The news arrives with a familiar, sickening thud. A senior Haitian security official, a man tasked with imposing order on a nation that has long since surrendered to chaos, has been snatched from the streets in broad daylight. The United Kingdom, through its Foreign Office, has issued a statement deploring the lawlessness. How terribly British. How utterly useless.
Let us be clear: this is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of a terminal condition, a state of affairs that should remind every student of history of the late Roman Empire, where the Praetorian Guard and barbarian mercenaries turned the seat of civilisation into a marketplace of assassination and ransom. Haiti, once the jewel of the Caribbean, the first black republic to throw off the shackles of colonialism, is now a failed state in the truest sense. The government in Port-au-Prince governs nothing. The police are outgunned and corrupt. The gangs, armed with weapons smuggled from the United States, are the de facto authorities. And the international community? It tuts. It deplores. It does nothing.
The kidnapping of a security official is particularly galling because it demonstrates the complete breakdown of deterrence. In a functioning society, the state holds a monopoly on violence. In Haiti, that monopoly is a joke. The gangs know that no one will come for them. The security official knows that his own institution cannot protect him. So he is taken, and the world shrugs.
What we are witnessing is not merely a crime wave. It is the final stage of intellectual and moral decadence, the kind that preceded the fall of great empires. The West, in its exhaustion and guilty conscience, has abandoned the very concept of imposing order. We have convinced ourselves that state-building is imperialist, that intervening is neo-colonial, that the Haitians must sort it out themselves. But Haiti cannot sort it out itself. It has not been able to do so for decades. The international community, with its endless conferences and donor pledges, has created a permanent underclass of nations, trapped in a cycle of dependency and decay.
Consider the parallel to the late Victorian era. Then, as now, there was a belief in the civilising mission, but also a deep reluctance to commit the resources necessary to achieve it. The British Empire was overstretched, and colonies like Haiti were left to rot under the care of local elites who were only too happy to exploit their own people. The difference is that the Victorians at least pretended to care about progress. Today, we simply look away.
The UK’s statement deploring the lawlessness is a perfect example of this hypocrisy. It costs nothing. It changes nothing. It is the equivalent of a Roman senator wringing his hands over a barbarian invasion while refusing to raise a legion. The UK, like the US and France, has the military and economic power to intervene. It could supply the Haitian National Police with the equipment and training they desperately need. It could impose sanctions on the gang leaders and their financiers. It could even, if it had the stomach, send in a stabilisation force. But it will not. Because we have lost the will to act.
There is a deeper lesson here, one that applies not only to Haiti but to the entire West. We have become a civilisation that prefers to opine rather than to act. We have elevated debate over decision, and empathy over effectiveness. The result is a world where the strong prey on the weak, and the weak are left to be rescued by press releases. Haiti is a warning. It is a preview of what happens when a state loses its monopoly on violence and the international community refuses to step in. The gangs will continue to kidnap, to extort, to murder. The country will continue to slide into anarchy. And the British government will continue to deplore it, from the safety of its London offices, while the rest of us pretend that words are a substitute for deeds.
So let us stop pretending. This kidnapping is not a tragedy. It is a verdict. A verdict on a failed state and a failed international order. The only question that remains is how many more officials must be snatched from the streets before the West finally wakes up. Or, as I suspect, it will simply turn the page and deplore something else.
