A time of chaos

The Iranian missile attack on Israel, which US, French and British military assets were reportedly involved in trying to repel, is yet another dangerous escalation of the conflict that flared on 7 October 2024. The attack, and the terrorist shooting that killed 6 people in Tel Aviv, should be condemned.

Iran says that it warned the USA it was about to happen, and said in the immediate aftermath that it regarded the attack as proportionate and complete. If, as signalled previously, the Israeli ground incursion into Lebanon can be similarly contained, there is the chance to de-escalate the violence.

But there’s a strong possibility that this escalates into a regional war, which only firm action by the USA can prevent.

What Iran wants, strategically, is to destroy Israel. That is clear from both its rhetoric and actions, despite the victory of the “moderate” candidate Masoud Pezeshkian in the July’s presidential election.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, told Israelis they should “die of your rage” just days before Hamas, his proxy militia, launched the terror attacks of 7 October. Everything Iran has done since has been in pursuit of that aim: provoking Israel into actions that destroy its global reputation; its attempts at conciliation with Arab states; and ultimately its ability to defend itself.

That’s why Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah joined the battle on 8 October and why Iran itself launched its first major missile attack on Israel in April 2024.

What Israel’s political leadership wants is also clear: to inflict damage so severe both on Hamas and Hezbollah that they cease to function. In the case of Gaza, that has involved the Israeli army in numerous flagrant violations of the laws of war and plunged 2.2 million Gazans into a nightmarish semi-existence amid the rubble. In the case of Hezbollah it involved the pager attacks, the decapitation strikes on its military leadership and now the killing of its figurehead, Nasrallah.

The problem is, in pursuit of the entirely legitimate aim of self-defence and survival, Israel is raising the chances of its own destruction.

It is repeatedly defying requests from the USA, its ally and main arms supplier, for restraint and de-escalation. Even now, in the aftermath of the latest missile strike, Israeli politicians are peddling fantasies of greater retribution: the assassination of Khamenei, the destruction of Iran’s nuclear programme or even of its wider energy generation system – all of these options are now flying around.

Netanyahu, whose strategy to contain Hamas failed, is now pursuing political survival through regional escalation. He is secure in the knowledge that the Biden administration will never cease supplying Israel with the weapons to prosecute the fight, even as it calls for a ceasefire.

But Netanyahu’s strategy runs counter to Israel’s long-term interests. To survive in a hostile and chaotic region, Israel cannot be dependent on the surface-to-air missiles on American warships, because at some point during the 21^st century these may have to be prioritised elsewhere. Nor can it be dependent on the pro-Israel lobby in the USA, because generational change has made many young Jewish Americans hostile to not just to Netanyahu but to Israel itself.

What Israel needs is peace with its Arab neighbours, legitimacy within the rules based order and friends in the countries that actually supply it with the means to fight. Netanyahu is squandering these in all directions.

That Israel can call the shots in Washington, is not just a symptom of the Biden administration’s weakness but of America’s.

This is the “multipolar world” in action. America is not strong enough to impose order; China is neither determined nor engaged enough to exert its willpower in the region; Russia is simply happy to see the Western hemisphere destabilised. As I’ve written here before, contrary to the wishes of its proponents, multipolarity does not bring fairer or more distributed global power. It brings chaos.

What can Britain do to stem the danger? The first task is to recognise that a wider war in the Middle East will have massive repercussions here. We have already seen parts of Britain’s Muslim community desert the Labour Party for religious sectarian and Green candidates, and the rhetoric from some pro-Palestine demonstrators brings fear to the Jewish community. For this reason alone, the UK government has the right to exert greater and more public pressure on both parties to desist.

At Labour’s conference, at a reception for Ukrainian politicians, Britain’s attorney general Lord Hermer told delegates that under Labour the UK would not only uphold international law but “promote it”. It was on Hermer’s advice that Britain pulled 10% of its arms supply contracts with Israel.

Despite the damage it would do to our own forces, who are more reliant on Israeli technology than vice versa, the UK should be prepared to increase that pressure. There is a simple reason for this: the government cannot break its own laws.

Beyond that, the strongest pressure the UK can exert is in Washington itself. David Lammy, the foreign secretary, showed leadership by issuing a public call on Israel and Hezbollah for a ceasefire: a call the US and France both backed in the runup to Israel’s strike against Nasrallah.

But only Washington can define Western strategy in the Middle East – and it is clear that its default strategy of de-escalation through persuasion has failed. Multipolarity, it turns out, is not primarily characterised by proxy regional struggles but by the power vacuums they create. In Syria we have seen more than half a million people killed and tens of millions made refugees because Russia could not, and America would not, reimpose order.

If Lebanon – a state always hovering close to failure – were to go the same way, the region would not be safer for anyone, let alone Israel, which would need to maintain a permanently mobilised army on its northern border.

It is entirely possible that a mixture of decapitation strikes and military humiliation could bring about the fall of the Ayatollahs in Iran. Netanyahu is not wrong to raise that. But anyone who thinks it would be followed by an orderly and peaceful return to secular normality is dreaming.

So the priority for the Biden-Harris administration should be clear: they have tried persuading Israel to desist in Lebanon. They should now compel the Israelis to call it quits. The alternative is US participation in a war with Iran, with inevitable demands on Britain to join in.

Given that an alliance of Iran, Russia, North Korea and China has formed an “Axis of Resistance” to Western power, the task is to thwart it by means of our own choosing, not theirs. Chaos is the element of the adversary, and any further escalation of the Israel-Iran conflict will only increase chaos.

Put simply: if you are the global superpower, it is you who chooses the terms, the tempo and objectives of any major war, not your tiny ally, led by a compromised prime minister and with a deeply fractured society. If your original strategy has failed, no matter how laudable it was, you have to be prepared to accept this and to act decisively.