How does America's Iran strike affect UK security?
What have we learned of material relevance to the UK's security from Trump's bombing of Iran's uranium enrichment sites?
First, Trump does not need European support for offensives of global significance.
This is a military version of the American unilateralism he manifested with his tariffs.
It feels a lifetime away from the courtship between Bush and Blair more than 20 years ago that preceded the invasion of Iraq.Second, there is a conspicuous limit to how much sensitive information the American president will share even with a leader such as Keir Starmer, whom Trump says he likes.
Note that on Tuesday the prime minister was at pains to try to persuade me that none of Trump's public statements were suggestive of an imminent US strike on Iran.
I was sceptical and the PM insisted I was quite wrong. Starmer's denials make sense only if Trump did not confide in him and - possibly - misled him.Third, Starmer and all European leaders will know that the corollary of the US as the supreme military superpower acting unilaterally is that European countries are under even more pressure to invest more in their/our own defences, because if Trump does not need us, he will feel even less obliged to help us.
This week's NATO leaders meeting will now be even more about accelerating a rapid increase in European spending on defence than it would anyway have been.Fourth, it is conspicuous that Starmer has not endorsed the American strike on three nuclear sites.
Trump will have noticed. It is however unclear whether this will introduce tension into the relationship between Downing St and the Whitehouse.Fifth, UK intelligence experts continue to believe that it is impossible to eradicate the nuclear threat from Iran using only missile and air attacks, no matter how devastating the bombs that are deployed.
This is why Starmer and foreign secretary David Lammy continue to hope Iran will come to the negotiating table.
Sixth, this is a super high risk moment for the stability of the Middle East. But those who know the Iranian regime well tell me they believe the likeliest outcome is neither a major escalation of the conflict into a wider regional war or a peace breakthrough.
They expect a tawdry muddling through that saves the face of the Tehran regime. Which means the pernicious tit-for-tat attacks between Iran and Israel would continue - till the next crisis.
PS The UK and European position is that a sustainable end to Iran's conflict with Israel requires a ceasefire in Gaza and meaningful progress towards the creation of a peaceful Palestinian state.
But European leaders shed no light on how this can possibly happen, given that Trump is so supportive of the belligerence of prime minister Netanyahu and his government.
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NBC News
38 minutes ago
- NBC News
Iran strikes push Vance, a foreign intervention skeptic, into the role of salesman
When he endorsed Donald Trump's 2024 presidential bid, then-Sen. JD Vance framed his support around a simple idea: Trump had started no wars in his first term. Now serving as his vice president, Vance is being called on to make a more complicated case in defense of Trump's decision Saturday to drop bombs on nuclear enrichment sites in Iran. Vance was by Trump's side in the White House Situation Room during the strikes, and at the televised address to announce them. And the next morning, he appeared on two Sunday news shows to answer for the United States' direct plunge into a conflict between Israel and Iran. The U.S., Vance asserted on NBC News' ' Meet the Press,' was not at war with Iran but, rather, with Iran's nuclear weapons program. Diplomacy, Vance added, 'was never given a real chance by the Iranians.' And on ABC's ' This Week,' Vance argued that Trump's contention that Iran's nuclear capabilities had been 'completely and totally obliterated' was not meaningfully different from a tamer characterization in The New York Times that the program had been 'severely damaged.' Vance's salesmanship Sunday — amplified along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio's by the White House's rapid response team in a stream of clips posted on social media — was not out of line with some of his more hawkish statements on Iran. But his TV appearances were also meant to reassure others who, like Vance, have been broadly skeptical of or opposed to foreign intervention. 'I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East,' Vance said on 'Meet the Press.' 