The fate of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei along with the head of the mighty Revolutionary Guards and the country’s defence minister and security corps, decimated in a precision air strike which reduced over four-decades of theocratic regime in Tehran to rubble, is the most pivotal moment for Donald Trump’s impact on the world outside America.
Its aftermath will also the most testing to date for US allies. In immediate terms, this is an American success. The risk lies in the vast uncertainty about how to control the fallout.
An Iran with its leadership decimated by air strikes is in a different position to one with its monopoly power intact. That changes the calculus in terms of its ability to project force using its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.
The difficulty for the UK – which has long occupied the position of the “little Satan” ally of the US in Tehran’s eyes, and is subject to significant ongoing cyberattacks from Iran – is how to respond to a range of options after the lethal strike.
For Keir Starmer – a distinctly un-supreme leader at home, teetering after a disastrous by-election in Manchester, ministerial unrest and internal divisions on immigration and asylum policy – conflict in the Middle East is wildcard factor.
On one level, the sheer significance of the weekend’s events in the Gulf is not the worst news for him, because they put Labour’s tendency to introspective parochialism in sombre perspective. While senior figures such as Lucy Powell, Angela Rayner and Shabana Mahmood fight out proxy wars about what “Labour values” and “being bold” mean in practice, the Tehran assault is a reminder that any potential replacement to Starmer would also face the possibility of the 3am wake-up call telling them that some major incident or retaliation is under way.
Like him, they would be asked to give or withhold signatures on use of British bases or key pieces of targeting information for US strikes involving UK capacity. For all the qualities of the main competitors for Starmer’s role, being titans of international statesmanship is not their most obvious calling card – as one loyalist minister texts tartly: “Imagine, calling for Angela Rayner to take the helm in situation like this.”
Starmer himself has chosen a milk-and-water response. He says he wills the end of the regime in Tehran because of its nuclear proliferation and support for terror – but that is a statement of the obvious and takes us nowhere in concrete terms. He talks of the “safety of UK nationals in the region” (to which the obvious answer is – if you don’t want to be in the way of Iranian missiles and a potential wider conflict, don’t bank on life being a breeze in low-tax Dubai and Bahrain).
He embraces “efforts to reach a negotiated solution” with Iran over its build-up of enriched uranium, an area where the UK has pretty much zero influence. Oman, seen as the major “balancing power” in the competitive alignment of the Gulf States, has been mediating talks over a nuclear deal intended to prevent these attacks – in vain. If wealthy Gulf states with strong regional levers to pull could not persuade Tehran to abide by nuclear restraint, it is unlikely that a nice note from a European leader would do so.
But the PM is calculating that his caution suits both his party and a large swathe of public opinion which is wary of over-commitment in Iran, with the wounds of the Iraq war and Libya interventions still fresh in minds. The Greens and Lib Dems, as well as many on his own side, are critical of successive governments being too pliant to US requests for UK assistance in open-ended military interventions.
The price of this abstention today, however, is enraging Donald Trump, already furious with the UK over the Chagos deal, which involves a long lease on the US-UK Diego Garcia military, satellite and signals base. Trump has been mercurial on the matter – initially welcoming and then turning against the “stupidity” of a lease-based solution. From Washington’s perspective, the weekend’s events have crystallised frustration after the UK Government blocked both the use of the Chagos base and other RAF bases.
In the Trump worldview, that is akin to being denied help that was asked for. It is not easily forgiven – and the President is not the forgiving type at the best of times.
So, what looks like sensible restraint here in the UK will upset the apple cart of Starmer-Trump relations. In essence, the 2025 model of wrangling a difficult US President was to assuage his vanity with polite dealings and a state visit, to leverage some minor advantages in the scrap so as to avoid the worst effects of tariffs on UK exports.
It was also symbolic that the UK was not lumped in with “Europe” – as the US separates itself off from the security interests of the continent and lambasts continental leaders for lack of vision and generally being losers.
This feels like a receding advantage. Britain will now have to figure out how it manages its close defence and economic relations with the Gulf States – UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain are all part of the UK’s military presence in the Middle East, as well as very large buyers of British weapons and defence systems.
For that reason, it is not as easy to sit on the fence when deciding how to handle conflict with Iran, as the present tentative reaction suggests.
Oil price rises, if the conflict deepens, will drive big consumers to natural gas, triggering spikes in gas and electricity prices, just as the Government has been trumpeting a fall in these for consumers. Oil prices still remain a third higher, however, than before the war in Ukraine – and another geopolitical oil shock looks hard to avoid.
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Britain now sits awkwardly between its ongoing close intelligence and nuclear ties to the US – and a President falling out of love with the UK in his highly personalised way of making and breaking alliances. The Ukraine crisis heralded a wave of democratic governments voted out in the turbulent elections that followed –in the US, UK, France and many other European states.
For Starmer, sitting out support for air strikes on legal grounds now is a no-brainer. A lot more thinking and some awkward choices won’t be so easy to dodge in the perilous weeks and months ahead.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico and co-host of the Politics at Sam and Anne’s podcast
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