A Swiss resort. A man from Ohio. A theocratic regime.
And MI6 watching from the shadows, no doubt sipping tea and polishing their monocles. The developing story that JD Vance, the Trump-adjacent intellectual turned political insurgent, has met with Iranian representatives in a discreet Alpine setting is not merely diplomatic gossip. It is a signal, a tremor in the tectonic plates of global order.
And one must ask: are we witnessing the clumsy birth of a new spheres-of-influence arrangement, or the suicide note of the liberal international order? Let us not mince words. For the British establishment, across both the Thames and the Potomac, the Iranian regime is the great untouchable, the apostate state.
To entertain them is to break taboo. But history, that relentless schoolmaster, teaches us that taboos are broken when empires decay. Think of the Congress of Vienna, or more pertinently, the disaster of Yalta.
When great powers grow weary of universalist crusades, they retreat to realism. This, I suspect, is what Vance represents: a yearning for a foreign policy of limits, of detente, of cold calculation. He is not a dove.
He is a hawk who has read his Gibbon. The Iranian regime, for its part, is no less shrewd. They sense the American empire's exhaustion, its cultural decadence, its inability to sustain another forever war.
They will bargain hard. And what of British intelligence? They are the guardians of the old order.
They will be furious, for this backchannel undermines decades of containment. They will leak, they will spin, they will try to poison the well. But the genie is out of the bottle.
The question is whether Vance and his patrons understand the game they are playing. Negotiating with a theocracy that hangs homosexuals and suppresses women is not a dinner party. It is a dance with the devil.
And in such dances, one must bring a dagger. If Vance imagines he can charm the mullahs with folksy charm and a copy of 'Hillbilly Elegy', he is a fool. If, however, he is building a new strategic architecture, a Nixon-to-China moment for a post-American century, then we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the current world order.
Either way, the Swiss air is thick with history. And as always, Britain watches, worries, and whispers.
