News arrives from the East: Xi Jinping is to visit Pyongyang for a rare summit with Kim Jong Un. The Foreign Office releases a nervous statement about a “strategic shift” that threatens the balance of power. One must suppress a weary sigh. Every time two autocrats share a photograph, Whitehall reaches for the smelling salts. Yet the real story is not the summit itself; it is the intellectual bankruptcy of a West that can only wring its hands while the tectonic plates of geopolitics shift beneath its feet.
Compare this moment to the Congress of Vienna, where Metternich and Castlereagh understood that grand diplomacy required constant engagement, not periodic hand-wringing. Xi’s visit to Pyongyang is a masterpiece of Realpolitik. It is a signal to Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo that China’s sphere of influence extends into the hermit kingdom’s void. For Kim, it is a lifeline: a guarantee that sanctions will not starve his regime, and that his nuclear arsenal buys him a seat at the table. For Xi, it is a reminder that the West’s “rules-based order” is a fiction maintained by declining powers.
The UK’s response is depressingly predictable. A spokesperson utters the usual pieties: “We urge all parties to uphold international norms.” This is the language of a nation that has mistaken its moral posturing for strategic influence. The British Empire once sent gunboats to open Asian markets. Now it sends strongly worded statements that are ignored before the ink dries. The truth is that London has no leverage over Pyongyang, and pathetically little over Beijing.
This summit is not an aberration but a pattern. We are witnessing the return of a world where great powers carve out zones of influence with the same casual brutality as the 19th-century European empires. The difference is that the current hegemon, the United States, is too exhausted to police the globe, while its European allies are too divided to offer a coherent alternative. Britain, post-Brexit, stands alone clutching its free-trade agreements like a child with a security blanket.
What should concern us is not the summit itself, but the intellectual decadence that prevents the West from responding effectively. Our elites have spent decades preaching globalisation, multiculturalism, and the end of history. Now that history has returned with a vengeance, they lack the vocabulary to describe it. They cannot call China a rival because that would disrupt trade. They cannot condemn North Korea too harshly because they need Beijing’s help on climate change. So they issue warnings that sound like a headmaster scolding a delinquent pupil.
The Victorians would have handled this differently. Palmerston would have dispatched a fleet to the Yellow Sea. Disraeli would have offered Kim a crown and a place in the balance of power. But we have become a nation of moralists, not strategists. We fret about human rights while our adversaries laugh and consolidate power.
One can almost hear the laughter in Pyongyang as the Davos set wrings its hands. The summit will go ahead. Kim will receive his Chinese patron. And the West will continue to mistake its own decline for a sign of moral superiority. When the Roman Empire fell, it did not fall to barbarians at the gates. It fell to a failure of imagination, a loss of nerve, and a belief that its own rhetoric was enough to hold back the tide. We should take note, for the Hermit King and the Dragon have not come to lecture us. They have come to win.
