Why the world has seldom felt nearer to Armageddon

Tonight, as two of the most deeply sinister figures on the world stage are about to meet to proclaim their friendship and mutual co-operation, it is hard not to feel a sense of foreboding.

The old world of ‘detente’, the carefully managed balance of powers that has kept us safe for the best part of a lifetime seems a distant memory.

The immediate reason for Vladimir’s Putin’s visit to North Korea is clear enough: the Russian president is grateful for the weapons supplied by his fellow autocrat, Kim Jong Un.

North Korean missiles have already played an important role in Russia’s continued bloody invasion of Ukraine and Putin, presumably, wants more.

But the pictures of the two dictators shaking hands also show how dangerously fragmented the world has become – a point that Russia and North Korea, both armed with nuclear weapons, will be happy to ram home.

Putin’s invasion made Russia an international outlaw. Now he has decided to team up with other global outcasts – with apparent impunity.

By lining up alongside the likes of North Korea and Iran, Putin is turning Russia into the captain of a team of rogue regimes. President Kim and the Ayatollahs of Iran provide a terrorist and missile threat to the West while supplying ammunition and drones for Putin’s war.

In return, Russia gives sophisticated nuclear and missile technologies to North Korea.

China, meanwhile, prefers to watch and wait. For as the West grows every more distracted in its attempts to deal with Russia and its rogue gang, Beijing is arming itself on a terrifying scale.

President Xi Jinping has undertaken a huge build-up of its nuclear potential, including 240 new intercontinental missiles with several warheads, shorter range anti-ship ‘carrier killers’, new missiles and a vast network of tunnels and bunkers concealing their location.

China may also be putting its nuclear weapons on ‘high operational alert’ for the first time, according to a report from the respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

For the 40 years that followed the remarkable economic reforms in the late 1970s, China’s Communist Party leaders were careful to steer clear of international crises. The architect of the country’s economic success, the late President Deng Xiaoping, warned his successors that China should ‘rise without attracting attention’.

Today we are in a different world. President Xi, China’s dominant leader since 2012, no longer wants to hide his growing power. He wants to flaunt it and intimidate his neighbours, not least by exposing America’s uncertainty in how to respond.

Today, Western politicians have started say that the West is entering a new Cold War. And they look back to the stand-off with the Communist Soviet Union in the 1980s for how to deal with China now.

But they need to look back further still. We are entering a new era of ‘missile crises’ – and we need to learn the lessons of the past.

Only those now in their 70s have any clear memories of the knife-edge Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

And even US Presidential contenders Joe Biden, 81, and Donald Trump, 78, are too young to remember how close the West came to war with the Soviet Union over Stalin’s blockade of West Berlin in 1948-49.

But today we face returning to a nightmare scenario: nuclear-tipped bullies demanding their own way around the globe. Forgetting is not a luxury we can afford.

It was only extraordinary Western statesmanship that steered the world to safety in the coldest Cold War years. But finding successors to the likes of Harry Truman or John F Kennedy, former US presidents and leaders of the West, will be no mean feat.

Today’s European leaders came to political maturity amid 30 years of Western dominance and as Soviet Communism unravelled. Decades of success have dulled our understanding of how to deal with a powerful, secretive and possibly unstable rival like China. How to manage the risks involved.

In the years following 1945, the leaders of the west improvised a brilliant strategy to contain the threat of Stalin’s Communism spreading without letting the world slip over the edge into a Third World War.

Our current politicians, our diplomats and strategists have no relevant experience or expertise, yet the situation confronting them is even more profoundly complex than the one that faced Kennedy.

We must deal with not one but a multiplicity of powers, some armed with nuclear weapons. And they increasingly act in concert.

When China boycotted the peace conference for Ukraine held in Switzerland over the weekend, the message was clear: even international problems half a world away cannot be solved without China’s say-so.

And the latter, which enjoys seeing the West drained of cash and weaponry, doesn’t want the Ukraine war to end any time soon.

Critics of the West say Washington is waging a proxy war against Russia by backing Ukraine, but what they miss is that China is very much using Russia to wage war against us.

And China is not the ‘paper tiger’ of the past.

Despite a domestic economic slowdown, China remains a way more formidable rival to the West than Stalin’s Soviet Union, let alone the nasty rump of it remaining under Putin.

The West, meanwhile, is deeply entangled with its economy in a way we were never with the Soviet Union.

Covid laid bare the sheer extent of our reliance on China for a huge range of medical supplies and much else besides. Now we are attempting – somehow – to cut out or minimise a bewildering array of Chinese components, including those crucial to the internet, mobile phones, electric batteries for cars and solar panels.

This attempt at resilience will only add to the country’s growing volatility. Its domestic economy is already slowing, so expect President Xi to use foreign crises to rally support for his regime. Keeping control at home requires China to be strong abroad. Building weapons provides both jobs and the muscle to assert herself abroad.

Who can doubt the scale of the task presented by Beijing’s secretive and brutal regime? Yet can anyone be confident there will be a steady hand on the White House tiller six months from now – whether doddering Biden or unpredictable Trump prevails?

When, finally, the Cuban Missile Crisis was over in October 1962, Kennedy concluded that ‘we lucked out’. Despite his own significant role, he understood the huge part that sheer chance played in saving the world from Armageddon.

It is hard to feel that we’ll be so fortunate today.

• Mark Almond is the director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford