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UK Special Coverage Starmer’s Latest Political Snafu: The Iran War The Labour prime minister’s indecision and the abject state of the British military have created an embarrassing display. UK Special Coverage Forty-four years ago, Margaret Thatcher sent a British task force 8,000 miles to liberate the Falkland Islands. They had been invaded by Argentina. Last week Britain wasn’t even able to send a frigate to protect British personnel and their families in Akrotiri in Cyprus against Iranian drones. The HMS Dragon was still in dock in Portsmouth even as Iran was attacking the UK’s base on the Mediterranean island. The French, Britain’s historic rival, had to step in with a gunboat to deter further aggression. The humiliation of the British military and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s government was complete. Had Thatcher still been around, she would have sacked the defense secretary and half the military top brass. From the start of this war, the state of Britain’s leadership has been dire. “This is not Winston Churchill,” said Donald Trump last week after Starmer refused to allow the U.S. to use British air bases to refuel planes headed for the Gulf. The prime minister had said the America-Israeli action was illegal under international law. (Britain’s closest military allies in the Commonwealth, Canada and Australia, seemed to think the strike against the weaponry of Iran’s regime was legitimate.) But after the American-Israeli success in taking out Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Starmer changed his tune. He conducted what has become a typical U-turn and agreed to let U.S. warplanes land at Diego Garcia and Fairford in Gloucestershire. Suddenly, international law wasn’t a problem.  Number 10 tried to cover itself by saying that the U.S. could only use British bases in “defensive operations”—as if bureaucrats were going to log every American assault on Iran’s military establishment to ensure that they waited until ballistic missiles were actually launched before targeting them.  Tony Blair, the former Labour Prime Minister and sometime Starmer mentor, was aghast. At a private meeting he remarked that “if your ally is the indispensable cornerstone of your defence strategy… you’d better turn up”. The Brits belatedly let it be known that the aircraft carrier Prince of Wales was being placed on alert. This didn’t impress the POTUS. “That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer,” he said on Truth Social, adding, “We don’t need people that join wars after we’ve already won!” Ouch. Starmer then hit the phones, desperately trying to reduce the damage to the so-called special relationship. So how did he get into this mess? According to Tim Shipman in the Spectator, Starmer had initially been minded to help the U.S. But his left-wing Energy Secretary Ed Miliband rounded up a few Cabinet colleagues and told Starmer that he could not risk being an accessory to U.S. imperialism. Didn’t he remember the disaster in Iraq, they said? There’s no plan. You can’t have regime change from the air. It is time to make a break from Trump, who is deeply unpopular with British voters. A stronger leader might have told Miliband to stick to net zero. Starmer is himself massively unpopular with British voters and decisive action over Iran might have improved his image. Instead he conducted yet another classic Starmer U-turn.  The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, had no hesitation in supporting the American-Israeli actions and called out Starmer’s “dither and delay”. She said that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a direct threat to the UK and it would therefore have been perfectly legal for Britain to support the U.S. from the start. Starmer, she added, was now a hostage to his left wing. Yet parties on the left were hardly more supportive of the PM than the Tories. The Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, also condemned the PM’s equivocation. He thought the UK should have remained aloof throughout from what he described as a “unilateral and unlawful act” by the Americans. The Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, accused Starmer of dragging Britain into an illegal war and said that all British bases should be off limits to Trump’s warmongers. The right-wing Reform UK might have been expected to support full British participation in the U.S.-Israel action, since its leader, Nigel Farage, has had a close relationship with Donald Trump. But it was not entirely supportive. Indeed, its Treasury spokesman, Robert Jenrick, told BBC TV on Sunday that, while it was OK for the U.S. to use British bases for refueling, it would not be right for British planes to take part in offensive bombing raids over Iran. Why this hesitation? Well, Reform realizes that the British public is very much opposed to the war, according to opinion polls. YouGov reported that voters here opposed US strikes on Iran by 49 percent to 28 percent. It is safe to say that Donald Trump is not exactly popular with the Brits. His net approval rating is minus-70. A lot of this has to do with the president’s infelicitous language and his recent claim that British armed forces had “stayed a little back from the front lines” during the  Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. This apparent accusation of cowardice went down very badly with many working-class voters who have close ties to the military. Even the Farage-supporting pop star Rod Stewart said it was offensive to the memory of the 450 British soldiers who gave their lives in those American-led actions. Trump’s triumphalism over Iran is also a vote-loser here. Things could have been different. When America and the UK bombed Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo conflict, there was widespread public support for the action, even though it had not been sanctioned by the United Nations. Outside university campuses, there is very little support in Britain for the regime in Iran. In times past the British might have backed more positive action against the ayatollah’s arsenal. But right now the prospect of Britain participating in any military action seems pretty remote. The last 40 years have seen a rejection of military values in Britain in favor of elite self-flagellation over the supposed evils of the Empire. In a YouGov poll last year, only 11 percent of young Britons said they would definitely fight for their own country, let alone someone else’s.  