The latest exchanges of fire between the United States and Iran in the Gulf are not a surprise. They are, rather, a predictable symptom of a civilisation that has lost its capacity for strategic thought. We have seen this script before. In the dying days of the Roman Republic, generals traded blows across the Mediterranean while the Senate fiddled with sanctions and ultimatums. Here we are again, with drones and missiles substituting for legionaries and triremes. The so-called ‘fragile ceasefire’ was never anything more than a fig leaf for the impotence of diplomats who have forgotten that peace is won by strength, not by wishful thinking.
What we witness now is the triumph of theatrical belligerence over genuine statecraft. The Iranians, ever the masters of the long game, test the resolve of a superpower that has spent decades outsourcing its moral authority to international bodies and multilateral resolutions. Meanwhile, Washington resorts to punitive strikes that satisfy the domestic appetite for action but accomplish nothing strategically, because they are designed not to win but to signal. This is the diplomacy of the smartphone era: a flurry of emojis and retweets, but no substance.
The ceasefire was always a charade. No one seriously believed that the mullahs in Tehran would abandon their nuclear ambitions, nor that the American establishment would tolerate Iran’s creeping hegemony over the region. But the charade serves a purpose: it allows both sides to posture for their domestic audiences while avoiding the necessary, brutal reckoning that a true settlement would require. The Gulf strikes are merely the latest scene in this tragicomedy, a performance staged to distract from the real crisis: the collapse of the post-Cold War world order.
Consider the historical parallels. The 1930s, for instance, offer a lesson the West has ignored: that appeasement to dictators does not lead to peace but to war. The Iranians, like their counterparts in Berlin and Tokyo, interpret restraint as weakness. Each token attack is a probe of the will to resist. And the West, weary of conflict and haunted by the ghosts of Iraq and Afghanistan, responds with measured force, calibrating the violence to avoid escalation. But in doing so, it ensures that escalation will come, for the enemy does not calibrate. He escalates.
What is missing is the backbone of a true statesman, someone who understands that peace is the product of fear, not of goodwill. The Gulf today resembles the waters off the Spanish coast in the 16th century: a zone where great powers skirmish to test each other’s mettle before the real war begins. The difference is that then the stakes were nothing less than the fate of empires. Today, the stakes are the survival of a globalised economic system that no one seems willing to defend with purpose.
The intellectual decadence of our age is directly to blame. We have convinced ourselves that all conflicts can be resolved through dialogue and that violence is a failure of imagination. But some conflicts are fundamental. Some adversaries do not want a settlement; they want victory. Iran wants dominance in the region. The United States wants its primacy to remain unchallenged. These desires are incompatible, and no amount of diplomatic fluff will reconcile them. The only question is how much destruction will precede the final act.
We must stop pretending that the Gulf strikes are an aberration. They are the new normal, the price we pay for a generation of leaders who prefer statements to strategy, and who believe that history has ended. It has not. History is a beast that must be fed, and if we do not provide it with wisdom and courage, it will devour us with fire and steel.
