When Xi Jinping descended upon Pyongyang this week, the chattering classes of Westminster reached for their accustomed lexicon of 'leverage' and 'influence'. Yet to frame this summit in such transactional terms is to miss the deeper, more troubling currents beneath the surface. This is not merely a diplomatic gambit; it is a vivid tableau of the new world disorder, a reminder that the liberal international order is now but a memory, a ghost haunting the halls of Geneva and the UN.
The real question is not what Xi gains from Kim Jong-un, but what the meeting signals about the decaying architecture of global governance. One is reminded of the Congress of Vienna, where Metternich and Castlereagh carved up Europe, or the Yalta Conference, where spheres of influence were drawn with callous precision. Today, however, we see not Great Powers managing a system, but a cacophony of autarkic states playing a zero-sum game.
Xi's visit is a taunt to Washington, a signal that China can defy American primacy with impunity, that the Korean Peninsula is no longer a Cold War chess piece but a proving ground for a multipolar future. The UK's intelligence assessments, so keen on parsing 'strategic motives', would do well to consider that Xi may simply be asserting a fundamental truth: that the era of Pax Americana is over, and that China, for all its internal fragility, intends to write the next chapter. This is not friendship; it is a shaping of the battlefield.
And we in the West, still clutching our tattered scripts of 'rules-based order', look increasingly like the audience at a play that has already ended.
