So the Americans and Iranians have been chatting again, and the State Department is using that most vacuous of diplomatic adjectives: “encouraging”. One can almost hear the Victorian statesmen rolling in their graves. When Lord Palmerston spoke of “encouraging progress” in the opium negotiations with China, he meant the Royal Navy had just blown a few more junks out of the water. Today, “encouraging” means the ayatollahs have agreed to use a slightly less hostile tone on Twitter. Meanwhile, Britain, that faded eminence of imperial diplomacy, urges caution. Because nothing says caution like a nation that spent the last decade embroiled in the Brexit morass, now lecturing the world on patient statecraft. The irony is as thick as the fog that once shrouded the Thames.
Let us dispense with the polite fiction that this is a new chapter. We have seen this play before: détente with Iran, then rupture; nuclear deals, then withdrawals. The Trump administration tore up the JCPOA with the theatrical flair of a Roman emperor declaring a new Colosseum spectacle. The Biden team, hoping to restore some semblance of order, now wanders through the rubble. The result? Iran’s centrifuges spin faster than ever, and the regime has grown expert at playing the long game. Every “encouraging” word from Washington only convinces Tehran that patience is a winning strategy. The mullahs know the West has the attention span of a goldfish. The moment the news cycle moves on, they can resume their march toward a bomb.
Britain’s role in this farce is particularly galling. The Foreign Office, ever the relic of a bygone era, insists on “cautious diplomacy”. But caution in the face of a theocratic regime that hangs protesters from cranes is not prudence; it is cowardice. The British establishment loves to lecture others about the lessons of the 1930s, yet it persistently fails to apply them. Chamberlain’s umbrella has been replaced by a diplomatic cable urging “restraint”. Neville Chamberlain at least believed he was buying time. Our current mandarins seem to believe they are buying nothing but the illusion of relevance.
One wonders if the Americans have studied the history of the Great Game. The British and Russians played their rivalries in Central Asia for decades, producing treaties, commissions, and mountains of paper. Did it prevent the Bolsheviks from eventually consolidating power? Did it stop the opium trade? No. It simply delayed the inevitable, while providing employment for a generation of bureaucrats. So too with Iran. The regime’s ideology is impervious to “encouraging progress”. It feeds on Western hypocrisy. The more we talk, the more they despise us. The more we offer sanctions relief, the more they fund Hezbollah and Houthi rebels.
What is needed is not caution but clarity. If the West truly believes Iran must never acquire nuclear weapons, then it must act with the decisiveness of a Victorian gunboat: a credible military threat, combined with an end to the charade of negotiations. But that would require a spine, a commodity in short supply among our ruling classes. Instead, we have the eternal dance: talk, talk, talk, while the mullahs laugh all the way to the enrichment facility.
The decline of Western civilisation, I have argued before, mirrors the late Roman Empire: a preference for spectacle over substance, rhetoric over action. These talks are just another gladiatorial contest for the cameras. The outcome is predetermined: a brief truce, then renewed crisis. Britain can urge caution all it likes; it will not change the trajectory. The only question is whether we will wake up one morning to news of a nuclear test in the desert, and wonder why we spent so many years talking when we could have acted.
History, as always, will not judge us kindly. But then, it never does.