The Choice Is Not About Iran Alone

A regular on GB News, James Schneider writes:

On Friday 27 February, Oman’s foreign minister, Badr bin Hamad al-Busaidi – the chief mediator between Washington and Tehran – appeared on Face the Nation. His language was restrained but unmistakable: a deal was “within our reach”. Full verification was in sight. Limits on enrichment and stockpiles were under discussion. Inspections were on the table. Less than 12 hours later, bombs fell on Tehran. The opening wave of the US-Israeli assault struck nuclear facilities, air defence systems and military infrastructure – and, in the city of Minab, a girls’ primary school, where rescue workers pulled dozens of dead children from the rubble. Iranian media later confirmed that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed. Washington and Tel Aviv call this preemptive action. The only thing it preempted was peace.

For more than 30 years Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that Iran was months – sometimes weeks – away from acquiring a nuclear weapon. The line has been constant; only the calendar has changed. Israel itself possesses nuclear weapons and is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Yet it asserts the right to decide which states may enrich uranium – and which governments may survive. Donald Trump meanwhile has dispensed with even euphemism. He has said he has “good candidates” in mind to lead Iran – treating its leadership as a vacancy to be filled in Washington.

Nor did all of this begin yesterday. For years Iran has been subject to what Washington’s own officials describe, with unsettling candour, as “economic statecraft”. At Davos in January – and again in testimony in Washington last month – US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explained that Washington had deliberately engineered a dollar shortage – blocking Iran’s access to foreign exchange, collapsing its currency and choking its ability to import – to intensify hardship and fuel unrest. “What we have done at Treasury,” he said, “is created a dollar shortage in the country… inflation exploded, and hence, we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.” The squeeze was working. Now it has become bombardment.

None of this absolves the Islamic Republic of its repression. Iran has jailed dissidents, crushed demonstrations, killed protestors and narrowed political life to a thin corridor. But liberation does not arrive in the bomb bay of a foreign power. When economic siege and aerial assault converge, the objective is not freedom. It is submission. The future of Iran should belong to the Iranian people.

Britain’s response has followed a familiar choreography. The Prime Minister insisted that the UK “did not participate” in the strikes – and did not condemn them. RAF jets are flying what Downing Street calls “defensive” missions in West Asia, intercepting Iranian retaliatory strikes. Now he has confirmed that the US has been granted permission to use British bases to target Iran’s missile capabilities, describing the move as “specific, limited and defensive”. Britain, he said, would not join “offensive action”, but would continue its defensive operations in the region. The distinction is rhetorically careful. It does not alter the material reality: British territory is being made available for a widening war.

Iran, he said earlier, must “end this now” and return to negotiations – negotiations which, hours earlier, their mediator had described as within reach. This is the grammar of subordination: disclaim responsibility, preserve alignment, absorb the consequences. Berlin and Paris echoed the line. The EU’s Ursula von der Leyen expressed concern without naming the aggressors. Spain alone broke ranks to state plainly that the assault violated international law.

Desmond Tutu once observed that if an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, neutrality is not neutral. In this case the elephant carries stealth bombers and carrier groups. To refuse to name it is to stand with it. For decades, British leaders have spoken of stability in West Asia while participating in cycles of intervention that produce the opposite. Each time, the promise is deterrence. Each time, the region emerges more fractured and more combustible. Retaliation has already struck US bases in Gulf monarchies – states now discovering that hosting US forward positions makes them a target. If escalation continues, refugee flows and state collapse will not be contained by geography.

The economic consequences are already unfolding. Dubai airport closed. Doha closed. Ansar Allah (the Houthis) has signalled renewed disruption of shipping in the Red Sea. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has warned vessels against transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes each day. Major shipping firms are rerouting cargo. Tankers are turning back. War-risk insurers are cancelling or repricing cover as premiums surge. Even the threat of disruption is enough to convulse energy markets.

That is the language of markets. Translated into ordinary life, it is simpler. Fuel prices rising within days. Food costs climbing again by summer. Higher freight costs ripple through the price of almost everything. Energy bills edging upward. Mortgage payments tightening. Public finances contracting. “Hard choices” returning to political speech. Wars in West Asia do not stay there. For people in Britain, they arrive in the weekly shop and the direct debit. For countries across Africa, Latin America and Asia, they arrive as something harsher still: higher import bills, currency pressure, and yet tighter constraints on independent development. But the immediate economic shock is only the first layer. The deeper consequence is political.

We have seen regime change before. Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya were its laboratories. They produced shattered states, proliferating militias and conflicts that radiated far beyond their borders. The disasters of the past damaged the rhetoric of regime change. They did not end the practice. What distinguishes this moment is the candour: the killing of a head of state mid-negotiation, accompanied by public discussion of his replacement.

In Munich last month, Marco Rubio proclaimed the emergence of a self-declared civilisational bloc – Euro-American, armed with the presumption of authority. The racial hierarchy embedded in that language may pass without comment in Washington and Brussels. It does not pass unnoticed elsewhere. Strip away the rhetoric and the doctrine resolves into something simpler: negotiation as theatre, sanctions as siege, force as decision. This logic is cumulative. Financial isolation. Currency collapse. Domestic unrest leveraged into political destabilisation. And if that fails, bombardment. Cuba is strangled. Iran is bombed. The instruments differ; the principle is the same.

If this model meets no meaningful resistance, it will not remain confined to Iran. It will stand as precedent. Any government that resists US strategic priorities will learn that sanctions and air strikes form a continuum, and that what passes for sovereignty is in fact obedience. Precedents are set quickly in war and dismantled slowly in peace. If this one hardens – if assassination during negotiation becomes tolerable and regime selection becomes ordinary statecraft – the architecture of international order will shift with it. Sovereignty will be further rationed.

Britain can continue to act as an auxiliary in someone else’s wars, repeating calls for restraint while refusing to name aggression. Or it can reject the doctrine that force decides legitimacy and that power, not people, determines who governs. The choice is not about Iran alone. It is about the kind of world now being constructed – and whether the British people will consent to it or contest it.