So the South China Sea boils over again. Another flexing of naval muscle. Another round of ‘grab what you can’ before the music stops.
And what does His Majesty’s Navy do? It ‘bolsters patrol presence’, as if a handful of frigates—ageing, underfunded, and perpetually seeking a dry dock—can impress the dragons in Beijing. Please.
It is a desperate act of theatre, a tattered Union Jack waved over a puddle while the Pacific becomes a Chinese lake. One thinks of the late Roman Empire dispatching a legion to the Danube: the gesture is noble, the reality is laughable. The real crisis is not the sea itself, but the intellectual and moral decay that makes us believe these patrols mean anything.
We are living through a slow-motion Fall, and this is just another brick falling from the archway.
