So here we are again, children of a lesser empire, watching our American cousins rain fire upon the Persian sands. The news trickles through the wires with a familiar stench: US strikes on Iranian radar sites in Kuwait, and Britain, ever the faithful hound, leads the coalition chorus. One might think we had learned something from the Suez Crisis. But no, history is a farce we are condemned to repeat with increasingly polished incompetence.
The parallels to the Fall of Rome are unavoidable. There, too, a superpower lashed out at peripheral threats while the rot set in at home. Here, we have America, the modern Rome, its legions stretched thin, its treasury bleeding, and its political class engaged in a circus of self-congratulation. And Britain, that once-proud island, now reduced to a praetorian guard for a decadent hegemon. The intellectual decadence of our age is laid bare: we no longer question the morality of such strikes, only their tactical efficacy. We have become administrators of violence, not its philosophers.
Let us be honest. The Iranian regime is no friend to liberty, but neither are we the knights of a new crusade. Our interventionist reflexes are a symptom of a deeper malaise, a loss of national identity. We no longer know what Britain stands for, so we stand for whatever Washington dictates. The Victorians at least had the decency to cloak their imperialism in a moral mission. We cannot even muster that hypocrisy.
The coalition of the willing is now a coalition of the witless. We bomb radar sites in Kuwait, but the real battle is for the soul of the West. And we are losing. The intellectual elites who cheer these strikes from their London townhouses have never tasted war. They are the same class that celebrates diversity while erasing history, that preaches tolerance while silencing dissent. They are the new barbarians, but they wear suits and speak of multilateralism.
This is not a call for pacifism. It is a call for clarity. If we must fight, let us fight for something real: our borders, our culture, our values. Not for the protection of oil routes or the whims of a decaying superpower. But such clarity is beyond us. We prefer the comfort of moral ambiguity, the thrill of a smart bomb on a television screen.
So the strikes proceed. The radar sites are destroyed. And somewhere, an Iranian general plots his revenge. The cycle continues. And Britain, poor Britain, marches on, its empire of the mind reduced to a footnote in an American footnote. We have become what we once mocked: a nation of shopkeepers, hawking our sovereignty for a seat at the table.
Arthur Penhaligon, signing off with a heavy heart and a sharp tongue.
