It is a sour spectacle, one that reeks of the late Roman practice of taking hostages to humiliate a decadent empire. The news arrives: a British couple, already languishing in an Iranian prison, have had their appeal denied. The family’s confirmation of this judicial charade is yet another reminder that for the Islamic Republic, a foreign passport is less a document of rights than a target. The couple, accused of espionage or some such trumped-up charge, are now pawns in a geopolitical game that the West seems almost too tired to play.
One cannot help but draw parallels to the decline of the Victorian era, when British consuls would thunderously protest the mistreatment of a single subject, and the Royal Navy would appear as a matter of course. Today, we threaten sanctions. We issue press releases. We sigh collectively and change the channel. The Iranian regime, a master of calibrated cruelty, understands that the West’s attention span is short and its will to defend its citizens is shorter. They see a society that has lost the stomach for confrontation, a civilisation that prefers comfort over courage. The couple’s families appeal for ‘continued support’, a phrase that rings hollow when we know that support means little more than a hashtag.
Let us not mince words: this is intellectual decadence masquerading as diplomacy. We have convinced ourselves that dialogue with tyrants is a virtue, that patience and understanding will eventually melt the hearts of men who stone adulterers and hang journalists. It will not. The only language Tehran respects is the one that speaks through hard power, economic isolation, and the credible threat of consequences. But our leaders, steeped in a culture of relativism, cannot bring themselves to utter it. We have elevated ‘engagement’ to a moral principle, forgetting that some regimes are beyond the pale of civilised discourse.
The British couple’s ordeal is a mirror held up to our own national decay. Once, a British subject in peril would stir the blood of the nation. Now, we scroll past their story, numbed by the sheer volume of global injustice, and mutter about ‘the right to protest’ as if that were an end in itself. The fall of nations is rarely a single catastrophic event; it is a slow erosion of nerve, a serial refusal to act until action becomes impossible. The mullahs know this. They count on it. And while we deliberate, they hold our people in chains.
