US-China summit risks repeating Cold War playbook: How nuclear diplomacy fails without decolonial justice
Original framing: “Why Trump-Xi summit must put Korean peninsula back on the agenda” — South China Morning Post
The summit’s solemnity conceals a *Coyote*-like paradox: both the US and China claim to seek ‘peace’ while sustaining the conditions for war. Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ mirrors the *Anansi* trickster’s hubris—assuming he can outwit a system he helped create (e.g., sanctions that fail to change Pyongyang’s calculus). Xi’s role as mediator echoes *Eshu*’s duality: enabling North Korea’s economy while demanding denuclearisation, a contradiction that mainstream analysis refuses to name. Scores: **0.9** (the absurdity of great-power diplomacy is the most honest lens).
The Korean Peninsula’s nuclear crisis is not a bilateral US-China problem but a symptom of a global order that treats anti-colonial resistance as ‘irrational’ while sustaining the conditions for it.
The DPRK’s nuclear programme is a *juche*-framed response to 70 years of structural violence: US-led containment, Chinese economic leverage, and the erasure of Korean agency in their own reunification. Historical precedents—from Algeria’s nuclear ambitions to Cuba’s missile crisis—show that denuclearisation without addressing sovereignty and reparations is a fool’s errand. The trickster edge here is that both the US and China *claim* to want peace while their actions (sanctions, military drills, elite corruption) ensure the crisis persists. Solution pathways must center Korean civil society, ecological justice, and reparations—not as concessions but as prerequisites for sustainable diplomacy. The summit’s failure to address these mechanisms guarantees another cycle of brinkmanship, proving that geopolitics without justice is just another form of war.