The news arrives with the usual fanfare of moral superiority: Senator Vance condemning Netanyahu’s judgement, and the United Kingdom urging Israel to uphold democratic norms. One might be forgiven for a weary sigh. Is this the grand lesson of the Fall of Rome or the sanctimony of the Victorian vicarage?
I suspect both. For Vance to lecture Netanyahu on judgement is like Caligula chiding Nero on restraint. The Senator’s own political manoeuvres, his flirtations with populist nihilism, are hardly a model of statesmanly wisdom.
Yet he stands, a tribune of the people, to castigate a leader who has spent decades navigating the treacherous currents of Middle Eastern politics. Meanwhile, the UK, a nation that has outsourced its own moral compass to the Brussels bureaucracy and the whims of Washington, dares to lecture Israel on democracy. This is the intellectual decadence I have warned about: the substitution of realpolitik for sermonising, the elevation of virtue-signalling over strategic clarity.
Israel, for all its flaws, remains a vibrant, messy democracy in a region of autocracies and theocracies. To lecture it on democratic norms from the comfort of London, where the House of Lords is still a hereditary chamber, is the peak of hypocrisy. Vance’s remarks are not a call for accountability but a performance for a domestic audience.
The UK’s position is not a defence of democracy but a feeble echo of declining power. We are witnessing a contest of decadence: the decadence of American populism, the decadence of British decline, and the decadence of a world order that has lost its nerve. The Romans would have understood.
They, too, had their moralists. And they, too, fell.
