The Spectator

Ignoring Iran

Crises in the Gulf and Conservative leadership elections come around with unnerving regularity. It is not unknown for both to coincide — that happened in 1990, when Margaret Thatcher was overthrown in the lead-up to the first Gulf War. On that occasion, drama on the domestic front did not smother Britain’s response to the international crisis — unlike now.

It is bizarre to have a US president threatening to ‘obliterate’ Iran while our Foreign Secretary hardly bothers to respond, preferring to pose with fish and chips and Irn Bru on the campaign trail.

Jeremy Hunt did intervene briefly a fortnight ago, when he described Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to accept that Iran was responsible for attacks on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz as ‘pathetic’. But beyond that brief clash of the Jeremys, it is hard to detect that there is any government policy on the current skirmish between the US and Iran. Were the Trump administration to go ahead with a military strike, as it nearly did last week in the wake of Iran’s downing of a US naval drone, would Britain support it or condemn it? If the crisis developed into full-scale war, would British forces join US operations, as they did twice in Iraq? Would we provide tactical support, as we did in Libya in 1986, when the first attacks were made on the Gaddafi regime? Would we sit on our hands, or would we become stern opponents? We don’t know because the government has given no indication at all. That is extraordinary.

Perhaps the government’s silence is a reflection of our loss of military power. As our forces have been run down, it has become ever harder for us to pretend that we could join a US-led operation on anything like equal terms — if indeed we wanted to.

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