Philip Hammond is the first Foreign Secretary to visit Iran in over a decade as he returned to reopen the Britain’s embassy in Tehran yesterday. But what has prompted this change in government policy? On the Today programme, Hammond explained that Britain needs the influence of a ‘very important country’ in the region to help with the fight against the Islamic State:
‘We’re trying to develop cordial relations with what is a very important country in a volatile and difficult region. We’ve had a difficult history between Britain and Iran but following the nuclear deal and after a couple of years in which relationships have been getting steadily better, we want to try and move to the next phase.
‘The whole point here is we need to engage with Iran as a major player in the region in order to seek to influence it. If we don’t talk to the Iranians, if we stand off and simply shout at each other through megaphones, we will not be able to influence the development of Iranian policy. We will not have good insight into Iranian thinking. And Iran is too large a player, too important a player in this region to simply leave in isolation without any interaction with them.’
But what about Israel, given that Iran’s former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad frequently antagonised the country? Hammond said that the government is dealing with the current administration and is attempting to let bygones be bygones on this matter:
‘Well that was the position of the previous president. I think the current president, the current regime has a more nuanced approached to Israel and we should judge – in a country like this and situation like this – we should judge people by their actions as much as by their words. And what we’re looking for is behaviour from Iran – not only towards Israel but towards other players in the region – that slowly rebuilds their sense that Iran is not a threat to them.’
The dynamics between Iran and the West are clearly shifting but Hammond was keen to insist Britain is not giving Iran a free pass: ‘we are not blind at all the faults, as you put it, of Iran’. Cynics will argue that the government is desperate to make progress in the fight against the Islamic State at any cost and is therefore cozying up to Iran because they are seen as partners who can help.
But so is the United States. Barack Obama’s Iran deal received a significant boost as news emerged that Senator Harry Reid, the Democrat’s leader in the Senate, said he ‘strongly’ supports the deal and will do ‘everything in my power’ to ensure it passes. As the most senior Democrat in the Senate, his support will sway many Democrats into backing Obama and therefore make it less likely that the Republicans’s will manage to veto the bill.
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