UAE warns of 'uncalculated, reckless steps' amid Israel-Iran air war
June 17 (Reuters) - The foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, has warned of "uncalculated and reckless steps" that could spill out beyond the borders of Iran and Israel, according to a statement by the foreign ministry on Tuesday.
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Times
28 minutes ago
- Times
Who'll rule Iran if the ayatollahs are ousted?
Back in 2014 the US security expert Matthew Kroenig set out the difference between an Israeli and an American bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities. A US strike would, he said, impose at least a five-year delay in Iran's nuclear progress while an 'Israeli strike would only buy us two to three years'. His conclusion: let the US handle the problem. The difference between the two predicted outcomes is still politically crucial. Putting Iran's nuclear ambitions on ice for five years could coincide with a shift in thinking in the country's defence establishment, a recalculation of the value of the goal of nuclear status. A shorter delay, bought by the flattening that Israel is inflicting on Iran's enrichment centres, might merely radicalise Tehran's nuclear lobby. The calculus has changed a little since Kroenig first set out his stall in his book A Time to Attack. Iran's proxy armies have grown and then withered, the nuclear diplomacy led by Barack Obama has run its course and Iran, creaking under the weight of western sanctions, does not look much like a regional leader any more. But the principles remain the same: a US attack changes the whole Middle East order while a solo Israeli assault keeps Iran, with Russian and Chinese backing, still in contention, a wounded big beast. This is where Binyamin Netanyahu's repeated, broad hints about accelerating regime change come into play. In the absence of a US military campaign against Tehran, Israel's best bet is the installation of a credible, even partially legitimate government in Iran that decides nuclear weapons are not essential for its status in the world. More important for Iranians is the country's reintegration into the world, sensible relations with neighbours and open-minded non-corrupt government. • Israel–Iran latest: Trump demands 'unconditional surrender' from Tehran Netanyahu describes this not as a war aim but rather as a desirable by-product of a short war. Donald Trump meanwhile knows how resistant America is to a revival of neocon, impose-democracy-by-force arguments but is open to the idea that Iran's rulers can change their mind. Hence his sudden return from the G7 summit this week, his warning to residents of Tehran to flee the city and the repositioning of forces that suggest he might after all order a bunker-busting raid on Iran's mountain enrichment plant. The point: to present Iran with an existential choice between a humiliating end to the nuclear dream or a negotiated face-saving exit while the ruling establishment is still intact enough to govern. Both options on offer from the US actually point to regime change even while loudly denying it. Despite all their intelligence savviness, the CIA and Mossad cannot predict how the next few weeks will play out. But one useful template is provided by Syria, once a close ally of Tehran which bankrolled the country in return for allowing the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to establish bases and arms depots there in order to build weapons supply routes to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Assads ruled Syria from the 1970s by building corrupt networks and using the secret police to muzzle the nation. But this year, in a helter-skelter fortnight, their regime was toppled by an ex-jihadist, backed and groomed (new suits, a shorter beard) by Turkish intelligence, and Bashar al-Assad disappeared under cover of darkness to a luxury apartment in Moscow. Could the ayatollahs be toppled with such surgical precision? They too have been in power since the 1970s; they too have kept control by playing one group off against another and have, through a series of missteps, near-bankrupted their country and alienated their young people. Ahmed al-Sharaa's rise in Syria was dizzying. In November his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham took over Aleppo and Hama and cut off Damascus from Assad's Alawite strongholds on the coast. By December he was sitting in Assad's palace. Last month President Sharaa had a meeting with Trump ('he's a young, attractive tough guy'). He has now started a normalisation process with Israel, made peace with the Kurds, expelled foreign militias, kept Islamic State at bay, got some western sanctions lifted and gained access to global credit markets. Not bad for someone who in his youth had been interned by the US in Iraq, in Camp Bucca where hardened jihadists from Islamic State and al-Qaeda ignored the American guards and ran their own sharia courts. In Camp Bucca, it used to be said, you entered as a nationalist and you left as a jihadist. Now Syria's new leader has become a nationalist again, albeit a religiously observant one. Does Trump think that a similar transition can be made in Iran? It would require an intelligence-spotting operation capable of finding a strong communicator who could unite the diverse pockets of resistance: the workers in the factories, the farmers who feel cheated, the students who chafe at the intellectual closing of Iran. Traditionally in this situation a figure can emerge from prison like Nelson Mandela, or from daily persecution and bureaucratic exclusion like Lech Walesa. Iran needs not only a rallying figure but one who has the flexibility to work with non-dogmatic elements of the ancien régime; a leader could even, some suggest, emerge from modernisers within the hated IRGC, providing that they retain a sense of honour, fairness and a sensitivity to what ordinary Iranians really need and want. One thing is clear: clerical rule, backed by an iron-fisted police state machinery, has failed Iran. The old guard protects only its own interests and hidden fortunes. Every day of this exhausting gallop of a war has demonstrated they cannot defend, inspire or mobilise Iranians. The country is on the brink of implosion.
