How Trump and Starmer could form an unlikely alliance against Iran

The incoming Labour government has pledged a more robust Iran policy than the Conservative party has had over the last decade. The bar is low. Somehow, nothing new came of Iran’s women’s movement, support for Russia, assassination attempts on British soil, and attacks on all our regional partners – or the unprecedented cross-party consensus this all generated.

Labour is apparently planning a pivot that includes proscribing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), cracking down on Iran’s domestic networks, and more robust deployments to the Middle East and Mediterranean. Whether Keir Starmer’s party will implement these plans is another question. The key difference is that U.S.-Iran policy, so long the anchor of Britain’s, is now adrift. Those charting Labour’s new course would do well to ask why, especially as Iran elects a new president this Friday.

Since the Obama years, Democrats have viewed Iran through the prism of what might be called ‘Malleyism’ after Robert Malley, who, until last June, served as Biden’s Iran envoy.