The intelligence cables have hummed with the drab urgency of Whitehall, and now the news breaks: Iran-backed militias, so the UK assessment suggests, are plotting a sniper attack on a US presidential event. This is not a novel plot. It is a return to form, a reprise of the age-old contest between order and the assassin’s bullet. One thinks of the Gracchi, of Julius Caesar, of the endless line of potentates felled by the lone marksman. But the target here is not merely a man; it is the symbol of American empire, the very embodiment of what the Victorians might have called ‘the White Man’s Burden’ in its current, attenuated form.
Let us not mince words. The Islamic Republic, that curious hybrid of revolutionary zeal and bureaucratic cynicism, has perfected the art of the plausible deniability. It uses its militias as the Persians once used their satraps: to project power while maintaining a veneer of official ignorance. A sniper is the perfect tool for this. It is intimate, personal, and suggests a precision that the West has long associated with decadent Eastern despotism. The assassin does not need to succeed; the threat alone is a victory. It forces the American state into a posture of defence, a crouch, a retreat from the open confidence that once marked its public ceremonies.
And what of the British role here? We are the intelligence-sharing vassal, the watchdog that barks before the mastiff bites. Yet our own history is replete with such plots. The Fenians, the anarchists, the IRA: all have used the rifle and the scope to challenge the British imperial centre. Now we pass the warning to our American cousins, who will no doubt respond with the usual bluster about ‘defeating terror’ and ‘protecting democracy’. But they miss the larger rot. The threat is not merely tactical; it is a symptom of a deeper intellectual and moral decay. The West has lost the faith in its own civilising mission, and the sniper’s bullet is the logical end of that loss.
This is not the first time a presidential event has been thus targeted. The Kennedy assassination, the Reagan shooting, the numerous plots against Nixon and Clinton: the sniper is the weapon of the disgruntled, the martyr, the one who believes that a single shot can rewrite history. And it is a fantasy, of course. History is not rewritten; it is merely paused for a moment before it continues its grim march. But the fantasy persists, fuelled by the same ideological fervour that drives the militias of Qom and the chatrooms of the global jihad.
The American security apparatus will no doubt tighten its perimeter. The Secret Service will scan the rooftops. The motorcade will swerve and brake. But the real threat is the one that cannot be outrun: the slow erosion of Western confidence, the creeping sense that our leaders are no longer the heralds of progress but the targets of a resentful world. And in this, the Iranians have succeeded, regardless of whether a shot is fired. They have reminded us that the empire is vulnerable, that the age of unchallenged American hegemony is over, and that the sniper’s scope is the new symbol of our era.
So let the warnings come. Let the cables be read. Let the event go ahead, if it must, under the shadow of a possible bullet. But let us not pretend that we are surprised. The West has been in decline since the Great War, and every such plot is merely a confirmation of that slide. The sniper is not the cause; he is the symptom. And the disease is terminal.
