A curious development has emerged from the Alpine sanitariums of Swiss banking. JD Vance, the erstwhile Republican vice-presidential candidate, has been spotted in Zurich, ostensibly for a 'private visit'. Yet the timing is exquisite.
British intelligence has just warned of a gaping loophole in the Iran nuclear framework, one that could allow Tehran to finance its proxies via opaque Swiss accounts. One does not need to be a cryptographer to connect the dots. The return of the great game is upon us.
The Victorians understood that Swiss neutrality was a fiction, a convenient veil for laundering the world's grey money. Today, the fiction persists. Mr Vance, with his populist disdain for the intelligence community, may well be the perfect emissary for a deal that no one dares to call a deal.
The Iranians, ever the masters of the bazaar, are surely delighted. The West, in its decadent exhaustion, seems willing to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s: appeasement dressed as pragmatism. Let us hope that Mr Vance’s meeting is nothing more than a harmless chat about cheese and watches.
I suspect otherwise.
