Why the West should target Iran as well as the Houthis

The Spectator has published an article about how Iran has activated its proxies across the Middle East amid the mounting tensions in the region. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

Peace cannot always be won by peaceful means. This is a truth that is as tragic as it is perennial. When history forges an enemy that cannot be placated, the blind pursuit of ‘peace in our time’ only shores up an even more devastating conflict in the future. This lesson, learned so painfully by previous generations, has faded in the somnambulant years of postwar Britain. It is one that we are starting to remember.

Today, the defence secretary Grant Shapps pledges 20,000 British personnel to take part in a major Nato exercise to prepare for a potential Russian invasion of Europe. His words are unvarnished. ‘We are in a new era and we must be prepared to deter our enemies,’ he will say in a speech in London. ‘The foundations of the world order are being shaken to the core. We stand at a crossroads.’

Perhaps 2024 will be the year when the British bulldog and American eagle begin to – in the words of Lance Armstrong – get their hate on. The stakes are high. If this transformation in attitude fails, or does not show its influence ubiquitously across our foreign policy, the alliance between Iran, Russia and China, along with a broader ‘axis of resistance’ across the Muslim world, threatens to overturn global security in 2025 and drag us into all-out war.

On January 11, as RAF Typhoons went into action over Yemen, the perennial value of deterrence seemed to have finally been accepted – albeit very belatedly – by western leaders. After years of weakness towards Iran, during which the regime played us for fools at the nuclear negotiating table while we played softer and softer, Downing Street and the White House looked to have finally found something resembling a spine.

There can be no denying it: the achievement of peace sometimes demands warlike means. This is truer than ever with respect to the absolutist theocracy, as it pulls the strings of armed groups across the Middle East, mounts scores of assassination plots on British shores and flirts on the brink of nuclearisation. The Houthis have a pressing domestic agenda in Yemen, of course. But the Red Sea attacks showed how much more geopolitically significant they are as a particularly sinewy tentacle of the Iranian octopus.

Since 7 October, Iran has activated its militia across the region. This aggression has been carefully calibrated to cause the West pain without provoking war. Hezbollah has fired sufficient rockets into Israel to force 100,000 Israelis to evacuate away from the border into government-funded hotels in the south; there have been attacks on American bases in Syria and Iraq; and the Houthis have been stealing the headlines by forcing cargo ships to redirect around the Cape of Good Hope, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

After launching their coup in 2015, the Yemeni militants have morphed into a key Iranian proxy, receiving increasingly sophisticated weaponry that has been smuggled in by sea and deployed against Tehran’s great rival Saudi Arabia. Its leaders received training from Hezbollah, Iran’s pet army in Lebanon.

It was an obvious match: the Houthi’s slogan, ‘God is great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam’, may be clunky but it hardly lacks clarity. As Grant Shapps pointed out in the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s strikes on Yemen were principally a warning to Tehran.

The irony remains that, in recent years, the problem has metastasised due to western timidity. The Houthis were on the brink of defeat in 2018 before a UN-backed ceasefire stopped the fighting, allowing the group to retain control of Yemen’s western coast and continue to receive weaponry from Iran.

In 2021, Washington attempted to keep the peace by withdrawing missile defence support and military and intelligence assistance from the Saudis, forcing the kingdom into a truce. The terms required the Saudis to deliver funding to Yemen; this has only strengthened the Houthis. To add insult to injury, the Biden administration removed the group from its terror list in 2021.

In Britain, meanwhile, not only have we not proscribed the Houthis but the Foreign Office has consistently resisted widespread calls to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s organ of international terror. In a briefing yesterday, Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, begged Downing Street to find its teeth. ‘The international community should designate the Houthis and the IRGC as terrorist organisations,’ he said. ‘Because that’s what they are.’

To say that a reversal in policy towards Iran and its proxies is long overdue would be a gross understatement. But let us ascribe credit where it is due: in recent days, you had to rub your eyes and blink hard to remember who was in the Oval Office. For all his faults, Donald Trump had an instinctive grasp of the value of deterrence, particularly when it came to the Ayatollahs. He knew that there was no contest when it came to economic power and military might. America’s defence budget is more than $850 billion (£670 billion), compared to its adversary’s paltry $9 billion (£7 billion); its economy is 31 times that of Iran; its airforce comprises 13,000 planes, compared to Tehran’s 551; and its naval fleet is four times larger. That’s without even bothering to compare its nukes.