The Independent
29 minutes ago
- The Independent
Trump isn't just burning his MAGA coalition over Iran — he's inspiring a new one to rise against him
Donald Trump, in the words of one prominent supporter this week, is 'angrily hemorrhaging the coalition that returned him to power' with his open support for Israel's onslaught against Iran and his open consideration of direct U.S. involvement. On Capitol Hill, there already are signs that a new political alliance is emerging in direct defiance of the president's sudden heel turn. With Axios reporting Tuesday that the president is now actively considering direct U.S. engagement in the Israeli effort to target Iranian nuclear weapons development facilities, the illusion of Donald Trump as the 'peace' candidate is quickly dissolving away. Signs of peace in Ukraine are nonexistent. Massacres at aid distribution sites occur in Gaza, where a ceasefire is still not within reach. And despite touting his first administration's record of non-engagement in further global conflicts and his relentless campaigning on the issue of a world in chaos in 2024, Trump is now potentially poised to direct U.S. military forces to strike Iran. Republican opponents of this hawkish neoconservative view of Iran — who supported his administration engaging in the first sustained talks with Tehran in more than a decade — are furious. Monday dawned in D.C. with that tension boiling over into a dispute between former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Trump, who blasted his one-time staunch ally as 'kooky' on Truth Social and reiterated that he was bent on preventing Iran's government from developing a nuclear weapon. The president and other administration officials have fought back (without evidence) against reporters and critics who have questioned why the White House believes the Iranian nuclear program is active when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified to the contrary earlier this year. Steve Bannon, another top figure in Trumpworld, continues to trash the idea of U.S. combat operations. 'We have to stop that,' he told Carlson in a conversation on his War Room podcast Monday, referring to an order for such operations from the White House. They were joined on Tuesday by Caroline Sunshine, a former deputy communications director for the Trump campaign, who posted an essay on Twitter urging against U.S. military support for the war. 'The USA has nothing to gain from getting involved in another war in the Middle East. Young strong Americans will die early deaths, gas prices will go up as oil rises, China would love seeing us distracted in yet another costly prolonged conflict, and President Trump's entire domestic agenda of mass deportations for illegal immigrants & tariffs to rebuild the American middle class will be totally derailed by the distraction of war,' she wrote. 'President Trump is a chess player. I pray all of this is an elaborate ruse to get Iran to fold like Reagan did with the USSR,' she added. Others on the right see the issue, led by Trump's own decisions and actions, as having the real possibility of irreparably damaging the MAGA voting coalition. Younger voters especially are skeptical of U.S. military interventionism, and younger males made up a growing and significant part of the president's winning voting bloc in 2024. On Tuesday, Curt Mills of the American Conservative magazine wrote that the political damage from the Iran conflict was already becoming apparent. Mills, who wrote that Trump was voluntarily 'hemorrhaging' his alliances on the right, was apoplectic about the possibility of the U.S. becoming involved in a drawn-out conflict with Iran — it was evident across his Twitter feed. Like Bannon, Mills and other 'paleo' conservatives fret that a war with Iran could become the same kind of protracted struggle that led to the occupation of Iraq and subsequent war against the Islamic State, or the pullout of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and collapse of the democratic Afghan government in the face of a Taliban insurgency. 'Tacky jingoism. Will end in tears,' said Mills in a tweet, deriding Trump's boasting of achieving 'total' control of Iranian airspace. 'Is that what tens of millions of frustrated and desperate Americans put their faith in this person to achieve? I missed that part. Though heard a lot about 'no more endless wars'. 