The Means to Act
Values Without Power: The Cost of Strategic Dependence
The Government has chosen not to take part in the initial strikes against Iran’s nuclear programme. That decision, taken in the name of international law, is one the Prime Minister is fully entitled to make. Indeed, it is the decision many would expect from him.
He has long argued that the authority of international law must stand above the expediencies of power. Within the Labour Party, both in Parliament and among its supporters across the country, this view is widely shared. No one should pretend that the Government has acted contrary to its convictions, or to the political mandate upon which it was elected.
But recognising the Government’s right to take this position does not oblige us to agree with it.
Indeed, recent events have clarified several uncomfortable truths. Iran’s response to the strikes has demonstrated the danger posed by the regime and strengthened the case for preventing it from acquiring nuclear weapons. Britain’s own response has been dangerously passive, leaving our citizens, allies and forces exposed. This passivity reflects decades of neglect that have steadily eroded the country’s ability to defend itself and those who depend upon it. And it illustrates a deeper truth: values and international law carry weight in the world only when nations possess the means to defend them.
For my part, I take a different view. The Iranian regime has declared itself, through its actions over decades, not merely an adversary but an enemy. For years it has armed and directed militias across the Middle East, sowing violence from Lebanon to Yemen, threatening states across the region, including many Arab governments. It has also sponsored terrorism beyond the Middle East, including on our own soil. These are not the actions of a state seeking peaceful coexistence.
Now, following the strikes by the United States and Israel, the regime has answered with volleys of drones and ballistic missiles launched toward nearly every nation within reach. These attacks have not been confined to military targets. Civilian infrastructure and centres of population have been struck, and states that played no direct role in the initial operation have found themselves under attack.
This behaviour should give us pause. Rather than confining its retaliation to those responsible for the strikes, Iran has responded by spreading violence across the region, threatening a wide range of states including the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Oman. These are not the actions of a government narrowly defending itself. They are the actions of a regime seeking to demonstrate resolve, reinforce its ideological posture, and show that it is willing to destabilise the entire region in pursuit of its aims.
Such conduct reveals something important about the nature of the government in Tehran. It suggests a regime less concerned with protecting its own population from the consequences of war than with defending its authority and projecting its revolutionary ideology. A government that sanctifies martyrdom and prizes ideological struggle above stability cannot easily be assumed to share the same instinct for restraint that has governed the nuclear powers of the past.
If such a regime were to acquire nuclear weapons, the consequences would be grave. The strikes now falling across the Gulf offer a troubling glimpse of how a future crisis might unfold: retaliation not narrowly directed at combatants, but scattered across the region in order to demonstrate strength and defiance.
In this sense, Iran’s own actions have strengthened the very argument that led to the strikes against its nuclear programme.
The case for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is therefore not merely theoretical. It is grounded in the conduct the regime has already displayed.
Some will argue that the risks of confrontation are too great. Yet the alternatives have already been attempted. For more than a decade Iran has faced sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and repeated negotiations over its nuclear programme. None of these measures has halted its progress. Instead, they have coincided with the steady expansion of the missile and drone capabilities now being used to strike states across the Middle East.
What we are witnessing today would be dangerous enough if limited to conventional weapons. Were the same regime to possess nuclear arms, the consequences would be immeasurably worse.
Notwithstanding this, even if one accepts the Government’s decision not to participate in the opening strikes, it does not follow that Britain should remain passive.
The failure to strike at the regime’s ability to attack our allies, our territory, and our forces in the region is a grave mistake. It is weak, it is hesitant, and it sends the wrong message to friend and foe alike. British citizens live and work across the Middle East, and British service personnel are stationed there in defence of our interests. Yet by declining to act against the systems now being used to threaten them, the Government signals that attacks upon them are tolerated without consequence.
This is not prudence. It is abdication.
Equally troubling is the absence of adequate defensive preparation. The failure to pre-position sufficient defensive assets, most notably Type 45 destroyers capable of providing advanced air defence, in both the eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf represents a serious lapse in judgement. These ships exist precisely for moments such as this: to shield forces, protect civilians, and intercept attacks before they reach their targets. Their absence is not merely an operational oversight; it is a humiliation for the Government and indeed for the country.
The Government, like its predecessors over many years, has placed the foundation of our national security in maintaining strong alliances, both at the diplomatic and military level, with partners across NATO, the Middle East and further afield. Yet its inability to act, both in lacking the political will to defend our allies and in refusing to support a defence establishment equal to the task, means our allies will rightly question the value of our friendship and support.
But this failure did not begin with the present crisis. It is the result of years of naivety and neglect.
For decades successive governments have been content to exist in a dream world where the threat of force, of state-on-state violence, is somehow something humanity has moved beyond. They have ignored the repeated lessons of history and thus abandoned the foresight those lessons might have provided. As a result, they have made savings on the nation’s defences repeatedly, savings in the short term at the cost of capability in the long term.
Yet it remains true that what appears economical today often proves ruinously expensive tomorrow. When crises arrive, as they inevitably do, we discover that the tools required to defend ourselves and our allies have been allowed to rust away.
The current Government, particularly though not uniquely, seems uneasy with the idea that the objective of British foreign policy should be the defence of British interests around the globe. It prefers instead the related, but distinct, aim of defending “British values”, and upholding the principles of international law.
I do not intend here to argue the validity of such a position. Yet whether one sets out to defend interests or values, the same requirement remains: the ability to act.
Values unsupported by the means to defend them are little more than declarations. If Britain wishes to uphold international law, to defend liberal principles, or to deter those who would violate them, it must possess the capability to do so.
That in turn requires more than strong alliances. Alliances are indispensable, but they cannot substitute for capability. A country that becomes wholly dependent upon its allies, for critical military capabilities, for mass, and even for the production of its own weapons, inevitably surrenders a measure of its freedom of action.
And with that freedom goes something else: the independence of its foreign policy.
One cannot demand the protection of allies while declining to support them in return. Nor can one claim the authority to defend international norms while lacking the capacity to act when those norms are violated. If a nation subordinates its defence to others, it will sooner or later find its diplomacy subordinated as well.
If Britain wishes its values to carry weight in the world, it must therefore ensure that it retains the means to defend them, both alongside its allies and, if necessary, alone.
This is where we might look to France for instruction. France remains a committed NATO ally, working closely with partners across Europe and beyond. Yet it has preserved a degree of strategic independence that allows it the freedom to act, or not to act, when its national interests demand it. It can cooperate with allies, challenge them, or operate without them when necessary.
Britain once possessed a similar capacity. It should seek to regain it.
When the Government finally publishes its long-awaited Defence Industrial Strategy, independence should lie at its heart. Not isolation, but independence: the ability to act, to defend, and to decide without waiting upon the permission or capabilities of others.
The alternative is the course we see today, hesitation abroad, vulnerability at home, and the slow erosion of the security we once took for granted.
Nations rarely lose their influence in a single moment. More often it slips away through a series of small decisions, each defended as reasonable, each justified as temporary, until one day the loss is complete.
The age of comfortable assumptions is ending. Alliances grow less certain, rival powers more aggressive, and war itself is changing before our eyes. The lessons of Ukraine and the Middle East are plain enough. If we fail to prepare for this new reality, the cost will not be measured in abstract notions of national power, but in lives: the lives of our servicemen, our citizens, and those of our allies.
This is not a matter of prestige. It is a matter of protection.
We are entering a period of consequences.