Let us dispense with the hand-wringing. The latest escalation between Israel and Iran is not a setback for diplomacy. It is a masterclass in realpolitik that has left His Majesty’s Government flat-footed, clutching a tattered copy of the JCPOA like a security blanket in a thunderstorm.
Tehran, that perennial bogeyman of Western dinner parties, has done what any shrewd actor would do: it took a provocation, dressed it in the garb of victimhood, and now holds the keys to the negotiating table. The airstrikes on Iranian-linked targets in Syria, meant to deter, have instead handed the mullahs a narrative of righteous defiance. Every bomb that falls on a Revolutionary Guard outpost is a recruiting poster for the regime. Every civilian casualty, a paragraph in their brief against the ‘Zionist entity’.
London’s response, as ever, has been a symphony of platitudes. Foreign Office mandarins issue statements about ‘de-escalation’ and ‘restraint’, as if these words alone could unmake the centuries of sectarian hatred. They forget that diplomacy without leverage is like a ship without sail: you drift, you do not navigate. Tehran now has precisely that leverage. Its negotiators can sit across from their Western counterparts and point to the mushroom cloud of fear that Israel’s actions have cultivated. ‘You want us to roll back our nuclear programme? Then rein in the Israelis. You want us to stop arming Hezbollah? Then show us you can restrain your ally.’
This is the tragedy of our age. We have convinced ourselves that mediation is a moral act, when in fact it is a power transaction. The United Kingdom, having shrunk its military and outsourced its foreign policy to Washington and Brussels, now has nothing to offer but good intentions. Iran, meanwhile, has what it always wanted: a conflict that justifies its regional meddling. The precision strikes have only confirmed the regime’s propaganda that it is the target of an unprovoked campaign of aggression.
We should not be surprised. The pattern is as old as empire. A great power or its proxy makes a show of force, underestimating the adversary’s capacity to absorb pain and convert it into political capital. Rome did it with Parthia. Britain did it with the Boers. And now Israel does it with Iran. The result is not victory but a protracted stalemate that favours the more determined, the more patient, the more ruthless.
What, then, is to be done? Not what the bien-pensants suggest: more summits, more resolutions, more hand-wringing. No. The only language Tehran understands is the language of pressure, applied consistently and without sentiment. That means economic strangulation, not token sanctions. It means covert operations that make the regime tremble, not merely twitch. And it means a public posture that does not apologise for self-defence.
But we lack the stomach for such things. We are a civilisation in decline, more concerned with our moral reputation than our strategic interests. We tut and fret while our adversaries laugh all the way to the bank. The Iran-Israel flare-up is not the cause of our diplomatic impotence. It is a symptom. And until we grasp that, we will continue to be outmanoeuvred, outflanked, and outwitted by a regime that knows exactly what it wants—and how to get it.
