I am not shocked by the latest handshake between Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un. I am not even mildly surprised. The real shock, the one that should jolt Whitehall from its slumber, is the collective amnesia that has descended upon our foreign policy establishment.
They seem to believe that history began in 1997. They behave as though the great game of empires is no longer played. But the Xi-Kim embrace is a stark reminder: the Iron Law of geopolitics abhors a vacuum, and in the Indo-Pacific, the vacuum is being filled with Chinese steel and North Korean missile tests.
Our leaders, obsessed with domestic trivia and the cult of 'net zero', have forgotten what a great power actually does. They used to understand that a smile in Pyongyang is a slap in London. Today, they offer only platitudes and trade deals for unicorn startups.
It is time to rebuild. It is time for the UK to remember that a carrier group in the South China Sea says more than a thousand diplomatic notes. If we do not, we will wake up one morning to find that our 'Global Britain' is nothing more than an island off the coast of a Chinese lake.
