A summit in prospect with America’s Donald Trump. An audience in the Great Hall of the People with China’s Xi Jinping. We can only guess, but the odds are that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is feeling rather pleased with himself. A backward, brutally repressive regime ruling a nation of 25m now commands the undivided attention of the leaders of the world’s foremost powers.

The international community should welcome Mr Kim’s visit to Beijing. The alternative might well have been war. Only months ago Mr Trump was promising to rain fire and fury on Pyongyang to destroy its nuclear weapons programme. The US president refused to contemplate a North Korean nuclear missile capable of hitting America’s west coast. The potential costs of a military conflict are incalculable. Yet Beijing has been unwilling or unable to restrain its recalcitrant ally and neighbour.

Now, on the face of it, we have the prospect of real diplomacy. By sending a North Korean delegation to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, Mr Kim broke the freeze in relations with South Korea. His offer to meet Mr Trump upended calculations in Washington and put US military preparations on hold. The Beijing trip has signalled that China now feels obliged to lift the exclusion order it had imposed on Mr Kim in response to his repeated defiance of demands to rein back the nuclear programme.