The footage is grainy, the location unmistakable: an Iranian drone, violating Kuwaiti airspace, striking an airport. This is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom. A symptom of the same intellectual and moral decadence that saw the Roman legions withdraw from Hadrian’s Wall, leaving Britain to the Picts and the Scots. We are witnessing a slow-motion collapse of the global order, and the British government, with its interminable reviews and strategic indecision, is playing the part of a pre-Victorian parliament, dithering while the empire crumbles.
Consider the parallels. The late Roman Empire, exhausted by internal strife and overstretched borders, outsourced its defence to barbarian mercenaries. Today, we outsource our security to the goodwill of international law, a polite fiction that evaporates the moment a drone crosses a border. The Iranian regime, like the Gothic tribes, tests our resolve not through grand battles but through a thousand cuts. A drone here. A missile there. A proxy war in Yemen. A nuclear programme inching toward completion.
Our response? A defence review. A committee. A study. The Victorians, for all their faults, understood that empire required projection of power. When the Russian bear threatened the Khyber Pass, they sent troops, not memos. When the Kaiser built a fleet, they launched the Dreadnought. Today, we have a Royal Navy that could be outnumbered by a medium-sized fishing fleet and an army reduced to ceremonial duties. The drone over Kuwait is a gauntlet thrown. We pick it up with tweezers and place it under a microscope.
But the rot runs deeper than mere military unpreparedness. It is an intellectual rot. We have convinced ourselves that history is a linear progression toward peace and enlightenment. This is a Victorian fantasy, a Whig interpretation of history that ignores the cycles of rise and fall. The drones are not a glitch; they are a feature of a world returning to its natural state of great power competition. The question is not whether we will be tested, but whether we have the will to respond.
The West, and Britain in particular, has lost its nerve. We fret about cultural appropriation while our enemies plot our dismemberment. We apologise for our history while the Iranians weaponise theirs. The drone over Kuwait should not be a moment for a review. It should be a moment for resolve. Send a clear message: any further violation will be met with a response that makes the Iranian mullahs regret their ambition. Reinforce the Gulf. Restore the carrier strike group to full operational readiness. And stop pretending that diplomacy with a regime that shoots down passenger planes and targets airports is anything other than appeasement.
History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. The drones of today are the longboats of the 9th century, the horse archers of the 13th, the U-boats of the 20th. They test our borders, our patience, our will. If we fail this test, we will not have the luxury of writing a review. We will be writing a eulogy.
The footage from Kuwait should be burned into every British policymaker's retina. It is a reminder that the world is not safe. It is a reminder that power, ultimately, is the only language that autocracies understand. And it is a reminder that a nation that cannot defend its airspace has no business calling itself sovereign. The time for reviews is over. The time for action is now.
