By Dane Giraud…

On a recent episode of The Rest Is Politics – that foggy salon of smug centrism hosted by Rory Stewart and Tony Blair’s onetime Spin-ghoul, Alastair Campbell – Stewart performed his ritual genuflection to international law, voicing his very British dismay at the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities by Israel and the United States. With chin aloft and voice suitably grave, he summoned the ghost of General Dwight D. Eisenhower to caution against pre-emptive strikes and warned that “you can’t have one law for Israel & the US & another law for Iran, otherwise it’s not the law.”

As arguments go, Stewart’s was most compelling as a refutation of itself – each phrase underwriting the opposite conclusion. With fingers wedged in ears to the shrieks of history, Stewart proceeded to unpeel the bandage over the gangrene festering at the heart of institutions like the UN. What emerged was not moral clarity but the bureaucratic evasion typical of those who mistake cowardice for diplomacy.

His invocation of Eisenhower, too, was misleading. The President was grappling with a terrifying new weapon – the hydrogen bomb – and the question of whether it could ever be compatible with a just war doctrine. Even the present pantheon of geopolitical outlaws -Putin, Xi, and their ilk – are content to treat nuclear weapons as ornaments of deterrence rather than tools of conquest.

Eisenhower, whose understanding of force was far more nuanced than Stewart’s pieties suggest, would likely have made a clear distinction between pre-emptive and preventive action. That distinction matters enormously when facing a fanatical theocracy intent on acquiring nuclear arms, not for the balance of power, but for divine fulfilment.

Stewart would have us believe that restraint is a moral principle in and of itself. But restraint in the face of escalating, unrepentant aggression is not wisdom; it is complicity. For nearly half a century, the so-called international community has coddled the clerical terror state in Tehran, hoping that if they extend enough open hands, the regime might one day unclench its fists.

And haven’t we been here before? Churchill’s warnings in the early 1930s about Germany’s armament programme were treated as alarmist until the Luftwaffe was screeching over Poland. The logic Stewart deploys – hesitate, equivocate, consult the rulebook – is precisely the logic that allowed those horrors to unfold.

And it isn’t just Stewart. Our own Helen Clark – now resembling some political version of Edgar Allen Poe’s Dr. Valdemar and putrefying before our very eyes – has recently emerged from retirement to pen earnest missives about bringing Iran “into the global community.” As though a regime that blinds women for showing hair and funds jihad can be rehabilitated with a warm smile and a cleverly worded communiqué. If this is naivety, then it is weaponised. Sympathy seems a likelier diagnosis, sympathy for the devil, clad in the vestments of diplomatic virtue.

Iran does not behave as a state with “interests” in the Westphalian sense. Its interest is in disorder. Its chief export is not oil or carpets but destabilisation. And contrary to the preening solidarity of the anti-imperial Left, the primary victims of the Islamic Republic have been Arabs, Sunnis, and countless Iranians themselves.

To pretend this regime is a lawful counterpart to Israel or the United States is to hollow out international law of any meaning whatsoever. “One law for all” sounds compelling, until one realises the rope is being used to usher monsters into the ballroom. Iran is not a misunderstood nation-state. It is a hostage crisis with a flag. A morally literate global order would recognise this and act accordingly.

The very foundation of the United Nations was mocked by Stalin the moment it was laid. That foundational flaw has festered into absurdity. Yet Clark and her ilk, gazing lovingly at the rot, prefer denial to repair.

And what of the premise – that Iran was quietly minding its own business before being set upon by a belligerent foe? This is not only false; it is sick. Since October 7th, when an Iranian proxy invaded and butchered Israeli civilians, Israel has been engaged in a war it did not seek. The next day, Hezbollah struck from the north. But neither Stewart nor Clark seemed overly troubled by this sequence of events. No outraged columns. No agonised podcasts. Just silence – or worse, veiled excuses.

Clark, particularly, outdid herself when the Houthis began firing on international shipping lanes. Rather than condemn the aggression, she blamed Israel’s operation in Gaza, as if the terror army that restored slavery in Yemen was bound by a sense of justice. What can one say? There are depths, it seems, beneath which even a former Prime Minister is willing to sink.

What we are witnessing is a new fashion: the laundering of terror through the silk of diplomatic language. The attempt to normalise – yes, to normalise – those who cheer for slaughter, if it comes dressed in resistance chic. And we must reject this, with unflinching clarity.

Stewart’s invocation of Eisenhower invites us to consider moral symmetry. But moral symmetry is not justice. It is its death. And it is precisely that symmetry which terror, in velvet gloves or not, seeks to exploit.

Dane Giraud’s opinion piece was originally published on his Substack – The Many Ways I Let You Down – and is republished here with permission.