'The tragic, full circle of destroying the Bush monarchy only to enact their policy— dangerously complete,' Mills continued, referring to Trump's public skewering of former Gov. Jeb Bush and his brother, President George W. Bush, during his first run for the presidency. Mills pleaded: 'Can still pull back'. He also warned that the growing and bipartisan group of lawmakers on Capitol Hill signing on to a resolution led by Thomas Massie, a non-MAGA Republican with a libertarian streak and history of bucking Trump, over restricting the president from going to war with Iran was a sign of a strong, unifying political force mobilizing against the president. Centrist Democrats and progressives alike were coming together around an issue while the national Democratic Party's battle over its identity rages on. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was one of the first to sign on to Massie's resolution, which does not yet include any other Republicans. Some GOPers typically close to the president, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), have already expressed their own opposition to war with Iran. In the Senate, a resolution is being led by Tim Kaine — the center-left Virginia Democrat who was Hillary Clinton's running mate in 2016, to give an idea of the breadth of the agreement on the left. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Pennsylvania progressive who has openly tried to build bridges with populist Republicans, was at it again on Tuesday afternoon. As the possibility of war seemed to draw closer, he made an open appeal for Greene and other House conservatives to sign on to Massie's resolution. Their reluctance may be the only political silver lining for Trump in this moment, even if it's a sign of the president's own electoral strength, rather than ideological agreement. Tweeting at Greene, Rep. Chip Roy and others, Khanna issued his rallying call: 'We have 14 progressives. Let us show anti war is no longer partisan.'
Telegraph
36 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Starmer's platitudes show Britain frozen out of big decisions on Iran
Expressions of concern, calls for de-escalation. As the 20-year crisis over Iran's nuclear ambitions reaches its historic climax, Britain has resorted to a policy of platitudes. Sir Keir Starmer wants no part in Israel's offensive against the Iranian regime and its nuclear plants. He will keep Britain as far away as possible from this campaign, and there is no reason to suppose that his position will change even if American forces were to join the assault, as anonymous US officials have been hinting. That is an entirely defensible position. Israel's bombs could yet achieve nothing but impose a short delay in Iran's quest for a nuclear weapon. The uranium enrichment plant at Natanz has been severely damaged, wrecking thousands of centrifuges, but the second such facility, buried in a mountain at Fordow, seems to have escaped attack so far. If Iran's regime manages to survive the onslaught and then repair the damage in a few months before going for a nuclear weapon as rapidly as possible, then Israel will have failed and Britain's decision to stay out will look entirely sensible. But the campaign may not end that way and, in the meantime, Sir Keir's empty bromides doom Britain to diplomatic irrelevance. There is simply no reason for Iran or Israel – and certainly not the United States – to listen to a word that the Prime Minister or his Government say on this subject. Britain wishes to have nothing to do with the enterprise, and therefore it cannot expect to have any influence over what happens next. That leaves Sir Keir with one deeply traditional goal of British diplomacy: to avoid an open breach with America. Hence the Prime Minister's claims that Donald Trump is fully behind 'de-escalation' and has no intention of joining the military campaign. Having dined with Mr Trump at the G7 summit on Monday, Sir Keir declared: 'There is nothing the president said that suggests he's about to get involved in this conflict.' Alas, straight after the summit, Mr Trump said plenty to suggest exactly that. He declared variously that 'we' have 'total control of the skies over Iran' and 'we' know 'exactly where the so-called 'Supreme Leader' is hiding' and Ayatollah Khamenei's only way out was 'unconditional surrender'. John Healey, the Defence Secretary, claimed heroically that Mr Trump was 'leading the calls for Iran to do a deal ', which is true if your definition of 'calls' includes issuing blood-curdling threats. If America now joins forces with Israel – and if this crisis ends with the total destruction of Iran's nuclear programme and perhaps the downfall of the regime – then Britain will have been a bystander in a moment of epoch-making importance. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but given that British diplomats and politicians have been deeply engaged in the Iran nuclear issue ever since the Natanz plant was first discovered in 2002, it seems strange, after all that effort, to choose irrelevance at the most decisive hour of the saga.
