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Two weeks is a short time in politics. In a bid to halt Israel’s bombing campaign in Iran, Foreign Secretary David Lammy flew to Washington DC on Friday. Following meetings with secretary of state Marco Rubio and Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to discuss “how a deal could avoid a deepening conflict”, Lammy emerged to declare: “A window now exists within the next two weeks to achieve a diplomatic solution.”
Less than 48 hours later, Iran’s uranium enrichment and nuclear technology facilities are in smoulders. Far from two weeks to negotiate, there were two days until the bombs went off. Donald Trump’s decision to target the sites in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan has shaken the regime in Tehran, but the tremors extend far beyond the Islamic Republic.
The US president has demonstrated in emphatic fashion exactly what he thinks of the UK Government and the people who lead it. Just three days ago, Keir Starmer said that while a nuclear Iran was a major threat, it was “better dealt with by way of negotiation than by way of conflict” and that ‘we need to de-escalate”.
It is being briefed that the UK took no part in the overnight bombing – boasting of your bystander status as a new world order is being born is certainly a choice – and that the Prime Minister was informed in advance.
That latter crumb-searching looks especially pitiful.
If there was a relationship between Trump’s White House and Number 10, beyond the formal and functional, the administration would not have allowed Starmer to embarrass himself by giving on-the-record quotes about the risks of a course of action the president was days away from taking.
Starmer and Lammy favoured yet more talks with Tehran, a regime that demonstrated with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that it regards negotiations and even agreements as a stalling tactic to gull naive Western leaders while its nuclear ambitions continue unabated. There are few leaders as naive as Starmer and Lammy, two men keenly interested in foreign and military affairs but fantastically out of their depth in both.
If the UK has been swept aside in Trump’s decision to hit Iran, it is not the US president but Britain’s own Prime Minister who has made his nation irrelevant. It makes little sense to speak of a Starmer foreign policy, for Starmer’s policy is merely a copy and paste of the various positions of the European Union.
and most importantly, this
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But the world does not belong to the likes of Ursula von der Leyen, Friedrich Merz or Emmanuel Macron anymore, and it certainly does not belong to their eager echoes Starmer and Lammy.
Israel and the United States have not only exploded Iran’s nuclear capabilities; they have blown to smithereens the delusions of liberal multilateralism.
Those delusions appeal to Starmer because they regard negotiation as an end in itself, rather than a means to achieving an outcome. They are about process, and if there is anything the Prime Minister believes in, its process.
Process is always the answer, even when it does not work, because process is the god of lawyers. The god of lawyers is dead, at least on the international stage. Peace through strength is back, with the United States and Israel in its vanguard.
they are out of their depth.
