Decoding China: Beijing courts Europe amid US dysfunction

Psalm 2 opens with a rhetorical question addressed to any generation that watches earthly powers conspiring to reshape the world on their own terms — apart from, and often against, the Lord's moral order. Its grammatical-historical sense is not limited to a single historical conspiracy; it is a wisdom-psalm describing the perennial posture of sovereign nations who imagine their diplomatic and military maneuvering is self-sufficient.

The principle is sharp: the counsel of kings and the rage of nations are, from heaven's vantage, both futile and observable — God 'holds them in derision' (Ps 2:4). That verdict applies to every multipolar summit, every strategic courtship, every alliance drafted without reference to His governance.

Beijing's geopolitical offensive — courting European capitals with offers of economic partnership and diplomatic solidarity — is precisely the kind of 'counsel taken together' the psalmist describes: powerful rulers plotting a new world order on purely human terms.

The believer is reminded that however sophisticated China's multipolar vision may be, it is still the nations 'plotting in vain' against an order that only the Lord of hosts can establish.

Revelation 17 describes a final-days consolidation of sovereign powers who, though distinct in identity, converge into unified allegiance to a single governing entity. John's original hearers understood this as a warning that global power blocs would ultimately not remain multipolar but would coalesce — the diversity of 'ten kings' resolving into a single authoritative voice.

The hermeneutical caution is important: we must not identify any current nation as 'the beast.' But the structural pattern — sovereign powers abandoning their independence to form a new consolidated order — is precisely what the text describes as a harbinger of the last days.

The fracturing of the US-led unipolar order and China's active effort to build a new multipolar coalition among European and Global South powers mirrors the first stage of Revelation 17's trajectory: the fragmentation and realignment of global authority blocs that Scripture indicates will ultimately converge into something far more centralized.

The believer should watch this diplomatic reshuffling not with partisan alarm but with eschatological sobriety — recognizing that multipolar realignments are the precondition, not the antidote, to the final consolidation of power the Apocalypse warns against.

Isaiah 8 addresses the historical moment when great powers — Assyria, Aram, Ephraim — were forming coalitions that threatened Judah, and the Lord's word through Isaiah was unambiguous: the counsel of nations conspiring without the Lord will not stand. The Hebrew imperative 'take counsel together' (עֻצוּ עֵצָה) directly mirrors the diplomatic maneuvering of power blocs.

While the original near-fulfillment was Assyria's inability to permanently subjugate Judah, the principle the verse establishes is universal: no geopolitical coalition assembled apart from God's governance will achieve its architects' ambitions.

China's diplomatic courtship of Europe — constructing what Beijing frames as a 'multipolar world order' to displace American-led Western hegemony — is precisely the kind of 'counsel taken together' Isaiah declares will 'come to nothing.'

The rise and fall of every great alliance from Assyria to the Cold War blocs bears witness to this principle; those who trust in such realignments as history's final answer are, Scripture says, mistaken.