'I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America's national security objectives.' A clash with Iran, Vance added, 'is not going to be some long, drawn out thing. We've got in, we've done the job of setting their nuclear program back. We're going to now work to permanently dismantle that nuclear program over the coming years, and that is what the president has set out to do. Simple principle: Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.' Vance 'was selected to be VP in part for situations exactly like this,' said a person close to Trump's team who was granted anonymity to share internal thinking. 'The president has total trust in his ability to effectively communicate the administration's message, especially in hostile territory, in a manner that can bring his coalition together, instead of dividing it,' this person added. A divided coalition has been a concern inside Trump world since Israel launched air strikes against Iran last week, prompting retaliation from Iran — and fears that the U.S. would soon become more directly involved in the conflict. Many influential figures in Trump's MAGA movement, from former Trump adviser Steve Bannon to young right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, have strong isolationist or anti-intervention views and popular platforms from which to share them. Vance himself has been a tip of the spear for such positions, which he articulated in the January 2023 guest column he wrote to endorse Trump in the Wall Street Journal. Several people in Trump's orbit have cited that endorsement, which came at a low moment in Trump's 2024 campaign, as a key building block in a relationship that blossomed into the vice presidency. 'In Mr. Trump's four years in office, he started no wars despite enormous pressure from his own party and even members of his own administration,' Vance wrote in the column, which appeared online under the headline 'Trump's Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.' 'Not starting wars is perhaps a low bar, but that's a reflection of the hawkishness of Mr. Trump's predecessors and the foreign-policy establishment they slavishly followed,' Vance added. That worldview, held by Vance and others, was at the time particularly potent given far-right opposition to U.S. intervention in Russia's war against Ukraine. But those close to Vance note that he has over time applied a more nuanced thinking toward Iran. Speaking last year on a show hosted by Morgan Ortagus, a foreign policy operative who has served Trump as a deputy special presidential envoy to the Middle East, Vance called for an 'aggressive' approach to ensure that Iran does not develop or deploy a nuclear weapon. 'And if, God forbid, they get there, then I think you have to be willing to take some extreme steps — if they're going to be effective — to ensure that they don't have a broader nuclear capability, that they can't launch nuclear missiles all over the Middle East or even all over the world,' Vance said in the interview. 'I think we have to be aggressive with this, and I come at this from a position of some restraint in foreign policy. I think war often leads to unintended consequences but preventing Iran from getting a bomb — really, really important.' In a Fox News interview during last year's Republican National Convention, Vance held up Trump's first term drone attack that killed Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani as an example of smart leadership. 'A lot of people recognize that we need to do something with Iran, but not these weak little bombing runs,' Vance told host Sean Hannity. 'If you're going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard. And that's what he did when he took out Soleimani.' More recently, at last month's Munich Leaders Conference in Washington, Vance described Iran's nuclear program as a tipping point. 'We really think that if the Iran domino falls, you're going to see nuclear proliferation all over the Middle East,' Vance said. 'That's very bad for us. It's very bad for our friends. And it's something that we don't think can happen.' Last week, as anticipation of U.S. intervention grew, Vance used his personal X account to issue a 374-word preemptive defense of whatever Trump might decide to do with Iran. The president, Vance wrote, 'has earned some trust on this issue. And having seen this up close and personal, I can assure you that he is only interested in using the American military to accomplish the American people's goals. Whatever he does, that is his focus.'
