Have Britain and America ever been more divided over any foreign-policy issue in the past 100 years than they are right now over China?

Consider the last fortnight. America has finally decided to confront China over its island grabs in the South China Sea. The Chinese government has responded by writing in its state media that it is “not frightened to fight a war with the U.S.” and that China must now “prepare for the worst.”

Meanwhile Chinese President Xi Jinping has just returned from his state visit to the United Kingdom, where the nation rolled out the reddest of red carpets. British officials joined their Chinese counterparts in proclaiming a “golden era” in British-Chinese relations. The Chinese state media called it an “ultra-royal welcome.”

This stark divide shows how serious Britain is in its pursuit of its new friend. It is willing to ditch its longest standing partner and perhaps risk its special relationship with America. This split is not over some fringe issue. The rise of China is one of the biggest predictable events of the 21st century. How to deal with China is one of the top foreign-policy questions facing the West today—its long-term implications are far more important than the rise of the Islamic State, the fate of Syria, or any number of foreign-policy crises that occupy officials’ attention.

Britain’s rapturous welcome of the new power demonstrates the tone of British foreign policy from here on out: We’re a declining power; let’s throw ourselves at other nations in the hope that they’ll help us out.

Britain’s conservative government has long seen the rising Asian powerhouse as a solution to Britain’s economic woes. Over the last few years, it has been backtracking from its support of Tibet’s Dalai Lama. Prime Minister David Cameron had to publicly announce that he had no plans to see the Dalai Lama again as a precondition to any thaw in British-Chinese relations.

Since then, Britain’s pursuit of China has been desperate. The first big move came this spring, when Britain became the first major Western nation to sign up to China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (aiib). The United States saw the aiib as a direct challenge to the dollar-dominated global financial system. It persuaded the Western world to refuse to join—until Britain led the way in defying the U.S. Once Britain broke ranks, much of Europe and other U.S. allies quickly followed.

Ahead of Xi’s visit, British Chancellor George Osborne set the tone with a visit to China in September. “Let’s stick together to make Britain China’s best partner in the West,” he said. “No economy in the world is as open to Chinese investment as the UK,” he declared.

“The chancellor looked as if he was attempting a world record for the longest kowtow in diplomatic history,” wrote the Spectator’s Fraser Nelson. “The Chinese will seldom have seen anything like it.”

The flattery kept coming. Britain promised half a million pounds (us$771,000) for Chinese arts organization, £300,000 ($463,000) for the archiving and translation of Qing dynasty poetry, and £700,000 ($1.1 million) to encourage Chinese tourists to visit the north of England.

Britain aims to be China’s second-largest trading partner by 2025. The two countries signed around 150 deals worth roughly £30 billion ($46 billion).

The most significant of these was an agreement to allow the Chinese to build and operate a nuclear power station in Britain. China has struggled to export its nuclear power, but an endorsement like this could open doors around the world.

China is routinely caught hacking both corporate and government systems. The American government is wary of letting Chinese made equipment anywhere near its electrical grid. Yet Britain is inviting China to build a nuclear power plant—the most sensitive kind of civilian site there is.

Michel Hockx, director of the China institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies said:

In a sense Cameron is doing to Xi Jinping what Tony Blair did to George Bush. [There were] massive ideological differences at the time between Europe and America but Britain was the one country that stuck with the U.S. And in a sense Cameron is doing the same with China now, saying, “We are going to stick with you in this partnership despite the fact that other European countries and other Western countries have these problems with you.”

Steve Hilton, formerly one of Mr. Cameron’s top advisers, said that the “sucking up” to China was “the worst national humiliation since we went cap in hand to the [International Monetary Fund] in the 1970s.”

“The truth is that China is a rogue state just as bad as Russia or Iran, and I just don’t understand why we’re sucking up to them rather than standing up to them as we should be,” he said.

How much return Britain will get on its investment remains to be seen. Evan Medeiros, the former head of the China desk at the National Security Council, warned, “If there is one truism in relations with a rising China, it is that if you give in to Chinese pressure, it will inevitably lead to more Chinese pressure. London is playing a dangerous game of tactical accommodation in the hopes of economic benefits, which could lead to more problems down the line.”

Even immediately, there is the problem of Britain’s relations with America. “Anglo-American ties are now at their lowest ebb for years, a risky state of affairs at a time when the UK faces a showdown with the European Union,” wrote the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans Pritchard.

Expect this to be the future of Britain’s foreign policy. Britain lacks the self-confidence to solve its own problems. It sees America as a declining or aloof power. And so it goes running after other nations to try and fix itself—pursuing them desperately, hurriedly and even recklessly, as the nuclear power plant agreement shows.

The Trumpet has long said that British-American relations would fray and that the nation would pursue Germany for help. We’re seeing the same instincts in place with China.

Britain is already well on the way to doing this with Germany; the other world leader the nation rolled out the “reddest of red carpets” for in recent years was German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

This habit of going to other nations to solve British problems is a dangerous weakness. These other nations have their own interests at heart. It is a recipe for getting taken advantage of.

For more on Britain’s said pursuit of foreign lovers, read Trumpet managing editor Joel Hilliker’s article “Want to Know What a Former Superpower Looks Like?”