If Argentina decided to launch a second invasion of the Malvinas, as they call the Falklands, they would likely find it a walkover. The post Starmer’s Latest Political Snafu: The Iran War appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Appeasing Allies When perpetuating an alliance becomes its own end, danger is not far off. The concept of “appeasement” is something invoked by foes of diplomacy who are in love with making bad Second World War analogies and applying black-and-white absolutism to the nuances of geopolitics. But there is one place where the term might actually have some constructive purpose: not for giving in to rivals by practicing diplomacy, but for giving in to the demands of allies uncritically. Such appeasement does in fact exist and is indeed dangerous, but not in the way that most who deploy the term mean. Only defense contractors and ideologues see any reason for a nation far outside the greater Middle East region to support war with Iran (or any such perpetual and costly military operations in general). The global balance of power is not at stake, and no indigenous power has the capability to dominate the entire region. But defense of the alliance is constantly cited in U.S. foreign policy circles as the primary reason to engage with Iran in partnership with Israel. While there is some debate over who is in the driver’s seat of recent operations, with President Donald Trump claiming ownership on the American end and Secretary of State Marco Rubio implying Israeli initiative on the other, the key point is that all parties involved cite the necessity of upholding the partnership between the two states as sacrosanct.  These alliance networks were built during the Cold War to combat the never-realized possibility of Soviet domination over the region. They became obsolete with the fall of the Union. Much like NATO, having lost their original impetus, they are now being retooled around increasingly abstract ends in order to justify their perpetuation in the game of primacy. And if recent rhetoric from within Israel is to be believed, these archaic alliance networks could well be on a collision course, as NATO member Turkey is increasingly viewed as the next rival for Israel in the region.  The viability of alliance networks comes from circumstance and geography. There have been many alliances that arguably have deterred war, just as there have been many, like the catastrophically rigid systems in place on the eve of the First World War, that have plunged their participants into disaster. But a general trend that can be gleaned from history is that the further afield from core interests an alliance network is, the more forced, ideological, and profit-driven they have to become in order to retain their relevance. This creates a feedback loop that turns a network of convenience into an end of self-perpetuation in itself and can lead policymakers to do things not for the publicly debated national interest, but for the alliance itself. The dual-loyalty aspect is not so much explicitly for a foreign nation, but for the international relationship network itself, above the individual countries that are the constituent parts of the alliance. The U.S.-Israeli relationship is by no means alone in this kind of artificial construction, but it is foremost in looking at this dynamic today—a relationship that must be “appeased” for its own sake rather than that of its constituent members. Now NATO itself, following the same path, will see many constituent alliance network members advocate for a reluctant public to deploy forces for some faraway conflict on behalf of a state which is not even part of their traditional defense network. With the breakdown of spatial relationships to serve the homunculus of global elite patronage, one can only imagine a backlash is growing. But the foreign policy establishments in many countries continue their work of appeasing the alliance. There is another path. The distance and geography of the United States and its first century of not only survival but prosperity show that such a country does not need permanent alliance networks, nor must constantly appease them if it does have such arrangements. If anything, the post–Cold War era in particular has shown that constructing these networks has only increased the likelihood of being dragged into conflict and experiencing backlash at home.  The United States’ founding was an effective opting-out of subordinating one’s regional interest for global commitment in the context of the British Empire. And one of its first diplomatic crises after achieving independence, the Quasi-War, occurred to extract itself from French designs of using the young and still unstable country as a pawn in its own game of global revisionism. Francophilia then was even stronger in America than the present foreign policy establishment’s love for Israel is today. But if the Washington and Adams administrations could break dependency on a supposedly permanent alliance, then it is well within the realm of possibility that a future American government could end the appeasement arrangement with Israel or any other liability state for being against the national interest. The post Appeasing Allies appeared first on The American Conservative.