The lights are out in Crimea. Not merely a power cut, but a tableau of civilisational decay that any decent student of decline would recognise. Ukraine’s recent strikes have plunged the peninsula into a blackout, and we are told that Britain will now patrol the Black Sea to defend shipping lanes.
One can almost hear the ghost of Lord Palmerston sighing from the grave. Have we learned nothing from Sebastopol? The pattern is drearily familiar: an act of war, a cry of outrage, a naval deployment, and then the long, grinding reality of imperial overreach.
I do not mock the impulse to protect trade. I mock the myopia that treats this as a discrete problem rather than a symptom of a wider rot. The Black Sea is not a pond.
It is a stage for a tragedy that has been playing since the days of Catherine the Great. Russia, Ukraine, NATO, Turkey: all are actors in a drama whose script was written long ago. The UK’s patrols will reassure the grain merchants, yes.
But what of the deeper currents? The intellectual decadence that believes a few frigates can restore order to a shattered region. The truth is that we are seeing the end of the post-war global order, and Crimea is merely the latest candle to be snuffed out.
When the lights go out in Simferopol, they flicker in London too. And no amount of patrolling will change that.
