Keir Starmer’s position on the Israel-Iran conflict is perfectly clear.
In the initial hours of “Operation Rising Lion,” a Downing Street spokesman said Iran’s nuclear programme was “more advanced than ever” and “a clear threat to international peace and security”. So naturally the prime minister wanted “de-escalation and a diplomatic resolution”, which was in “the interests of stability in the region”.
Iran’s nuclear programme is bad for stability, it seems, but so too is Israel’s military operation to destroy said programme. The prime minister must have an alternative means of promoting stability, then.
Indeed he does. According to Number 10, the government is “committed to finding a diplomatic solution”, and in case anyone thinks that a flimsy, insubstantial position, Starmer’s spokesman gave it some teeth by threatening to “take every diplomatic step to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons”. The prime minister remains wedded to the pre-Friday approach of warning Iran not to pursue nukes and, when Iran carries on regardless, warning it in a much sterner voice.
Like most progressive ideas, it works in theory but not in practice, because Iran is a bad-faith actor hellbent on acquiring nuclear arms by whatever means necessary, even duping naive Western policymakers as happened with Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
And when proliferation continues, brazenly, the answer is not a new policy but more of the same policy. In the name of stability, of course. Maintaining stability means allowing Iran to do as it pleases while being jolly cross about it, just not cross enough to do anything remedial.
In a post on X, Starmer said that "escalation serves no one in the region”, a criticism that certainly can’t be levelled at his strategy. It plainly serves someone in the region, but unfortunately that someone is Ayatollah Khamenei. When the prime minister proclaims that “stability in the Middle East must be the priority” he reveals a preference. Not for a nuclear Iran, which he sincerely does not want, but for a continuation of the current state of play, which might have allowed Iran to reach the brink of nuclear status but is somehow still preferable to Israeli military action.
The result is a prime minister who is for the status quo and against it, for upending it and for leaving well alone. He has so many positions on the Middle East it makes one long for those simpler issues on which Keir operates a mere two tiers.
The logical pretzel into which Starmer twists himself betrays a moral imagination crippled by proceduralism. Disputes are governed by rules drawn up in committees and resolved in processes overseen by lawyers – a reasonable worldview when applied to domestic circumstances but one to which international conflict seldom yields. In a liberal social order, force is a last resort to be avoided at almost all costs, but in a realist global order, the costs of avoiding force are often perilously high and sovereign states sometimes calculate that measured force today is better than uncontainable force tomorrow.
There is a reflection, too, of the inconsistency of progressive thinking when it comes to global conflict. Progressives are not against the use of force on the world stage. They are among the lustiest advocates of Ukrainian force against Vladimir Putin’s invaders and legalistic objections to sabotage and the intentional killing of enemy civilians fall by the wayside when the targets are Russian.
Why should it be otherwise? Ukraine is an embattled democracy threatened by a dictatorship bent on its national annihilation. It has every right to defend itself. The same does not apply to Israel and Iran. Progressives assess the legitimacy of force in international warfare according to the current considerations of domestic politics, but even allowing for this there is an added dimension when Israel is involved. Israel is the great asterisk of progressive politics, the exception that not only proves the rule but rewrites any rule as required. If you can come to see the Jewish state as an omni-malefactor, source of varied and limitless wickedness, you are well on your way to understanding the progressive mind.
Starmer, I suspect, does not share this outlook, and might even grasp its sinister undertones. It is hard to believe that a man so law-brained would not rankle at the caprice involved in distorting every principle and convention to apply or disapply to Israel as necessary. But he is a politician and he understands his tribe and their prejudices, which likely go too far for his tastes but echo his more establishment liberal queasiness about Israeli firepower. Jerusalem’s deployment of disproportionate, unregulated force against densely civilian-populated Gaza opens to question the use of Israeli force in other theatres, against different enemies, to unrelated ends.
Keir Starmer says he recognises Israel’s right to self-defence, but when, by what means, under which circumstances, and as determined by whom? The prime minister seems to accept the legitimacy of Israeli force in theory but in practice his tolerance is contingent on party management, elite opinion and perhaps personal squeamishness. He lacks coherence, consistency and clarity, but above all he lacks guts.
Stephen Daisley is a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail and writes regularly for The Spectator
