For the second consecutive day, the United States and Iran have traded strikes across the Middle East, as if the 21st century were merely a rerun of the Peloponnesian War with better weaponry. The UK has, of course, urged immediate de-escalation. How terribly British.
One can almost hear the polite cough of a diplomat while the world burns. But what is truly striking is not the violence itself, but the intellectual bankruptcy that accompanies it. We are witnessing not a clash of civilisations, but a clash of mediocrities.
The Americans, with their delusion of global policing, and the Iranians, with their theocratic theatre, both stumble through a script written by men who have never read Thucydides or Gibbon. The UK, for its part, plays the role of the concerned courtier, offering sage advice while lacking the power to enforce it. This is the decadence of our age: a foreign policy where the only constant is the smell of napalm and the sound of hollow rhetoric.
If this were the Fall of Rome, we would at least have the dignity of barbarians at the gates. Instead, we have bureaucrats at the keyboard. The real tragedy is not the loss of life, though that is appalling, but the loss of a coherent sense of national interest.
What is America defending? What is Iran asserting? Vague notions of influence and pride, easily manipulated by men who cannot see beyond the next news cycle.
History will judge this period harshly, I suspect. They will call it the age of noise, a time when action was mistaken for thought, and violence for strategy. The UK's plea for de-escalation is noble, but it is the plea of a faded power, a country that once understood that empire required restraint, not just firepower.
Now it is a nation reduced to issuing statements. So let us watch the fireworks, dear readers. Let us count the dead and measure the shrapnel.
But let us not pretend this is statecraft. It is the last gasp of a tired system, a system that has forgotten that war is a continuation of politics by other means, and that politics, at its best, is the art of avoiding war.
