Denying US Bases for Iran Strikes Is a Big Mistake | American Enterprise Institute - AEI

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer says he will not allow the United States to use RAF bases, including the strategically critical installations at Diego Garcia and Fairford in Gloucestershire, for an attack on Iran according to reports.

Starmer is wrong, and he is making a strategic and diplomatic mistake. The UK should enable, not hinder, any military action President Donald Trump takes against Iran. It stands to gain considerably if the Iranian regime is weakened or overthrown.

Tehran has undermined UK interests consistently since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. It is no exaggeration to say that this regime has British blood on its hands. According to the British government, the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies were responsible for the deaths of numerous British troops during the Iraq War. In what then-Foreign Secretary James Cleverly called “a barbaric act,” the regime executed British citizen Alireza Akbari in 2023. The UK has also sanctioned Iranian entities believed to be attempting to kill British nationals on British soil. When Iranian clerics demand “Death to England,” they mean it.

Nor are these Iran’s only attacks on the UK. In 2011, a mob ransacked the British embassy in Tehran. Ambassador Dominick Chilcott later said that the perpetrators had “the acquiescence and the support of the state.” In 2019, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy seized and held a British-flagged oil tanker for months. And just this Thursday, Iran sentenced a British couple touring the world to 10 years in prison on risible charges of espionage.

This is not the first time London has missed a chance to deal a blow to a potent and dangerous enemy. Starmer, who has called Iran’s nuclear program “a grave threat,” nonetheless declined to assist Trump’s strikes on it, stressing that the UK was “not involved” in the American operation last year.

The UK government has been at the center of fruitless negotiations over Iran’s illegal nuclear weapons program for decades now, and the Foreign Office has regularly accused Tehran of cheating on its obligations under international law. Even the UK’s notoriously cautious civil service bureaucrats have come to the end of their tether in dealing with the regime’s human rights violations.

Sir Keir is reportedly concerned that British assistance would undercut international law. Of course, the UK government was all too keen to join an attack on Libya on far slimmer international law grounds. In 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron insisted that military action against Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi was “necessary, legal, and right . . . because I believe we should not stand aside while this dictator murders his own people.” International law does not discriminate between the value of a Libyan and an Iranian life, yet the basis for action in that case is more than replicated in Iran’s ruthless slaughter of possibly tens of thousands of its citizens in the past month.

Starmer’s obduracy, rooted, Washington suspects, in hostility toward this American president, is angering officials in the United States. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who has resolutely defended the trans-Atlantic alliance at a time when it’s increasingly unpopular in his party, labeled the news of Starmer’s refusal to cooperate on Iran as “beyond surprising” on social media. “To my friends in Britain, sitting this one out puts you on the wrong side of history and is yet another example of how much our alliances throughout Europe have degraded,” he wrote.

Starmer should reconsider his position. Rather than make it more difficult for the United States to strike Iran, he should do all he can to hasten the regime’s demise.

America is far from the only country threatened by the lawless Iranian regime. As the prime minister should be well aware, the UK is closer to Iran and doubtless in the Islamic Republic’s gunsights. Not to speak of the fact that the world will be better off when Iran is at peace, no longer seeking nuclear weapons, sponsoring terrorism, and murdering its own people.