Let us not mince words: the Iranian drone strike on Kuwait International Airport, which claimed a life and disrupted the fragile peace of the Gulf, is not an isolated act of aggression. It is a symptom of a deeper malady, a world order in freefall. As I have argued time and again, we are witnessing the slow, grinding collapse of the post-1945 settlement.
The United Kingdom’s call for immediate United Nations action is a reflex, a bureaucratic tic, a plea to a corpse for a pulse. The Security Council, that grotesque relic of 1945, is paralysed by its own contradictions. Russia will veto, China will abstain, and the world will wring its hands.
The Iranian regime, emboldened by the vacuum of American power and the fecklessness of European diplomacy, is testing the limits of impunity. This is not 1990. This is not even 2003.
This is the return of the Great Game, played with drones and proxies, with the Gulf as the new chessboard. The victim in Kuwait is not merely a statistic; he is a symbol of the human cost of our collective failure to uphold the basic tenets of international law. The British call for action is noble but hollow.
It assumes a world where states still respect boundaries and norms. We no longer inhabit that world. We inhabit a world of grey zones, of hybrid warfare, of plausible deniability.
The drones that struck Kuwait were likely launched from a base in southern Iran, but the trail of command leads to the Quds Force, to the corridors of power in Tehran, where the mullahs calculate that the West will do nothing. And they are right. The West is too busy with its own decadence, its own cultural civil wars, to muster the will for a confrontation.
The fall of Rome was not accomplished in a day; it was a slow rot, a loss of nerve, a preference for comfort over duty. We are living through that same decadence. The strike on Kuwait is a bellwether.
More will follow. The question is not whether the UN will act – it will not – but whether the Gulf states, long reliant on the American security umbrella, will finally realise that they must forge their own defences. Or perhaps they will continue to drift, like late Victorians, hoping that the storm will pass.
It will not. The storm is here. And the sound of drone wings over Kuwait is its herald.
