As the prime minister goes to the Middle East to try to placate friends and be a voice for peace, there has seldom been such confusion. Although everyone clearly is glad of a ceasefire, the winners of this latest development remain frustratingly unclear.
What we do know is that Sir Keir Starmer has shown himself to be on the right side of the argument. By going to see those who have suffered bombing by Iran, he has also proved himself willing to go the distance for Britain’s role in global affairs, in which we would hope to have an influence.
These are the allies whom we had committed to defend if under attack, and we have to explain both our role and our reasoning. Some have compared Sir Keir to Harold Wilson, who not only kept the UK out of the war in Vietnam as prime minister but also had surprising success in getting elected and bringing together the complicated coalition that is the Labour Party.
Geopolitics can sometimes throw up unexpected heroes, and some considerable thanks for the US-Iran ceasefire must go, on behalf of the whole world, to Pakistan. The Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, and the head of the army, Field Marshal Asim Munir, have somehow managed to gain the trust of Washington and Tehran so well that they have constructed a simultaneous diplomatic double “off-ramp” that suits both sides.
A character such as Donald Trump may have been bluffing when he promised that Iran’s ancient civilisation would “die tonight”. But it’s just as well that no one needed to find out if he was being deadly serious or not. If Pakistan’s peacemaking yields further success, then the field marshal and the prime minister may even attract the attention of the Nobel Peace Prize committee. Surely even President Trump could not begrudge them that.
The Iran war has proved worse than a “zero-sum” conflict. It has been one where all sides, and indeed virtually every other country on Earth, have lost. That includes Israel. Although Iran, to the great satisfaction of the Benjamin Netanyahu government, has undoubtedly been weakened in many respects, the Islamic Republic remains in place and has now crucially gained lucrative control over the Strait of Hormuz.
This has given Iran obvious leverage, not least in the framing of any eventual peace settlement, which may be in terms not entirely in line with Mr Netanyahu’s war aims – particularly the Israeli prime minister’s stated desire for regime change.
Inevitably, Israel, arguably the progenitor of the conflict, is being difficult about whether the truce extends to its sideshow invasion of Lebanon.
It’s obvious that the United States hasn’t got everything it wanted from this conflict, and has lost a great deal, not only in casualties and the cost of the risky, failed operations, but in its global influence and, most grievously, in the destruction of what we used to broadly call the Western alliance – principally Nato, Japan, South Korea and Australia. All have been abused and alienated.
America’s ability to project its power has thus been denuded, perhaps permanently. It has become something of an unstable, even rogue and predatory state. Mr Trump has even seen fit to revive the concept of “to the victims, the spoils” – namely oil.
In contrast, if there is one power that has quietly gained something over the last few weeks it is China, able to portray itself as a dependable partner not inclined to interfere in other countries’ affairs.
A Chinese invasion of Taiwan has been the constant prediction of US policymakers for decades. Yet America, too, has been erratically menacing and attacking its neighbours. Victims include Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba and Canada, plus the longstanding enemies in Tehran.
The Gulf states in particular will now look to Beijing and to Europe for support rather than to America, which has compromised their security so shamefully in recent weeks. Sir Keir Starmer’s visit to the region should help reassure them that at least some old friends are committed to maintaining their safety and prosperity.
The cessation of hostilities is a tremendous relief to a world that was holding its breath. In truth, both Washington and Tehran may have been looking for some face-saving mechanism to avoid further escalation, but the underlying tensions are real, combustible and, if anything, more serious than they were before the bombing raids began.
Despite President Trump’s upbeat remarks about Iran’s new leadership, and the occasional faintly placatory noises emanating from the Islamic Republic, there is a gulf, so to speak, between the two countries’ respective “peace plans”.
It will take more than the fortnight of this ceasefire to reach a sustainable settlement. A more likely outcome is that the indirect talks in Islamabad drag on while ad hoc, bilateral and messy deals are done to keep the tankers and the container ships moving through the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.
In other words, we are still set for a kind of limbo. The conflict in Iran may not be “over” in any meaningful sense for months, even years. It may indeed prove to be exactly the kind of costly and debilitating “forever war” in the Middle East that Donald Trump promised the American people he would never burden them with. He, too, will be a loser from this morass of his own making.
