The news arrives with the familiar, wearying thud of inevitability. Israel, with its usual clinical brutality, has struck the Lebanese capital, Beirut, in what it calls a ‘targeted’ operation. Britain, as if on cue, has called for de-escalation.
One might yawn, but for the lives at stake. This is a dance we have seen before, a grim ballet played out to the music of spheres of influence and historical grievances. The question I ask is not whether the strike was justified or disproportionate.
Those are tired categories, useful only for debates on The Today Programme. The real question is whether we in the West have the stomach to see the pattern. We are, after all, living in the autumn of our own empire, and our reactions to foreign crises reveal more about our own decay than about the conflicts themselves.
Consider the Victorian era, when Britain could dispatch gunboats and issue ultimatums with a clear sense of purpose. Now we issue press releases and call for calm, as if the Middle East were a rowdy pub we could manage with a few soothing words. The irony is rich.
We claim to be the adults in the room, but our interventions have a pomposity that belies our impotence. Israel acts; we react. The cycle perpetuates itself.
And what of the intellectual decadence that allows us to lament the violence while doing nothing to understand its roots? We speak of ‘de-escalation’ as if the conflict were a temperature to be lowered, not a volcano waiting to erupt. We use the language of management, not statecraft.
Perhaps the lesson of history is that we cannot solve these problems because we have lost the confidence to even define them. In the Victorian mind, the world was a place of order and progress, albeit imposed. For us, it is a place of risk and humanitarian concern.
There is a difference, and it is the difference between an empire and a nervous posture. So let us not pretend that Britain’s call for de-escalation is anything but a reflex, a nervous twitch of a declining power. The real action is in Beirut, in Tel Aviv, in the minds of men who still believe in history as a series of decisive acts.
We, on the other hand, are merely spectators, making notes and tutting softly.
