1930s. The difference is that today's strongmen have nuclear weapons and a global stage. The consequences of our dithering will be measured not in reparations but in megatons.
So let the Foreign Office issue its statements. Let the pundits debate the strategic implications. I prefer to see this for what it is: a tragic play in which the West has written itself out of the script. The only question that remains is whether we are capable of a final act of defiance before the curtain falls.