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
How the carefully planned US bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities unfolded
Late on Friday night, eight US B-2 bombers took off from Whiteman air force base in Missouri and turned westwards towards the Pacific. Amateur flight trackers plotted their progress on social media as the black flying-wing warplanes joined up mid-air with refuelling tankers and checked in with air traffic controllers once they had reached the open ocean. The movement of the B-2 bombers towards the US Pacific base on Guam triggered speculation that Donald Trump was arranging pieces on the board before a decision on whether to join Israel in bombing Iranian nuclear facilities. On Thursday, Trump had let it be known that he would make that decision over the following two weeks, suggesting a window remained open for some last-ditch diplomatic alternative to war. He angrily denied a Wall Street Journal report that he had already approved a strike plan. The British, French and German foreign ministers seized the opportunity to meet their Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, for talks in Geneva on Friday but to little or no avail. Trump himself was characteristically dismissive of European efforts. 'Nah, they didn't help,' he told journalists. We know now that and the B-2 flights over the Pacific were part of the same elaborate ruse to ensure Iran was off its guard and looking the wrong way, and that the president's declared two-week diplomatic window was likely to be part of the same ploy. The Pentagon described the eight bombers that were spotted flying west as a decoy, a deception effort known only to an extremely small number of planners and leaders in Washington and at central command headquarters in Tampa, Florida. As they were tracked across the western states and then the Pacific, another seven B-2s took off from Whiteman base and headed in the opposite direction – eastwards. These seven planes made no communications with each other or with the ground as they crossed America and flew unnoticed over the Atlantic. The planes and their two-pilot crews flew all day and into Saturday night, refuelled mid-air along the way by tankers that had been deployed to Europe over the previous week. The careful orchestration and prepositioning, some of it predating the Israeli surprise attack on Iran on 13 June, raises questions over how early Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu decided to join forces to go to war against Iran, and over how much of the US president's professed interest in a diplomatic solution, and apparent effort to discourage an Israeli attack, was all part of the charade. As far back as May, during a visit to Doha, Trump went out of his way to denigrate the B-2's design, declaring 'I'm not a huge believer in stealth', because it made for an 'ugly plane'. By the time the flight of seven of these ugly planes arrived in the Middle East at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, it was midnight local time on Saturday. The mission they had been assigned was codenamed Midnight Hammer, and to carry it out the bombers were joined by an escort of US fighter jets, surveillance and reconnaissance planes deployed in the region earlier – 125 aircraft in all. Together they flew on eastwards, with hardly a word exchanged between the pilots, to maintain the all-enveloping secrecy surrounding the operation. At the same time as the warplanes reached the Lebanese coast, a US submarine loitering somewhere in the Arabian Sea launched Tomahawk cruise missiles, synchronised to reach their targets in Iran at the same time the bombers arrived. The Tomahawks flew low over the Gulf of Oman and up over south-east Iran as seven B-2s and their accompanying fighters crossed Lebanon, Syria and Iraq (according to a map provided by the Pentagon on Sunday) and entered Iran from the north-west at about 1.30am local time. The chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, Dan Caine, described the whole operation as 'a complex, tightly timed manoeuvre requiring exact synchronisation across multiple platforms in a narrow piece of airspace, all done with minimal communications'. The primary target was the farthest north, near the Shia religious centre of Qom, the underground enrichment facility at Fordow, generally thought impregnable to every conventional weapon with the possible exception of America's biggest bomb, the 30,000lb (13,500kg) GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The seven B-2s approaching from the north were each carrying two of them. The second target was Natanz, Iran's first enrichment facility, and the third was a complex of facilities outside the ancient city of Isfahan, which is linked to other parts of the nuclear fuel cycle, and which had already been partly damaged by Israeli bombing. Before the bombers arrived at these targets, according to Caine's account, their fighter escort swept the area for any sign of Iranian warplanes, released decoys and opened fire on air defence sites on the ground. Apparently, there was no return fire. The Pentagon was 'unaware of any shots fired at the US strike package'. Iran's defensive shield had been flattened over the preceding week by relentless Israeli sorties. The bombers struck between 2.10am and 2.35am Iranian time, the Pentagon said, hitting Fordow at 'several aim points'. It was the first time the enormous GBU-57 bunker-busting bomb had been used in a US operation. It is unclear how many of the total of 14 were dropped on Natanz or Isfahan. The Tomahawk missiles fired by the navy were all aimed at Isfahan, Caine said, and landed slightly after the other two facilities were struck. The US warplanes turned around and headed back the way they had come, leaving Iranian airspace at 3am. By that time, reports had surfaced on Iranian media of explosions in the region of the nuclear facilities, and a quarter hour later, Trump confirmed the operation in the way he has made most of his presidential announcements – on his private online platform, Truth Social, complete with key words in all-capitals. 'A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow,' Trump wrote. 'All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!' Addressing the nation a little later on television, Trump said the targets had been 'totally and completely obliterated', a claim that was modified over the course of Sunday to 'severely damaged'. The president appealed once more for Iran to sue for peace, which he has made clear would involve a surrender of all its nuclear programme. The message was repeated by other members of the administration throughout the day. Midnight Hammer would be a one-off US intervention, as long as Iran did not try to fire back and complied with the terms laid down by him and Netanyahu. Any retaliation, Trump said, returning to all caps on Truth Social, would be met with 'FORCE FAR GREATER THAN WHAT WAS WITNESSED TONIGHT'. By the end of Sunday, however, there was no sign of compliance from Tehran. Araghchi, vowed that Midnight Hammer would have 'everlasting consequences' adding that Iran reserved the right to 'all options to defend its sovereignty, interest, and people'. Iran played down the impact of the US bombs, saying that the country's reserves of high-enriched uranium had been removed from Fordow long before, and all the damage inflicted could be repaired. On Sunday morning, Iran launched a new salvo of missiles at Israel, one of which flattened most of a city block in north Tel Aviv. By the end of the day, Iran's parliament had approved a bill calling for the closing of the strait of Hormuz, the gateway to the Persian Gulf, through which over a fifth of the world's oil needs flows daily. Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, warned that the US must 'receive a response' to its attacks. Tehran has previously threatened to target US bases spread across eight countries in the region, if the US were to join the Israeli attacks. In reality, its military capabilities are constrained by the withering attacks of the past 10 days, but late on Sunday the regime was saying it would explore all its options, while making clear that submission was not one of them.
