It's not at all clear to me that Iran emerged from nabbing those 15 British sailors and marines in a stronger position than before, as Yoav Fromer writes here. (Smirks, even those of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are not exactly the stuff of strategic superiority.) But it's a valid question. What's not valid is Fromer's implication that Great Britain would have--and should have--attacked Iran to free the captives had it not been hampered by a century of post-imperial slippage that merely reflects a broader decline in the West's military and psychological mettle. The specter of Western decline is an old conservative and neoconservative trope that wasn't true during the cold war and is even less applicable now. Great Britain has two active carrier battle groups and spends more on its defenses than all but four countries, lagging significantly behind only the United States and China. It also deploys 16 megatons of nuclear explosives on its Trident submarines. That's about 1,000 times the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Put it this way: If British leaders woke up one day and decided that Iran should no longer exist, Iran would no longer exist. Great Britain has substantially greater military power in both absolute terms and in terms relative to Iran than it did "in the good old days, more than a century ago." The 12-inch guns of which the author is enamored are small bore (literally). The real question, of course, was whether military action was worthwhile. Few people thought so. The priority right now vis-à-vis Iran is its nuclear program, and military action is an option we should take only after diplomatic efforts have been exhausted. Yet Fromer writes, "The Brits (and their European allies), Iran now understands, have neither the inclination nor the ability to take up arms--not even to protect their own troops, let alone to face down someone's uranium-enrichment program." (Emphasis mine.) That suggests that one ought to be more inclined to start a war over one ship than over an enemy nuclear-weapons program. But, if you're going to advocate military action--and, if so, please advocate it rather than just implying it--you ought to spend at least a sentence on basic cost-benefit analysis and operational feasibility. Otherwise you're just chest-thumping, which is about as meaningful as Ahmadinejad's grinning. --Peter Scoblic