The latest intelligence assessment from Britain’s MI6 has described President Trump’s Iran strategy with two unflattering possibilities: a ‘flip-flop’ or a ‘deliberate’ act of statecraft. This is a classic case of Whitehall’s understated eloquence masking a deeper contempt. If it is a flip-flop, we are watching a superpower’s foreign policy conducted by tweet and impulse, a governance by whim that would make Caligula blush.
If it is deliberate, then we are seeing a master of disorienting tactics, a man who treats geopolitics as a reality TV script where allies and enemies are equally confused. Either way, the result is the same: a vacuum of credibility that Iran, Russia, and China are only too happy to fill. The irony is that the ‘America First’ policy has made America last in the trust department.
One remembers the Victorian notion that a gentleman’s word is his bond. Trump’s word is more like a bond swap: volatile, speculative, and often defaulted. This is not strategy.
This is epistemological chaos dressed as negotiation. The British intelligence community, seasoned by centuries of diplomatic nuance, can only watch in horror as the special relationship becomes a special kind of theatre. Rome did not fall in a day; it first lost its reputation for reliability.
We are watching a replay, this time with a nuclear-armed Iran in the wings.
