Donald Trump appears to be enjoying keeping the world guessing as to whether he will intervene against Iran. A teasing comment that the US military “may or may not” join the Israeli strikes on suspected nuclear sites; a throwaway suggestion that the supreme leader is safe “…for now”; and now a declaration that he will make a decision on whether or not to “go” within “the next two weeks”.
And so it has fallen to Sir Keir Starmer to be the grown-up in the room.
The prime minister today made his government’s priorities clear, calling for a “return to diplomacy”, warning against actions that would “ramp up the situation”, “cooling tensions”. It is a level of seriousness that the situation in the Middle East deserves.
Sir Keir agrees that the Iranian nuclear issue has to be dealt with – “but it’s better dealt with by way of negotiations than by way of conflict”. It’s a soundbite that could suggest an intention to tell the US president, if he came asking for British participation in action in support of Israel, that Britain would invoke the precedent of Harold Wilson’s refusal to provide Lyndon Johnson with military assistance in Vietnam.
Iran’s nuclear ambitions are real enough. When he appeared in front of the foreign affairs committee on Tuesday, Seyed Ali Mousavi, the Iranian ambassador to the United Kingdom, was unable to explain why his government should want weapons-grade enriched uranium, which is no use for civil nuclear power.
What is less clear is whether Iran is, or was, on the threshold of making a usable weapon. Despite speculation for decades that Iran is years, or months, away from making a nuclear bomb, it has never actually seemed imminent. Given the extent of Israeli intelligence penetration of the Iranian secret state, made evident by the assassination of several military leaders and nuclear scientists in recent days, we would have expected Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to have let the world know about it if there was evidence that Iran was about to acquire nuclear capability.
Even if the Israeli strikes had been justified, however, what is even less clear is whether military action is the best way to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons in future. This is the critical issue for the British government as world leaders consider the way forward.
Peter Ricketts, Britain’s former national security adviser, put it pithily on Wednesday, saying of Iran’s rulers that bombing raids would “reinforce their determination to keep working on a nuclear weapon when this round of fighting is over”. As he said: “Just coming back and bombing them every few years is not going to make the world safer.”
Now, Sir Keir should tell Donald Trump that he was right to pursue negotiations with the Iranian government – talks that were interrupted by the unilateral Israeli action. Mr Trump evidently thought that those negotiations were making progress towards the goal of verifiable restrictions on Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons.
And it may be that Mr Trump’s bellicose language since then has been designed, however crudely, to push Iran’s leaders back to the negotiating table, now that they have seen what the alternative looks like.
The British government’s leverage is limited, but it does have some and it should deploy it. If the US wants to use the British Diego Garcia base on the Chagos Islands to launch attacks on Iran, it should be refused.
We will not labour the comparison with the US invasion of Iraq. The Independent led the campaign of opposition to Britain’s role in that disaster, but we failed to keep Britain out of it.
We may have been vindicated by events – but the important thing is to avoid making the mistake in the first place. We hope that Sir Keir, the Labour Party and the wider political establishment have learnt from history, and that they will refuse to follow another US president into another counterproductive and ill-judged conflict.
