Six years ago, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was asked about the revival of the Quad, which groups the United States with Japan, Australia and India. The revival, after a decade-long freeze, had come on the back of the US endorsement of Japan’s move to promote a strategic mixing of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, which led to the “Indo-Pacific” nomenclature for the Asia-Pacific. The US even renamed its Pacific Command to IndoPacom.

Mr Wang responded acidly, saying there was no shortage of “headline-grabbing ideas”, before going on to predict that all this would soon dissipate like “foam on the seas”.