The news that Xi Jinping recently slipped into Pyongyang for a clandestine summit with Kim Jong-un has set Western chattering classes into a predictable frenzy. ‘A new axis against the West!’ they shriek, dusting off their well-thumbed copies of ‘The Grand Chessboard’.
But let us pause and think, for once, like historians rather than panicked stockbrokers. This is not 1939. This is not a new Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
No, this is something far more banal: two autocrats, each presiding over a system of unparalleled stagnation, seeking to prop each other up. The real fear should not be of a formidable new bloc, but of the intellectual and moral vacuum such a meeting represents. Xi, presiding over a slowing Chinese economy and a tech sector choked by its own surveillance state.
Kim, the hermit king of a nation that still relies on oxen for ploughing. This is not the rise of a new Rome; it is the crumbling of two old ones, grasping at each other for a simulacrum of relevance. The West, for all its faults, still possesses the one thing these regimes lack: the capacity for self-correction.
A secret meeting in Pyongyang is a sign of weakness, not strength. It is the desperation of men who know their systems are failing, who seek to create an illusion of momentum. So let the pundits wring their hands.
Meanwhile, we should watch, with a cooler gaze, as history repeats itself not as tragedy but as farce.
