It appears we have stumbled into yet another episode of regional farce dressed up as geopolitical crisis. Reports from London and Quito suggest that Ecuador, a nation not typically associated with playing the heavy in South American affairs, has been accused of rigging the Colombian election. The alleged mechanism?
A tariff threat. One must admit, it is a refreshingly blunt instrument in an age of cyber-espionage and disinformation campaigns. But the real story here is not the accusation itself, it is the reflexive response from Whitehall: a warning of 'regional instability'.
One might ask, when did we decide that the mere hint of election interference by a middling power warrants the language of empire? The answer, I suspect, lies in the collective failure of nerve that has gripped Western diplomacy since the fall of the Berlin Wall. We have become a civilisation that prefers the language of risk management to the messy realities of power.
The Victorians, for all their faults, understood that a tariff threat was merely a prelude to gunboat diplomacy. Today, we issue press releases and call it statesmanship. The comparison to the late Roman Empire writes itself: a ruling class so detached from reality that it mistakes posturing for action.
The Ecuadorian gambit, if true, is a sign of the intellectual decadence that has infected our political classes. They have forgotten that a threat must be credible to be effective. A tariff on Colombia?
What next, a sternly worded letter to the cartels? The UK's warning, meanwhile, is a textbook example of what the historian Niall Ferguson calls 'the pretence of control'. We have convinced ourselves that by issuing statements we can shape events, when in fact we are merely spectators at the decline of our own influence.
The rot, as always, begins at the top. Our elites have traded the certainties of national interest for the vagaries of multilateral hand-wringing. The result is a world where a country like Ecuador can allegedly rig an election and the most powerful response is a warning from a former empire that has become a museum.
The question is not whether regional instability will follow. It will. The question is whether we have the nerve to face it without the comfortable fiction that we are still actors on the world stage.
We are not. We are commentators, and not very good ones at that.
