The news cycle, as is its wont, has erupted with fevered speculation over Xi Jinping's state visit to North Korea. The British intelligence community, ever eager to demonstrate its relevance, has apparently assessed that this is about 'leverage over friendship'. How droll. How pathetically West-centric. This is not about friendship. It is about geopolitical necessity, the cold calculus of survival in a world that the West no longer commands.
Let us, for a moment, strip away the layers of liberal pieties. Xi did not travel to Pyongyang for a cosy chat over kimchi. He went because the Sino-DPRK relationship is the last remaining buffer against total encirclement by American naval power. Recall the fall of Rome: the Empire did not collapse because of barbarians at the gate. It collapsed because it could no longer manage its peripheries. America, in its senescence, repeats the same error. It fixates on Europe and the Middle East while the real pivot of history moves to East Asia.
The British intelligence assessment is revealing in its provincialism. 'Leverage over friendship' implies a transactional relationship, as if China and North Korea are two poker players eyeing each other's chips. This is nonsense. China needs a stable North Korea. A collapsed North Korea means millions of refugees flooding into Jilin and Liaoning. It means a unified Korea under American military tutelage. It means the end of China's strategic depth in the region. Xi knows this. Kim knows this. The 'friendship' is merely the public face of a mutual survival pact.
What the British analysts fail to grasp is that Xi's visit is not about extracting concessions. It is about reinforcing the proposition that North Korea will not be allowed to fail. This is the same logic that drove the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s. Khrushchev thought he could pressure Mao. He was wrong. The West today thinks it can pressure Xi. It is equally wrong.
Consider the historical parallels. The Victorian Era saw Britain master the art of peripheral control through naval dominance. Today, America attempts the same with its 'pivot to Asia'. But the game has changed. China is not a collection of treaty ports. It is a continental power with the population and industrial output to match any combination of its rivals. Xi's visit to Pyongyang is a signal to Washington: You cannot contain us. You cannot encircle us. We have our own allies, our own sphere of influence, and our own nuclear umbrellas.
The intellectual decadence of the West is on full display here. Instead of analysing the strategic logic of China's move, we obsess over 'leverage' and 'friendship' as if these were items on a menu. They are not. They are the products of a thousand years of history, of shared borders and shared enemies. North Korea is not a client state. It is a cockroach that has survived every attempt at extermination. And China, like it or not, is the hand that feeds it.
So let us stop pretending that Xi's visit is a puzzle to be solved by UK intelligence. It is a chess move. And the West, distracted by its own moralising, is already three moves behind. The fall of Rome did not announce itself with trumpets. It came as a gradual realisation that the centre could no longer hold. Xi's plane landing in Pyongyang is a small step in that same direction. The West would do well to pay attention instead of prattling on about leverage.
