In a spectacle that could have been penned by a particularly cynical playwright with a taste for geopolitical farce, the much-vaunted Trump-Xi summit has produced precisely the sum total of sweet bugger all. The two titans of tariff and trade met in a room so thick with diplomatic hot air that the oxygen levels reportedly dropped to 14%, causing one Japanese translator to hallucinate pink flamingos. Meanwhile, Her Majesty’s Government, clinging to the fraying edges of relevance like a drunk at a bus stop, watched on with the sort of desperate hope usually reserved for the final minutes of a Cup Final when your team is 3-0 down.
Let us dissect this non-deal with the precision of a coroner examining a very dead horse. President Trump, resplendent in a tie that could serve as a warning to shipping, demanded that China reduce its trade surplus by the size of Luxembourg's GDP and also agree to buy a million copies of his book. President Xi, a man who exudes the calm certainty of someone who knows he’ll be running things long after the current US administration is reduced to a series of embarrassing tweets, smiled politely and offered a 0.2% reduction in steel tariffs in exchange for the US recognition of Tibet as a provincial golf resort.
And where does Britain stand in all this? Ah, yes. Britain. The nation that once ruled the waves now masters the art of getting seasick in a paddling pool. Our diplomatic leverage, if it can be called such, is currently being used to prop up the leg of a wobbly table at the Foreign Office. The talk of a post-Brexit trade deal with the US is now about as realistic as a unicorn jousting tournament. The Chinese, meanwhile, view us as a quaint little island that once had some nice porcelain and now mainly exports reality TV shows and the eternal hope that the weather might improve.
The summit concluded with what diplomats call a 'no-deal' and what I call a two-hour exercise in mutual masturbation without the satisfaction. The joint statement, if one can dignify that mangled prose with the term, was three paragraphs of meaningless platitudes wrapped in the linguistic equivalent of soggy chips. 'We have agreed to continue discussions,' it read, which is diplomatic code for 'We couldn't agree on what to have for lunch, let alone the future of global trade.'
And so the world lurches onward, its steering wheel unattended, while the grown-ups in the room squabble over who gets to be pilot. Britain, the country that once shook the globe, now trembles at the prospect of its own shadow. The special relationship is now more of a distant cousin you meet at funerals and pretend to like. As for the Chinese, they have already moved on to more important matters, like designing a new app that will harvest your dreams and sell them as advertising space.
In the end, the only thing that was gained from this summit was a collective headache for anyone who tried to parse the spin from the substance. The bar at the hotel ran out of gin within the first hour, which I consider the only true barometer of diplomatic failure. We stagger into a future of uncertainty, clutching our passports like talismans, hoping that somewhere, somehow, someone might remember the words to 'God Save the Queen'.
