So the Americans and the Iranians are on the verge of a nuclear deal. Again. And once more, British intelligence is the Cassandra at the feast, whispering of hidden threats while the White House clinks glasses with the mullahs. One is reminded of the appeasement of the 1930s, or perhaps the naive détente with the Soviet Union before the truth of the gulags emerged. The pattern is sickeningly familiar: the West, desperate for a diplomatic trophy, trades concrete security guarantees for abstract promises of good behaviour.
Let us examine the matter with the cold eye of historical realism. The Islamic Republic is not a rational state actor in the Western sense. It is a revolutionary theocracy with an eschatological mission, a regime that has spent forty years perfecting the art of duplicity. Even as its diplomats smile in Geneva, its covert units burrow deeper into the Middle Eastern sand, arming proxies, plotting attacks, and inching closer to breakout capability. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, was a masterpiece of self-delusion: it assumed that a regime which views the West as the Great Satan would honour agreements it signed under duress. Unsurprisingly, the Iranians cheated. They always do.
Now, with the prospect of a new deal, the same farce is being re-staged. President Biden, eager for a foreign policy win, is reportedly ready to offer sanctions relief in exchange for temporary restrictions on enrichment. But what of the non-nuclear threats? British intelligence has indicated that Iran’s ballistic missile programme and its network of regional militias remain untouched by these negotiations. The hidden threats are not hidden at all; they are simply ignored. The mullahs have learned that nuclear negotiations serve as a shield for their other malign activities. While the world focuses on centrifuges and uranium stockpiles, the Quds Force funnels weapons to Hezbollah and the Houthis. It is a shell game, and we are the marks.
The intelligence community in London has a long memory. It recalls the Iranian embassy siege of 1980, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the bombing of the AMIA in Buenos Aires, and the endless plots on European soil. It knows that the Iranian regime does not negotiate in good faith because it cannot. Its entire legitimacy rests on resistance to the West. To make a genuine deal would be to admit that the revolution’s founding ideology is bankrupt. Ergo, any agreement will be tactical, not strategic. The Iranians will take the sanctions relief, modernise their economy, and then, at the moment of maximum advantage, tear up the deal and race for a bomb.
What then is to be done? The answer is not to retreat into isolationism, as the Trump administration did, nor to embrace naive engagement, as Obama did. We require a policy of calibrated pressure, one that couples the threat of force with the promise of genuine integration should Iran transform. But such a policy demands patience and nerve, qualities conspicuously absent in modern democracies. Instead, we get photo opportunities and piecemeal agreements that kick the can down the road. The road, however, leads to a precipice. And when we arrive, the clever intelligence analysts in their Thames-side offices will be able to say, with grim satisfaction, that they warned us.
This is not a lament; it is a diagnosis. The British soul has ever been sceptical of grand schemes and utopian promises. Our intelligence services reflect that: they are the dusty, pragmatic counterweight to the shiny optimism of American diplomacy. Their warnings about hidden threats are not the product of paranoia, but of a deep understanding of how power actually works. The nuclear deal is a distraction. The real threat is the regime itself. Until we address that, we are merely rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