In 2020, Trump authorised the killing of Qasem Soleimani, the totemic leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The diplomatic establishment reacted with horror, predicting World War Three. Typically, Iran talked big but did not meaningfully retaliate. Ten months later, the ‘godfather’ of its nuclear programme, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated by Mossad using a remote-controlled gun. Again, meaningful Iranian retaliation came there none. 

This was the era of ‘maximum pressure’, during which Trump eroded Tehran’s accessible foreign-exchange reserves to a low of just $4 billion (£3.1 billion). Nuclear scientists were being aggressively sanctioned by the west, military strikes on Iranian soil were on the table, and Tehran’s nuclear progress had flatlined. As funding dwindled, its proxies around the region were starting to shrivel. Then Trump lost the election.

After four years of a Biden White House, Iran is closer to nuclearisation than ever before. It has tripled its production rate of highly-enriched uranium, placing it just a week away from the material for one bomb. This, according to former UN weapons inspector David Albright, could be weaponised within six months.

All the key landmarks, from achieving enrichment at 20 per cent, then 60 per cent, then producing uranium metal and so on, took place after Biden exchanged Trump’s stick for an endless supply of carrots. To make matters worse, Iran has been expelling and harassing International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors with impunity. And even after 7 October, the State Department continues to turn a blind eye to Iranian oil exports to China and has issued a sanctions waiver to release $10 billion (£8 billion) into the hands of the mullahs.

Iran’s mischief-making is not limited to the Middle East. In 2022, the director general of MI5 revealed that Tehran’s IRGC – did I mention it has not been blacklisted? – had mounted ten assassination attempts in Britain that year. Iran’s ‘aggressive intelligence services’ had expanded their ambitions to plot terrorist attacks on British soil, Ken McCallum said.

Last year, Matt Jukes, head of counter-terrorism policing at the Met, disclosed that police and security services had foiled 15 abductions and murders by the IRGC. The Jewish Chronicle has revealed that the regime has ‘mapped’ prominent Jews in Britain to be targeted if Israel attacked its nuclear facilities.

Part of the problem with the West’s approach to the theocracy is that it has never seriously accounted for its nature. Our diplomatic elites have behaved as if the regime acted as we do, out of rational, enlightened self-interest. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let me be clear: Iran is in the grip of a caste of fanatical clerical fascists who design their national strategy to achieve metaphysical goals. Foremost among these is the apocalypse. They believe that victory over Israel will herald the end times, causing a mythical figure called the Mahdi to throw off his cloak of invisibility and triumph alongside 313 of his most loyal lieutenants. The world would then be carved up between them. Schoolchildren in Iran are taught these bizarre ideas as fact.

For Tehran, this is not just abstract theology. Its strategy for attaining this doomsday scenario rests on three pillars: nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and overseas proxy militia. The West may be constitutionally unable to take fanatics at their word, but the fanatics themselves are deadly serious.

But as fanatical, depraved and retrogressive as Iran’s leaders may be, they are far from stupid. Understanding their own weakness better than we do, they have been building alliances with Russia – to which Iran supplies drones for use in Ukraine – and China, to which it exports sanction-busting oil.

North Korea lurks nearby in the shadows, as do Hezbollah, the Houthis and other proxy forces across the Middle East. After Thursday’s strikes in Yemen, Israeli assessments are that neither Iran nor the other members of this ‘axis of resistance’ have any appetite for all-out war; although the Houthis have responded by defiantly launching more missiles, American and British resolve would cause them to back down, Jerusalem believes. This is a critical moment. Having acted, the coalition must hold its nerve.

What comes next is even more important. Having finally found a measure of courage in the face of the Iranian threat, the United States must breathe this spirit into every aspect of its policymaking when it comes to the head of the octopus in Tehran. It was Israel’s last prime minister, Naftali Bennett, who emphasised the metaphor, launching a string of retaliatory strikes on Iranian soil – the head of the beast – rather than targeting its tentacles. The West must embrace this approach. 

The following would be a sensible policy shopping-list. Pinpoint strikes on Iranian assets that are sufficient to cause pain but not to trigger war; aggressive enforcement of existing sanctions that have fallen into neglect; no more frozen sanctions money released to Iran in the empty hope of peace; triggering the ‘snapback’ sanctions that were provided in the nuclear deal of 2015; stopping ransom payments for western hostages, which only incentivises future kidnaps; and bringing to fruition a credible military threat against Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.

As I said, peace cannot always be won by peaceful means. We learnt that in the Thirties, and recent policy towards Iran has proven it again. It’s time to call the Ayatollah’s bluff. We must recognise our economic, military and moral clout and use this moment to pivot to maximum deterrence. Then we must act with full conviction.