The White House fallout with Iran is a potentially catastrophic example of mutual miscommunication, writes Andrew Marr
18 June 2025, 19:54
It looks very much as if the war between Israel and Iran is, as we suggested yesterday, escalating.
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Donald Trump is now demanding Iran’s unconditional surrender, and added this afternoon: “that means I’ve had it. That means no more. That means we go blow up all the nuclear stuff. The next week is going to be big, very big...” but this being Trump, it could just be bluster.
He also said, “I may do it, I may not do it, I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do“ which sounds more like a way of trying to entice the Iranians to negotiate.
Good luck with that.
The supreme leader in Teheran, Ayatollah Khamenei said Iranians never surrender and the Iranian mission to the United Nations put out a statement saying that “no Iranian official has ever asked to grovel at the gates of the White House.
"The only thing more despicable than his lies is his cowardly threat to take out Iran’s supreme leader.
"Iran does not negotiate under duress, shall not accept peace under duress, and certainly not with a has-been warmonger clinging to relevance.
"Iran shall respond to any threat with a counter threat, and to any action with reciprocal measures.”
De-escalation? Not so far; so far, a potentially catastrophic example of mutual miscommunication.
So the next question is, what should we do?
Keir Starmer has been meeting with senior ministers and advisers this afternoon and the government is not denying that Israel, however unpopular it is right now, might be sent British missiles to help protect itself.
There is a huge choice there for the prime minister and politicians are still worried, as I argued yesterday, that there’s a danger of repeating the dreadful mistakes of the Iraq war.
Whatever the horrors in Gaza, no mainstream British politician could countenance the eradication of the state of Israel and there will be a very strong lobby inside the Labour government for defensive help for Tel Aviv, even though it was they who took the initiative in this fresh conflict.
How much pressure is labour under to provide military help? That will change almost by the minute and hinges a lot on American involvement but here was the reaction of the Israeli ambassador when I asked her about it yesterday:
"We didn't ask anyone's help, honestly, from the British government," Tzipi Hotovely, Israeli Ambassador to the UK, said.
"We are very clear that we, we are very happy that our friends from all around the world are supporting this very justified campaign against the most dangerous regime, not to have the most dangerous weapon.
"And we didn't ask their help. And we are allies in intelligence cooperation. We do a lot of things together. On security, the UK is not involved."
Yet inevitably, there will be fierce opposition from many on the left, Labour and anti-Labour, who regard Israel as a pariah state and won’t have been enthused about the prime minister by President Trump’s warm praise of him.
This is not a war, right now, to be clear, in which the United Kingdom is involved. Even so you can see the cracks running through our politics as we try to work out what to do next.
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