If Xi Jinping wants China to succeed the US as a world superpower, he must choose change

The best that can be said about 2017 is that it has survived both US President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. What happens next year will depend on the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping. The years from then on are China’s to lose.

Trump’s first year in the Oval ­Office did not ignite a world war, but unleashed the insurgent energies of US parochialism. The most powerful country on earth withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris accord on climate change. Multilateralism in trade and environmental solidarity – the mainstays of globalism – were struck off the agenda of American leadership.

In their place appeared the spectre of American exceptionalism, ­exhibited in part in a visceral distrust of Muslims. Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and his decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the historically contested Jerusalem, signalled a dangerous break with the status quo. America has become a revisionist country.

Its peer is North Korea. Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programmes, carried out in the face of a perceived threat of annihilation by its enemies, announced the arrival of another revisionist nation.

Kim’s desire is to ensure regime survival, to avoid the fate of Iraq and Libya, whose governments were ­demolished as part of a US crusade for regime change in the Middle East. Signature regimes in these countries lacked a nuclear deterrent. North Korea wishes to avoid that fate by threatening South Korea, Japan and America itself with nuclear retaliation, should they move against its political system.