Sir Keir Starmer, a man who looks perpetually surprised by the weight of his own premiership, has been handed a rather unenviable intelligence brief. The gist: Iran’s strike capability is growing, and Western allies are in the crosshairs. One almost imagines the briefing was delivered in hushed, panicked tones, as if the apparatchiks had just discovered that the Persian Empire is not, in fact, a museum piece. The predictable response will be a flurry of diplomatic throat-clearing, a few more sanctions, and perhaps a sternly worded letter to the Iranian mullahs. But let us be honest: the West has lost the stomach for anything resembling a decisive foreign policy. We are living in the autumn of our imperial will, a season that feels suspiciously like a permanent winter.
Compare this moment to the late Victorian era, when a British gunboat could sort out a recalcitrant potentate before breakfast. Today, we have intelligence chiefs warning of Iranian missiles that could reach Paris, Berlin, or even London. And what do we offer? Sanctions that the Iranians have learned to sidestep with the agility of a bazaar merchant. The mullahs, you see, have studied our decadence. They know that we are a civilisation addicted to comfort, horrified by casualties, and terrified of appearing “provocative.” Our leaders, from the White House to Downing Street, speak of “de-escalation” as if it were a universal solvent. It is not. It is a recipe for slow-motion suicide.
The historical parallel that gnaws at me is not the fall of Rome, though that is always tempting. It is the 1930s, when Europe’s intellectual elites saw the storm gathering and convinced themselves that appeasement was a form of wisdom. The Iranian regime is not Hitler’s Germany, but it is a revolutionary state with hegemonic ambitions. It has proxies in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. It is enriching uranium to near-weapons grade. And it is doing all of this while the West tut-tuts and imposes toothless sanctions. The intelligence warning to Starmer is a reminder that the gap between capability and will is now a chasm.
What, then, is to be done? First, we must stop pretending that economic pressure alone will suffice. Iran is a theocracy that has mastered the art of suffering and deflection. Second, we must rebuild the credibility of our deterrent. That means visible, robust military postures in the Gulf and the Mediterranean. It means making clear that the protection of our allies is not a rhetorical gesture but a binding commitment. And it means, perhaps most painfully, acknowledging that our own societal decadence—our obsession with identity politics, our fear of risk, our preference for online outrage over real-world action—has made us look weak.
The Victorians, for all their faults, understood something we have forgotten: empires are maintained not by sentiment but by steel. The present crisis is not just about Iran. It is about whether the West can still muster the collective will to defend its interests and its allies. If the answer is no, then the intelligence chiefs’ warnings will be the prelude to a tragedy. And future historians, looking back at this moment, will note that the West did not fall to barbarians. It fell to a terminal lack of nerve.
