We are Spider-Man, we are Braveheart, we are Tom Cruise in Top Gun and Russell Crowe in Gladiator. We are, in short, a bunch of reckless, macho freaks who think it is cool to intercut real footage of human beings getting blown to smithereens with clips from Hollywood and broadcast it from the account of the president of the USA.
That was the subtext of the disgraceful White House video, glorifying the war against Iran, put out last Thursday.
It illustrates perfectly what Donald Trump wanted Britain to sign up to: an offensive war, with no clear objective and no claim to international legality; glorified violence and regime change from the air.
That Keir Starmer refused has nothing to do with his background as a human rights lawyer. It is burned into the British constitution that the government obeys the law. It’s what every civil servant learns on the day they get their lanyard.
Yet the Conservatives and Reform, egged on by right wing commentators who call themselves patriots, have been hounding the Labour government for its refusal to partake. The Mail called Starmer “desperate and deluded”; Kemi Badenoch described worried Labour backbenchers as “goons and Orcs”. Nigel Farage even flew to Mar-a-Lago to instruct the president on how to wind up Starmer, but ended up being snubbed again.
This mixture of far right hacks and British neocons has amplified every attack by Trump. I expect some of them will pick up fat livelihoods on the American fascist speaker circuit in return. But it looks as if a political Rubicon has been crossed.
For decades, the British right’s main claim to legitimacy has been its patriotism, its breast-beating about national security; its habitual jibe at the left that we “talk the country down”. Now, because we have a centre left government whose cautious stance on the conflict matches that of the British people, they are siding with the US national interest, not our own.
Because war is a vortex, it is possible – indeed getting likelier by the day – that Britain will get drawn into this one. Iran is attacking not just its declared enemies, but also its neutral neighbours. So the drone attack on RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus may be just a taster of what could happen if the regime hardens, and decides to go after the UK.
I have no doubt, if that happens, that the Conservative-Reform-GB News triad will try to push the UK from defensive strikes to offensive ones, merging our efforts with those of the White House.
But we cannot do so. If Britain gets seriously attacked, there will be no legal obstacle to striking back. Article 51 of the UN Charter, under which Starmer has allowed the US Air Force to make defensive strikes, also allows Britain to take action in its own defence, including air strikes on military targets.
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But out of pure self-interest and geostrategic sense, Britain needs to keep its military, diplomatic and economic goals in this conflict separate from those of Israel and the USA, and indeed aligned to those of major European partners.
It is stated in black and white, in the US National Security Strategy, that Trump wants to undermine liberal democracy in Europe and replace it with the ascendancy of far right parties like the AfD, Reform and Rassemblement National. It is also stated that the USA will deprioritise the conventional defence of Europe against Russia.
The implications of that stance were made clear when “war secretary” Pete Hegseth told journalists he was “not concerned” about the fact that Russia is feeding precise targeting data to Iran.
By sending large parts of the USA’s strategic force to the Gulf, Trump has stripped them from the Nato arsenal. The eight Typhoons now needed to protect Cyprus are aircraft that won’t be available to intercept Russia’s monthly dummy bomber attacks on Scotland.
By attacking the British and Spanish prime ministers, and courting Farage – whose party is riddled with Russian influence – Trump is undermining Britain’s national security and the collective security of Europe. And Badenoch and the right wing media are helping him.
Badenoch attacks the RAF for “hanging around” in Cyprus. What did she want? For Britain to join, at a moment’s notice, with no common command structures and no clear objective, a war that every one of her predecessors – from David Cameron through to Rishi Sunak – tried to avoid?
Geostrategy has to be composed of purposive actions: clear ends defined and realistic ways and means to achieve them. Badenoch has expressed no such clarity.
If Britain’s hand is weakened in this crisis there are two reasons – both of the Tories’ making. First, the decade of defence austerity they imposed has hollowed out the armed forces to the point where there are not enough ships and crews to fight the kind of war they fantasise about.
It was Liz Truss who signed off on a document known as MarOpC, which authorised the Royal Navy to scrap old capabilities before new, hi-tech ones could be built, leaving a “capability gap”. That gap is now illustrated by the warships lying at anchor under repair, maintenance or in mothballs in Portsmouth.
The second, and most fundamental reason, is Brexit. It not only cut Britain adrift from a key collective security mechanism. It set the Tories in pursuit of their “Global Britain” fantasy: as a result, there are today two British warships stationed in Singapore and none in the Mediterranean.
Starmer has looked stunned by the speed at which the global order is disintegrating. British Labourism in the postwar era has been moulded around the permanence of the Special Relationship. He now needs to decisively embrace the change.
Labour should scrap the second fiscal rule that demands debt must be falling as a percentage of GDP between 2028 and 2029. With the oil price rocketing and global trade disrupted, the fiscal rules are notional. Rearm now, at scale and at pace.
Second, the UK should seek a coalition of willing European states to respond in lockstep to the crisis: we’ve seen a terror attack in Norway, attempted missile strikes on Turkey and the drone attack on Akrotiri.
A European naval task force to stabilise and secure the eastern Mediterranean would form a counterweight to the gestural American superpower. Abiding by international law, and with clear objectives, such a force would signal that Europe intends to stand united in this new and dangerous world.
