Time to stop playing Mr Nice Guy with paranoid Iran

Iranian Revolutionary Guards patrolling around the British-flagged tanker Stena Impero as it's anchored off the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas. Picture: AFP.

One of the top shows on Iranian television features a slick team of spycatchers taking on internal opponents of the Islamic republic. The villains include an environmental campaigner, a doctor, a British tourist, and a professor of journalism.

All of them have been recruited by the US, British and French intelligence services to destabilise the regime, and they are thwarted in every episode by the brilliance of Tehran’s spooks backed by drones, computer geeks and honest-to-goodness God-fearing patriots.

Iran has become a paranoid state creating imaginary foes and waging covert war against real ones. Sure enough, in the midst of the latest tension with the West, Iran announced that it had captured 17 CIA spies and unmasked their recruiters: television news merging with television entertainment in an ugly propaganda blur.

Iran, handicapped by sanctions and by the grip of the Revolutionary Guard on its economy, does not manufacture much any more but remains skilled at making enemies.

Its attacks on shipping and oil refineries have robbed Tehran of the ability to exploit the differences between the Gulf states. Its attempts to turn Syria into a forward base have brought the Saudis and Israelis closer together.

The assault on the freedom of navigation has made it more difficult for the clerical regime to split Europe from the United States. Iran’s elder statesmen should have remembered the opprobrium that was heaped on the country in the 1980s when it threatened, as part of its tanker war with Iraq, to close the Strait of Hormuz.

That triggered the dispatch of US warships to the Gulf to protect international shipping. On that occasion Britain joined in with the Americans. Internationally isolated, an impoverished and exhausted Iran eventually had to accept a humiliating defeat.

How desperate can a regime be that it accepts the possibility of a similar setback now? The answer might be: one that is in an end-of-days struggle. As the supreme leader Ali Khamenei succumbs to old age and illness, he becomes more dependent on advice from the Revolutionary Guard commanders who answer to him.

He sponsored their military adventurism, their attempt to keep Syria in Iran’s sphere of interest, their destabilisation of Iraq to neutralise its power in the region, and their propaganda war against Israel.

Now that effort is costing money which Iran doesn’t have; payments to Hezbollah in Lebanon are flagging. The Revolutionary Guard has become factional and is plotting the next phase, the one that follows Khamenei’s death. It needs to retain its profitable business holdings, have a finger in the pie in the reconstruction of Syria, and yet present itself as the flame of the Islamic revolution.

To enter talks with the West any time soon would be a betrayal of that revolution, yet an all-out war against America is unwinnable. What’s left is a string of small, interconnected but dangerous wars designed to pay lip service to the fading dream of regional supremacy.

It is this uncertainty of purpose that is driving the crisis.

Britain treats the current tanker war as a Suez 1956 moment, a snapshot of our declining influence in the world. It isn’t. This is about the unravelling of the Iranian, not the British, elites. Yes, we need to get our navy more battle-ready.

But for the time being we should concentrate on bringing some clarity back to our diplomacy. The best way of dealing with a reckless regime is to close ranks as an alliance against it, not give it opportunities to outwit us.

Instead Britain is acting as if Donald Trump, not Khamenei, is the problem in the Middle East. Boris Johnson should scrap the idea of working with France and Germany (and increasingly with Russia) to come up with a new financial instrument that allows trade with the Iranian regime and thus undermines US sanctions.

Those sanctions are not an instrument of torture: they are well thought-out, often aimed at people or institutions who steal from the Iranian people. The 2015 nuclear deal put caps on uranium enrichment (now being ignored) but was chiefly built on the hope that Iran could be ushered back into the community of law-abiding nations. That didn’t happen and Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again.

Also: abandon the idea that the Royal Navy can hang out with German and French vessels to provide an effective maritime protection force in the Gulf.

There are no signs that such a flotilla will deter Iran’s hybrid war at sea and it would almost certainly be dependent on US command ships. The point is political — stop an unpredictable Trump from putting a potential invasion fleet in the Gulf — rather than tackling the actual problem. Our actions in the Gulf should be about signalling seriousness of intent and a European mission is unlikely to achieve that.

Urban Iranians are sophisticated enough to know when they are being lied to by their leaders. Maybe one day they will find a way to change the regime.

But let’s stop pretending that we can cut through the Persian psychodrama by deploying some nuanced European super-sensitivity, find people like us in the hierarchy who are ready to discover a Third Way between religiosity and liberal pragmatism if only we cut them some slack.

We need to be firm, consistent and strategic. Everything is linked in this crisis. Almost everything is malign. It’s time the Foreign Office stopped playing Mr Nice Guy.

The Times