Iran, Trump and the slide into global anarchy

Yesterday, Keir Starmer convened an emergency Cobra meeting to discuss the options. Since the institution formally tasked with international crises is the National Security Council, calling a Cobra meeting signals that the government understands the domestic significance of any involvement in action against Iran. Iran’s agents have been trying to assassinate dissidents here, and their influence is clearly present on the fringes of the Palestine solidarity movement.

Both here and against UK targets worldwide, Iran still has the ability to harm the UK should we enter the Israel-Iran war directly.

There were reportedly four options on the table at Cobra: direct military intervention in an attack on Iran; logistical support to an American strike; permission to use Diego Garcia but no active involvement; and outright refusal to get involved.

In weighing its options, the government needs to think beyond the immediate threats and consider the UK’s strategic objectives.

The first problem is Israel. It launched Operation Rising Lion unilaterally. Whether we believe it had Trump’s tacit permission or not, it is being conducted autonomously, and is designed to achieve Israel’s war aims.

What these are, however, is not clear. In the first hours of the attack, Israel effectively decapitated both Iran’s nuclear science cadre and its senior military leadership – sparing Ayatollah Khamenei, it is reported, only on Trump’s orders. Yet until and unless the working class and the youth of Iran are prepared to go on the streets and topple the dictatorship, the only “regime change” likely to happen is a coup by military elements prepared to make peace with Israel.

Israel – as with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza – has neither the capacity nor the intent to stabilise the countries it disrupts through offensive action. Tragic though Gaza looks today, the real danger is that it becomes a model for a kind of offensive action that creates failed states and desolated cities across the Middle East.

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An even more acute problem concerns the nukes themselves. So far Israel has hit, in addition to the Arak reactor (which was reportedly shut down), facilities to make and enrich uranium in Esfahan, a long range missile complex in Parshin, and the fuel enrichment complex at Natanz – each vital to Iran’s ability to manufacture weapons grade material and fire it at Israel.

However, the strategic target remains Fordow, the nuclear fuel enrichment plan discovered by the IAEA to have been processing uranium at close to the 90% purity needed to make the core of a nuclear weapon. Israel struck Fordow on 13 June, but the main facility is buried so deep underground that it is likely to need repeated strikes by penetration bombs, which can only be delivered by the US B-2 bombers currently stationed at Diego Garcia.

Everything Trump has done since the beginning of this crisis signals that this is the main option – moving first the bombers themselves and then the refuelling aircraft needed to support them. The Israeli air offensive against Iran’s anti-air defences completes the set up.

But if Israel cannot trigger regime change, and cannot secure the destroyed facilities themselves, the biggest danger arising from an American strike is not that half a million people come onto the streets of London, or that Iranian agents here start planting bombs: it is that civil order breaks down in Iran and non-state actors get their hands on nuclear technology.

If – as the USA now claims – Iran is weeks away from being able to produce a nuclear warhead, that means the danger of such material falling into the hands of terrorists is huge.

If Keir Starmer wants to say, openly and directly, that the UK grants permission for US bombers to use Diego Garcia, I have no problem with that in principle. Though the US needs Britain’s permission for such a move, the assumption must be it will get it.

But in return he should demand two things: cast iron intelligence on the state of Iran’s nuclear weapon readiness and a clear statement of war aims, both by Israel and the US.

Without that intelligence it will be impossible to persuade the British public that this is any different to the catastrophic intelligence scam that led us into Iraq. Without a clear statement of war aim, we would be entering a geopolitical maelstrom entirely dependent on the right/far-right Israeli government and the deeply divided Trump administration, which won an election by promising to stay out of future wars of aggression.

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And that is why, beyond the use of Diego Garcia and potentially the RAF base at Larnaca, it is hard to see the logic of any deeper UK involvement. We should say to the Trump administration: we are a state that still observes international law; make the case under such law for an attack and we will consider it. We should say, in addition, that since we were ordered just five months ago to take on the task of leading Europe’s deterrence efforts against Russia, let us get on with that.

Iran’s performance in this conflict has been woeful. It has lost its military leadership, key scientists and most of its nuclear capability, together with most of its air force and air defences. But while its proxies have been defeated – Hamas, Hezbollah and Assad in Syria – they are still capable of switching to terror against western citizens.

As we hold our breath to see what the mercurial Trump and Netanyahu administrations do next, we should at least recognise this: the chaos unfolding in the Middle East is entirely the product of so-called “multipolarity” advocated by China, Russia and their allies in the BRICS. The multi-polar world breeds chaos.

Everything we ourselves do, therefore, must be designed to slow the slide into global anarchy. If we are to preach international law to others, and indeed resort to it in order to justify any participation in an attack on Iran, we must obey it – and be prepared to set standards by our own behaviour.