The second consecutive day of strikes between the United States and Iran across the Middle East prompts the Foreign Office to bleat its customary call for restraint. ‘Restraint’ is the verbal sedative administered by the terminally powerless. It is the diplomatic equivalent of politely asking a hurricane to mind the garden furniture. For those of us who have studied the nineteenth century’s great power clashes, this is a re-run of a very old, very tired script. But modern Britain seems to have forgotten its lines entirely.
Let us dispense with the usual pieties. The American bombing campaign is not a sudden aberration. It is the logical endpoint of a foreign policy establishment that has spent two decades blundering through the bazaars of the Levant, mistaking drone strikes for statecraft. Iran’s retaliation is equally predictable: a theocracy that thrives on external threat will never miss an opportunity to play the martyred victim. Both sides are locked in a dance of mutually assured self-righteousness. And what does Britain do? It wrings its hands and issues a press release.
This is the moral and strategic vacuum at the heart of our national identity. A hundred years ago, a British government confronted with chaos in the Middle East would have dispatched a gunboat, drafted a treaty, or drawn a border. We might have been wrong, but at least we had the conviction of empire. Today we have nothing but a trite appeal to ‘calm’ and a vague hope that someone else will sort it out. We have become the elderly gentleman at the dinner party who mutters about the good old days while the house burns down.
The real scandal is not the violence itself, but the intellectual decadence that cannot conceive of a coherent response. Every pundit on every panel reaches for the same cliché: ‘There is no military solution.’ Tell that to the hundreds of thousands who died in the Iran-Iraq war because their leaders thought otherwise. The problem is not that military solutions exist; it is that we have lost the vocabulary to distinguish between a prudent use of force and a reckless one. We have substituted strategic thinking with a sort of therapeutic humanitarianism, where the only permissible intervention is a donation to the Red Cross.
We must reclaim the ability to speak plainly. The United States is acting as a great power, which means it will pursue its interests, sometimes inelegantly. Iran is acting as a revisionist state, which means it will probe for weaknesses. Britain, having surrendered its great power status and failed to find a post-imperial purpose, has opted for the role of the international nanny. It is a pathetic posture, and it serves no one.
The real question this crisis poses is not about the Middle East, but about Britain itself. Are we a nation that simply manages decline, or do we still possess the intellectual firepower to shape events? The calls for restraint are a symptom of a deeper malady: a loss of nerve, a retreat from history. If we cannot find the will to articulate a real strategy, we may as well dissolve the Foreign Office and replace it with a charity helpline.
The empire is long gone, but the habits of thought remain. We must decide whether to dust them off or abandon them completely. The current approach, a muddle of moralising and indecision, is the worst of all worlds. It is a grey, anxious, forgettable performance. And history, as it always does, will remember those who acted, not those who wrung their hands.
