In a development that has sent shivers down the collective spine of Whitehall’s chinstroking class, British intelligence has assessed that the recent Israel-Iran flare-up has gifted the Tehran regime a surge in ‘resilience.’ Resilience, as any student of diplomatic newspeak knows, is the word they use when they mean ‘a frighteningly robust capacity to withstand our best attempts at destabilisation.’ It’s the political equivalent of saying your ex is ‘doing well’ when you’ve just discovered they’ve replaced you with a priapic yoga instructor named Dmitri.
The assessment, leaked from a source so deep within the intelligence community they may as well be communicating via semaphore from a kayak in the Thames, suggests that the latest bout of tit-for-tat missile jousting between Netanyahu and the Ayatollahs has actually bolstered Tehran’s hand. Leverage, they say. As if Iran is now sitting at the negotiating table with a freshly signed mortgage on the entire Levant.
Let us parse this peculiar word: leverage. In the world of spycraft, leverage is the art of making your opponent do what you want by holding something they value hostage. Usually a secret, a bank account, or a compromising photograph of a diplomat in a Brighton bed-and-breakfast. But now, Iran apparently has leverage simply by existing and occasionally setting fire to the sky over Tel Aviv. It is a marvellous diplomatic sleight of hand. Iran has turned the entire theatre of Middle Eastern geopolitics into a performance art piece titled ‘We Are Still Here, and We Have Rockets.’
What, one wonders, is the root of this newfound pluck? Is it the centrifuges spinning with the quiet humming of a thousand vengeful bees? Is it the bearded men in parallel palaces who speak of erasing enemies from the map with the casual air of someone deleting spam emails? Or is it simply that the regime has realised that the more missiles rain down, the more the world’s media fixates on their forehead with a gleaming telephoto lens, rendering them the lead actor in a drama of their own script?
British intelligence, in their mossy tweed and with their cautious vocabularies, have confirmed that the regime’s ‘resilience’ is surging. I picture resilience as a graph in a windowless room, its line climbing past the ‘Worried’ mark, past ‘Quite Concerning,’ and now nestled comfortably in the ‘We May Need a Fortified Gin Cabinet’ zone. The intelligence community is, after all, the professional worrier class. They are paid to expect the worst and to enjoy it slightly.
But here we are. A flare-up has given Iran leverage. The same flare-ups that were supposed to cow them, to remind them of the precision of Israeli laser-guided smugness, have instead filled them with a strange, defiant vigour. It is as though we have been fighting a hydra with a high-powered water pistol. Every time we spray them, they simply grow another head and another threat to the stability of the global oil market. The only question is whether the regime’s resilience will translate into a more peaceful engagement or simply a more sophisticated form of chaos. Given form, I suspect the latter. After all, chaos is the only currency that never inflates.
And so, as the gin bottle grows lighter and the news cycle grows heavier, we are left with the peculiar thought that Iran, the great bogeyman of the West, is becoming stronger not in spite of the conflict but because of it. Resilience is surging. Leverage is accumulating. And somewhere, in a mahogany-panelled room, a man in a suit is nodding gravely at a graph that looks like a ski slope. Time to pour another. The world is ending, but at least it's doing so with a certain piquant irony.
