Charlie Gammell is a historian and former diplomat who was on the Iran desk at the Foreign Office.
As Israeli troops make incursions into southern Lebanon, in the wake of recent successful aerial and covert campaigns against Hezbollah, Tel Aviv appears ascendant. Iran, by contrast, seems on the back foot, at odds with its proxies and divided internally as to the way forward. Israel’s response to Iran’s missile strikes, and the West’s ability to check Israel’s actions to prevent all-out
Sun Tzu, the Chinese military strategist writing roughly 2,500 years ago, said that ‘Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.’ As we stand on the precipice of a truly frightening regional conflict, which pits a technologically advanced Israel and its allies against Iran and its allies in
Not only does the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter crash in the fog and mountains in northern Iran, necessitate an election within 50 days, it has also removed the likely front-runner to replace Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. Anyone hoping for a revolution will probably be disappointed Raisi was an attractive candidate
We’ve been here before. Iran has been here before. In 2020 its most senior IRGC commander, Qassem Soleimani, was killed in a US air strike on his convoy as they drove out of Baghdad airport. Soleimani was a much mythologised figure across the Middle East, famed for his ability to direct Iran’s regional proxies to
