Iranian interventions are a tricky balance of the price, the prize, and the problem with the Prince of Persia

They were talking in Geneva the way Iran and the US always talk. Slightly passed each other.

Now we know there was little store set by the White House on any substantive outcome.

Discussions were about stopping the one thing all Western countries have wanted to avoid; a viable and deployable Iranian nuclear weapons programme. Crudely, ‘the Ayatollahs must not have the bomb’ has been British policy towards the Islamic Republic for almost as long as the idea has existed.

It is in no way to sympathise with the Iranian regime to point out these were discussions at US gun point. You don’t have nearly a third of America’s deployable fleet in the Gulf for holiday sailing jaunt.

This morning Iranians start their first full day in 37 years without Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as their ‘Supreme leader’. The truth is he’d been ill for some time and unlike some of the world’s dictatorships the Iranian regime is a hydra.

It’s clear that Trump now wants more than stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. He tried that in June last year, striking Fordow and other sites in a 12-day campaign.  The US President has been explicit in suggesting ‘regime change’ is on the table, and has urged the beleaguered Iranian people to seize this moment to achieve it.

Neutralising Iran and its current rulers permanently, as exporters, fosterers, and funders of global terrorism is what this joint assault by the US and Israel is now explicitly about – and for Israel here read Netanyahu whose aim that has always been.

The British Government pointedly has not taken part in the strikes, and Starmer has called along with the leaders of Germany and France for ‘no further escalation’. That looks unlikely to be heeded, just yet.

Just as Democrats in Washington are gearing up to constrain Trump’s ‘war powers’ in Congress, Starmer has his own political considerations to be aware of, since most of those most pro-Gaza, pro-Palestinian have clubbed him at the ballot box are also open supporters of the Islamic Republic. It’s a problem when someone hates Trump so much it leads them to hold a candle for the thugs in Tehran.

But the UK’s attitude towards Iran, has always been one of its more complex and misunderstood foreign policy areas.

I myself with colleagues have spent many a meeting trying to unravel the reasons and motivations for what is a rather solid default position in the Foreign Office that whilst it produces some very cogent arguments, has often felt inflexible to the moment as if it is some timeless one-size-fits-all policy for every eventuality.

It goes something like this:

The Iranian people, the Persians, are decent, cultured, and dynamic. Their history, art, literature, architecture and academic contribution to the world is enormous and dazzling, which makes the nihilist ugly brutality of their current leaders so stark.

The Iranian people reached a point after the widespread protests over the 2022 killing of Iranian-Kurdish 22 year old, Mahsa Amini by their ‘religious police’ – or Guidance Patrol – for not wearing a headscarf. They recognised two facts of their life in Iran.

First, they would never again be ‘won over’ by the regime. Their tacit support was gone forever. Second, the state security apparatus was too strong to be toppled. The horrible truth of that second fact was demonstrated in blood just recently as widespread protests driven by Iran’s desperate economic situation were brutally crushed. Their ‘cost of living crisis’ makes ours look like a picnic.

The only card beyond repression that the regime has to play in its favour is when it can point to blatant attempts by the Great Satan (America) and Little Satan (Britain) to destabilise Iran. Iranian’s may hate their leaders, but they love their country. I suspect the power of this card has waned significantly in the last two years. Enforced public support for the Palestinians was vocally defied at a number of mass events in Iran.

The Iranian regime – the British government never refers to Iran as having a government – is a complex and shifting conglomeration of powerful individuals and institutions, deeply embedded and protected by a labyrinthine security apparatus. It is many headed and so the “cut off the head of the snake” strategy has always been dismissed as unrealistic.

Well its real now. Trump green lit the assassination of relatively popular Iranian General Qasem Soleimani six years ago with a missile strike outside Baghdad airport. Had Soleimani not been dead, and the regime topples now, you’d have put money on him emerging from the rubble to take control.

That, of course is the final argument made inside the British foreign policy arena. The ‘be careful what you wish for’ line. It is highly unlikely that of all possible scenarios within Iran in the event the Islamic Revolution collapses, that its replacement is a pro-Western, democratic, peace loving respecter of US military hegemony and accepter of the state of Israel.

Iran is a patchwork of peoples and cultures all with rather different aspirations for the future. Like Syria and Iraq, the risk of civil disintegration without the iron hand of state repression is a real one, and not to be dismissed. There is no unified and operational opposition, ready to take over, unless it be from within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

The reasonable and outwardly gentle ‘Prince of Persia’ Reza Pahlavi, the eldest son of the Shah toppled in 1979, is not universally popular inside Iran, abut far more outside. Therein lies his problem. Many Iranians say he has not spent nearly fifty years enduring inside the country he seems to want back. However his recent position to have an immediate referendum in Iran on the future, including the option of one without him as head of state was a smart move. To make it real you’d need a stable country to do it. Most worry now the dice have been thrown, that’s not what you’ll get if the regime falls.

As I said, these arguments are all solid ones. Former Tory MP and foreign minister Tobias Elwood is out today making them. Like Lord Ricketts former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee and later National Security Advisor speaking on the BBC  yesterday, the warnings, risks and costs of Trump’s actions are being articulated across the media.

Whatever one thinks of the arguments, they are of course behind the curve.

Khamenei, and a number of IRGC security personnel are dead in the rubble of a regime compound. A strike which speaks to the levels of intelligence available to the US and Israel. This is now unfolding whatever the view in Whitehall. The things our system have warned about and warned against involving ourselves in, are happening in real time.

There has been considerable threat to British national security co-ordinated by Iran on UK soil for years. Iran has sponsored and exported terrorism from Lebanon and Iraq to Gaza and Yemen. It supplies drones to Russia for the express purpose of killing Ukrainians. And the regime does so because it shares something with Putin.

Iran thinks it should be a regional power player. It thinks it is not given global respect. It feels it’s isolation as a national slight. Its response was not to enter the international rules based order and gain that respect, but demand it under threat, and via proxies. It no longer encourages hostage takers, but has taken an entire population hostage and put a boot on its collective neck.

The ‘do nothing about it beyond sanctions’ option has clearly run out of steam in Washington.

Is this a very risky ploy? Yes. Are their potentially worse outcomes than a new Ayatollah and a newly embittered regime? Yes. But how far does the regime have to go before somebody decides to act. For better or worse Trump has.

He’s not getting universal support for it in America, but there will be, I guarantee it, voices inside the very system fighting to survive in Iran, telling its Western opponents, ‘if you want change, act now.’

The issue will be whether Trump gets the change Trump wants.