Times
an hour ago
- Times
Who are Iran's allies — and will any help after the US strikes?
Iran's foreign minister will hold a 'serious consultation' with President Putin in Moscow on Monday after US strikes on its nuclear facilities. Seyed Abbas Araghchi said the American attacks were 'outrageous and will have everlasting consequences'. Russia has described them as a violation of international law. Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president, accused President Trump of starting 'another war' and said the prospect of a US ground operation is now 'looming on the horizon'. 'And now we can say it outright, the future production of nuclear weapons will continue,' he said. 'A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.'The US launched co-ordinated airstrikes overnight against three Iranian nuclear sites — Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan — in what Trump described as a 'very successful attack'. The strikes, widely anticipated after days of mounting tension, came after repeated warnings from Moscow that any direct US action on Iranian soil would amount to a dangerous escalation. Putin is yet to comment publicly on the strikes but despite fiery rhetoric from members of his government, there has been no signal that Russia is preparing a military response. Since Israel began attacking Iran on June 13 in an operation dubbed 'Rising Lion', Russian action has been limited to condemnation and an offer to mediate between the two last week's St Petersburg economic forum, Putin reiterated that Iran had not asked Russia for any military assistance and emphasised that mutual co-operation did not include defence obligations. The 20‑year strategic co-operation deal signed last year between Moscow and Tehran excluded a mutual defence clause. Iran's other allies and its neighbours were quick to condemn the US action, warning that it could precipitate all-out war in the Middle East, but they also stopped short of offering any concrete support. China 'strongly condemned' the attack on Iran, saying it violated 'the purposes and principles of the UN charter and international law', and called for a ceasefire. Lebanon's Hezbollah, once Iran's most powerful proxy, said on Sunday that it had no immediate plans to retaliate. The militants, themselves decimated after a year and a half of war with Israel, have not launched a single attack since the operation Houthis, in Yemen, offered the strongest pledge of action, saying they supported a previous statement from their armed wing, which threatened US naval vessels in the Red Sea in solidarity. Specific details of what Iran will request from Russia during the forthcoming talks have not been officially disclosed by either government, but Araghchi could seek to secure the Kremlin's political or diplomatic backing. Experts said that with resources tied up with the war in Ukraine, Russia is unlikely to be preparing to come to Tehran's rescue. Putin did little to stop the advance of rebels in Syria in December last year who toppled a key Russian ally, Bashar al-Assad, from power. 'Putin will of course fire out a lot of aggressive rhetoric … but he can't do much, ' said Ian Garner, a historian and academic focused on Russian culture and war propaganda. 'It will likely be a case that Putin's bark is very loud but his bite is about as toothless as it gets.' Fyodor Lukyanov, head of Russia's council on foreign and defence policy, which advises the Kremlin, said that Putin's statements in recent days show he is extremely cautious. 'He has never expressed any assessment of one side or the other, only about the need for negotiations and a peaceful solution,' he said. 'Iran may have expected more. It has supplied the Kremlin with thousands of drones and missiles used in the war against Ukraine.'
