The world, it seems, is always eager to recreate the dreary pageantry of 1930s diplomacy. This week’s anticipated meeting between Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un is a case in point. Britain, ever the Cassandra of the global stage, warns of a ‘new nuclear axis’.
But let us not be too quick to indulge our nostalgia for the Axis powers. What we have here is less a rematch of the Tripartite Pact and more a clumsy alliance of two regimes united by their paranoid insecurity and a shared contempt for the liberal order—a sort of mutual admiration society for leaders who have convinced themselves that nuclear weapons are the ultimate status symbol. The Victorians, for all their faults, at least had the decency to frame their imperial ambitions in the language of civilisation and commerce.
Today, we have a Chinese leader who channels the Ming dynasty’s sense of celestial centrality, and a North Korean monarch who models himself on a Stalinist caricature. The British warnings, while perhaps melodramatic, are not without merit. The fall of Rome, after all, was preceded by a proliferation of petty tyrants and the erosion of any coherent international system.
But the real question is not whether this meeting will produce a new axis; it is whether we have the intellectual fortitude to recognise a farce when we see one. The nuclear non-proliferation regime is already in its death throes, and yet we continue to treat these states as though they were responsible actors. They are not.
They are the intellectual decadence of our age personified: obsessed with power but bereft of any vision beyond their own survival. So, let Britain warn. Let the diplomats fret.
The farce will continue, and we will all be the poorer for it.
