So the Dragon and the Hermit King are to meet, and Downing Street promptly reaches for its well-worn lexicon of crisis: ‘destabilising axis’. One must marvel at the utter predictability of it all. Every few years, a great power does something inconvenient for the Anglo-American worldview, and out comes the moral panic, the historical comparisons to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the grave warnings about the ‘free world’ under siege. It is all so very tedious.
Let us, for a moment, dispense with the cant. Xi Jinping’s meeting with Kim Jong Un is not a grand geopolitical realignment; it is a display of realpolitik as old as the hills. China, encircled by American naval power and Alliance systems, does what any self-respecting civilisation has done since the time of Thucydides: it cultivates its periphery. The notion that this constitutes some sort of ‘axis’ is a charmingly naif reading of diplomacy, one that ignores the fundamentally transactional nature of such encounters. Does anyone genuinely believe Beijing wishes for a nuclear-armed, unstable neighbour? The Chinese desire for a stable, pliable buffer state is hardly a revolutionary insight.
What truly irks the mandarins in Whitehall is not the security dimension but the symbolic one. Here we have the leader of an ancient civilisation, one that has clawed its way back to great power status, engaging with a pariah state on his own terms, without seeking permission from Washington or London. The West’s reflexive horror at this tableau is a symptom of a deeper malaise: the inability to countenance a multipolar world where our moral categories are not universal. We have become so accustomed to lecturing others about the ‘rules-based order’ that we have forgotten the rules are often just a euphemism for our own hegemony.
Indeed, one might argue that the most destabilising axis in East Asia is not Beijing-Pyongyang but the Washington-Tokyo-Seoul triangle, a chimera that periodically rattles sabres and conducts military exercises of intimidating scale. Yet no one in Downing Street warns of that. The hypocrisy is as thick as the smog over a Chinese industrial city.
Then there is the matter of intellectual decadence, an obsession of mine. Look at how our commentariat processes this visit: they reach for comparisons to 1938, to the appeasement of dictators, to the erosion of global norms. This is history as mood music, not analysis. The real lesson of the 1930s is not that all strongmen are alike but that the failure to understand the legitimate security concerns of great powers leads to catastrophe. Has the West ever truly considered the Chinese perspective? The memory of the ‘Century of Humiliation’, of being carved up by European powers and Japan, is seared into the Chinese psyche. A friendly Korea, even a troubling one, is a bulwark against that history repeating.
In the end, the meeting in Pyongyang is a done deal. Xi will smile, Kim will bow, and the usual communiqués will be issued. The West will wring its hands, impose yet more sanctions, and life will go on. What the episode truly reveals is not a new axis but the West’s solipsism: the assumption that our values are universal, our alliances virtuous, and our rivals invariably malign. It is a worldview unsuited to a world where China, Russia, and others are reasserting their own historical prerogatives.
So, to Downing Street I say: spare us the jeremiads. If you wish to be taken seriously, offer a coherent strategy, not platitudes. Until then, your warnings sound less like statesmanship and more like the muttered grievances of a declining empire. The fall of Rome, after all, was not brought about by barbarians alone but by the inability of its elite to adapt to new realities. We would do well to remember that.
