Vice President Vance’s candid admission that the Tehran negotiations are ‘not there yet’ is a welcome splash of cold water in an ocean of diplomatic wishful thinking. Of course they are not there. They have never been there. The chattering classes in Washington and Whitehall would have us believe that a nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic is just a few minor concessions away, as if history had not taught us the folly of trusting a regime that views signed agreements precisely as scraps of paper to be burned when convenient.
One need only glance at the Victorian era’s great diplomatic follies, or more recently the 2015 JCPOA, to see the pattern: western negotiators prize process over substance, while Tehran uses talk to buy time for its centrifuges. The UK, now belatedly urging stronger safeguards against an atomic breakout, sounds like the man who shouts ‘fire’ after the building has already begun to smoulder. The time for safeguards is long past; we should be demanding verifiable, intrusive inspections of every military site in Iran, or else accepting that the mullahs will have a bomb within months.
Let us not mince words. The intellectual decadence of modern diplomacy lies in its fetish for agreement at any cost. Vance’s remark, however stark, is a rare moment of clarity. No deal is better than a bad deal. And a bad deal with Iran is worse than no deal, because it legitimises a criminal nuclear programme while providing the world with the illusion of security. The UK should stop playing the earnest schoolmarm and start acting like a nation that once knew how to deter aggression. Otherwise, we might as well prepare for the inevitable: a nuclear-armed Iran, and the cascade of proliferation it will trigger across the Middle East.
History cycles, and so do our mistakes. The choice is ours: learn or repeat.
