Ranj Alaaldin: Labour’s ambiguity on Iran is costly to them, the Iranian people and all of us

Dr. Ranj Alaaldin is the Director of Conservatives in Foreign Policy and a Foreign Policy specialist. He has held positions at Oxford University, the Brookings Institution and the World Bank.

Israel’s pre-emptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and military assets was long in the making and, after a year of devastating setbacks for Iran and its proxy network in the Middle East, was entirely foreseeable.

The two adversaries had spent nearly a decade locked in a shadow war, marked by sporadic retaliatory attacks across multiple conflict zones. But the informal boundaries that had limited this conflict collapsed in April 2024 when Iran launched a large-scale drone and missile assault on Israel, an unprecedented direct attack that followed an Israeli strike on Iran’s embassy complex in Damascus, a major regional operations centre for the Islamic Republic.

Israel’s ongoing strikes, in addition to America’s airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday, must be understood not solely through the lens of the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas, which the Iranian regime played an instrumental role in, but as the culmination of four decades of Iranian coercion and subversion. This is aimed at eliminating the state of Israel and fulfilling an expansionist militant agenda in the Middle East that is centred on ending the Western-led international order and the creation of a pan-Islamist order, with the Islamic Republic having uncontested hegemony.

These underlying objectives of the Islamic Republic underscore the regime’s attempts to pursue a nuclear weapon.

The cost has been untold: the regime has undertaken atrocities against hundreds of U.S. and British soldiers, suicide bombings on American and Israeli embassies, the kidnapping of British and U.S. citizens, missile attacks on its neighbours and ethno-sectarian cleansing in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Iran is also designated as an ongoing threat to the UK by the intelligence services, which has warned of increasing Iranian terrorist activity on British soil.

For decades, Iran has exploited the international community’s aversion to conflict.

Calls for de-escalation and dialogue have consistently played into the regime’s hands. Far from moderating Tehran’s behaviour, this has empowered the Islamic Republic. In the wake of the civil-wars that followed the 2011 Arab Spring conflicts and instability, Iran expanded its grip on the region by mobilising militia groups in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, who committed scores of atrocities to dominate the political systems of these countries.

Iran then capitalised on diplomatic negotiations to further expand and entrench its proxy network. According to the IAEA, Iran exploited negotiations over the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to place itself at the threshold of a nuclear weapons capability.

It used the negotiations as a smokescreen, while its proxies made bloody advances in Syria to prop up the Assad regime, and while the Houthis took control of Yemen. The European signatories of the 2015 nuclear deal, including the UK, had repeatedly written to the UN secretary general accusing Iran of breaching clauses within the JCPOA that place restrictions on Iran’s missile programme, namely by transferring its drones to Russia. Iran has repeatedly conducted missile tests and provided prohibited weaponry to its foreign partners and proxies.

On top of this, the Iranian regime has capitalised on the West’s aversion to conflict to transform neighbouring states into launchpads for attacks on its rivals, including Israel, the United States and the wider West. This manifested itself when the regime mobilised its proxies — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shia militias in Iraq and Syria — to launch a campaign of missile and drone strikes targeting Israel, Western forces, and global shipping in the wake of the October 7 attacks.

These were not isolated acts of retaliation by Iran, but deliberate, calculated moves inter-connected with its role in the October 7 attacks to re-assert its dominance following the signing of the Abraham Accords and the normalisation of ties between several Gulf states and Israel. The Accords represented a potential seismic geopolitical shift that threatened the Iranian regime’s warped ideological ambitions.

Now, Israel is engaged in a preventive war of self-defence against a regime that has a steadfast commitment to acquiring nuclear weapons. From the perspective of others in the region, the Israeli strikes will be privately welcomed as a reassertion of red lines and pushback against years of transgressions by Iran, including drone and missile attacks on the Gulf states.

Some observers have suggested that Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered the strikes to torpedo diplomatic negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme but the United States has backed Israel’s strikes and is now directly involved following its own airstrikes. This suggests that Washington had given up on the nuclear negotiations when Israel first conducted its strikes, even if the U.S. has kept the door for negotiations open.

This is no time for ambiguity from Labour: the post-October 7 geopolitical landscape will not permit Iran the space and time to regroup and restore its capacities, much less allow it the space to further its ideological aspirations. Denying the regime this space will also empower the Iranian people to shape the future of their country. Labour must clarify its position –– it is either supportive of the campaign to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities, or against.

In this context, the Labour government must proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s vanguard and most powerful military force that represents an ongoing and imminent terrorist threat to the country. Claiming this is unfeasible due to diplomatic considerations is no longer tenable and an outdated argument as our most important strategic allies confront the Iranian regime. Iran has been indifferent to UK and Western sanctions and proscription will enhance the West’s negotiating hand to ensure the regime does not use any negotiated outcome to the conflict to play for time, as well as regroup and restore its capabilities.

In calling for dialogue and de-escalation –– platitudes detached from the realities of an ongoing war –– the Labour government is behind the curve and risks giving Iran an opportunity to determine the outcome of this conflict on its own terms but also emboldening it to carry out a major terrorist attack on UK soil.

There is no returning to a pre–October 7 status quo and Labour must step up.