There was a time when Nigel Farage warned us not to take foreign policy advice from the American President.
In 2015, with Barack Obama in the White House, he tweeted: “We don’t need to take foreign policy advice from the American President. The last time we did that it was called the Iraq War. We should be wary.” He has long described Iraq as a disaster, not in Britain’s national interest, a conflict that destabilised a region and left us paying for decisions made elsewhere.
And Iraq did not unravel because the invasion was tactically difficult. It unravelled afterwards. The regime fell quickly. Then came the vacuum, the looting, the insurgency, the slow realisation that no one had properly worked through what the day after was meant to look like. Remove Saddam, fine. Then what? That part was never convincingly answered.
That was the lesson. Or so we were told.
Now we are asked to “back the Americans in this vital fight against Iran”. That is Farage’s current line, along with support for regime change and the use of British bases. The caution of 2015 has become something closer to enthusiasm.
And what exactly are we backing?
Donald Trump talks about missiles, naval power, nuclear capability, proxies, timelines that may be short or may stretch on. The scope shifts depending on the speech. Trump’s background is in business and television. He is a political operator, not someone who has spent decades managing post-conflict states.
Marco Rubio explains that the United States moved because Israel was about to move and Washington expected retaliation. So America acted first. That means the timing was not driven solely by a neat US strategy document or by the collapse of negotiations. It was shaped by an ally’s imminent decision. Britain, in turn, is being asked to align with Washington’s response to that.
Pete Hegseth says this will not become another endless war, though he does not entirely close the door on escalation. J.D. Vance says the aim is simple, that the United States is at war with Iran’s nuclear programme rather than Iran itself, and that diplomacy is preferred.
Except diplomacy was actually happening.
There were indirect talks mediated by Oman. Meetings in Geneva described as serious. Technical sessions planned. No formal declaration that negotiations had collapsed beyond repair. Strikes took place while that process was still live.
And who was conducting those talks for the Americans? Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Both experienced negotiators in property, finance and political deal-making. Kushner had a hand in the Abraham Accords. But neither is a career arms-control specialist steeped in enrichment limits, inspection regimes and compliance mechanisms. They are trusted envoys and dealmakers, not architects of nuclear non-proliferation frameworks.
Yet Farage’s instinct in all this is alignment, not hesitation.
Pause for a moment and look at the range of explanations on offer. Is this a tightly defined operation against specific nuclear facilities? Or is it a broader attempt to weaken Iran’s military capacity more generally? Is it pre-emption triggered by Israel’s timetable? Is it regime change in all but name, with the small matter of what follows left conveniently vague? And if diplomacy was still in motion, what exactly marked the point at which it was judged irretrievably futile?
These are not minor distinctions. They point to different risks and different outcomes. Regime change in particular drags us back to Iraq’s awkward question: once you topple the regime, who governs, who keeps order, who stops the vacuum from being filled by something worse?
If Iraq was wrong because there was no serious plan for what followed, then Iran has an uncomfortably familiar feel. The stated aims move around. The diplomatic track was interrupted rather than exhausted. No one has set out, in plain language, what success looks like beyond stopping a bomb and weakening a regime.
Farage once told us to be wary of following the American President into war. That was not an unreasonable position. If prudence was the principle then, it should be the principle now.
No comments:
Post a Comment