No. of Recommendations: 6
One would think that somebody with half a brain in Whitehall would be telling Starmer that the Iranian regime is teetering on the brink and that if the Americans think they can tip the balance, maybe it's in Britain's interest to let them do it.
But maybe it's not. It probably isn't. "Tipping the balance" through direct military intervention is an incredibly risky proposition, and one that can have enormous destabilizing impacts throughout the Middle East. I can't imagine that the Administration has given Britain much confidence in thinking that they've got a plan for the aftermath of "tipping the balance," much less given Britain any role in shaping a plan for the region. That's not their style.
Nor would Britain benefit from the larger implications of doing this, which were the reasons they publicly cited. The U.S. has no justification for taking military action against Iran. Other than the Thucydidean rationale, that is. There's no legal basis for attacking Iran under the existing international rules-based order, and there's been no effort to obtain such a justification.
U.S. policy is now to disdain international rules-based systems, since all they do is restrain the big countries in service of the small countries. And since we're a big countries, that's not "America First." But Britain is a small country, not a big one. They're far worse off in a world where the big do as they will and the small suffer as they must, rather than an international community where all the small gather together and try to enforce a legal structure against the big. The "middle powers" team, as Canada might put it.
So it's not really a smart move for them to actively enable the U.S. to attack a sovereign nation with no inciting incident to warrant that invasion. And given that the U.S. doesn't appear to have shown their work on why an attack is either justified or is likely to lead to a good outcome for Britain (or anyone in particular), there's not a whole lot of reason why they would say "yes" to such a request.
One reason they might have said "yes" in the past is a spirit of cooperation and mutual trust. But those are things that the current Administration disdains and has discarded.
Hence, we get told "no" when we might have been told "yes." Because, if we decide that Britain's contribution of the use of their military facilities and mutual cooperation - and subordination of their military strategy to the direction of the U.S. by taking a subordinating role in national security measures - doesn't add much to the alliance to be worth acknowledging by treating them better, it's no surprise those things might not be on offer any more.
