The first lesson of war is ‘know your enemy’ – and Britain’s enemy now is Donald Trump

Nine days in, the conduct of the unjustified, illegal US-Israel war against Iran grows ever-more disproportionate, dishonourable and deranged. The torpedoing of an Iranian navy ship off Sri Lanka by a US submarine demonstrated that for reckless Donald Trump, the whole world is his battlefield. Diplomacy, treacherously sabotaged by Washington, has been replaced by unceasing airstrikes that are murdering and maiming hundreds of Iranian civilians. Trump’s White House increasingly resembles a madhouse. War aims shift daily. A clueless, rambling president insists he must help pick Iran’s next ayatollah. Meanwhile, his “secretary for war”, Pete Hegseth, rants manically about killing without mercy.

Nine days in, it’s clear Iran’s leaders, those who survive, are not going to roll over in a repeat of Trump’s Venezuela coup. Their forces, though drastically outgunned, are succeeding in spreading pain across the Middle East, inundating defences with waves of drones and missiles. That’s no surprise. Iran warned of a region-wide conflict if attacked again. Trump is now at war with US allies, too, having adopted George W Bush’s crude Iraq war “for us or against us” maxim. The Gulf Arabs – and cruelly battered Lebanon – just want it to stop. Britain and Europe mostly want no part of it, but are being sucked in anyway. The global economy is tumbling into crisis. In Trump’s war on the world, there are no heroes, only victims. Spain’s defiant leader, Pedro Sánchez, is one exception.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, already charged with war crimes in Gaza, and Trump must now face prosecution by the international criminal court for atrocities perpetrated in Iran, notably the appalling 28 February bombing of a school in Minab. They should both be sanctioned by the UK and all other governments that still respect the UN charter, human rights and the rule of law. And their countries should be sanctioned, too. Many Americans and Israelis deplore their leaders’ crazed behaviour. Yet these two thugs act in their name. Concerned citizens, failed by an emasculated US Congress and Israeli Knesset, must demand a halt to the mayhem.

It’s long been obvious Trump is no friend to Britain. But this latest act of lethal hubris, of which the UK received no advance warning, shows he and his administration must now be considered an enemy. Just look at the facts. The US (like Russia in Ukraine) has launched an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign state. Its claim of an “imminent” threat is unsupported by evidence. Its armed forces are unrestrained, lacking any rules of engagement. Moral and legal considerations are ignored; it has brazenly assassinated a head of state. This US-led rampage, this homicidal turkey shoot, is terrorising and displacing millions while disrupting trade, travel and energy supplies. What more proof is needed that the US, an outlaw state like Israel, is a hostile power that fundamentally threatens the UK?

It’s not in Britain’s national interest that Iran be reduced to smoking ruins. It is not in the UK interest that the Tehran regime, vile though it undoubtedly is, be driven to adopt asymmetric tactics (such as terror attacks in European cities) in order to survive. It is certainly not in the interest of Britain and neighbouring countries that Iran fragment into Iraq-style anarchy amid mooted uprisings by Kurds and other ethnic minorities. The ensuing refugee exodus would dwarf that from Syria a decade ago. Most saliently, it is not in the UK interest that the rule of law, and the laws of war, be casually eviscerated, thereby accelerating disintegration of the “global order”.

Mobster Trump’s latest crimes follow close on the heels of his kidnapping of Venezuela’s president; his threats to invade Greenland, sovereign territory of a loyal Nato ally; his hypocritical upgrading of the US nuclear arsenal while prating about Iran’s hypothetical nukes; his sabotage of UN action on climate; his punitive global trade tariffs; his intrusive support for Europe’s far-right parties and Reform UK; and perhaps most bitter of all, his unforgivable betrayal of Ukraine and appeasement of Russia. All these actions adversely affect the British people and the British state.

Unlike Washington, successive UK governments have tried to maintain a dialogue with the Islamists who toppled the US-backed shah in 1979. Lacking diplomatic relations, the US was absent from the conversation. As a result, American ignorance of contemporary Iran is profound. To suggest the regime and its proxy militias will tamely surrender is simply crass. Economic sanctions, reinforced by Trump when he foolishly reneged on the 2015 UK-backed nuclear deal with Tehran, are used by the mullahs to excuse failings and justify abuses. The US repeatedly missed chances to boost reformists such as ex-president Hassan Rouhani by offering sanctions relief. The greater the country’s impoverishment, the worse the social strains, the tighter the grip of repressive, misogynistic hardline clerical and military factions. Partly at least, today’s Iran is of the US’s making.

Iran desperately needs a fresh start. The theocracy symbolised by its assassinated supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has long ago had its day. Many, probably most, Iranians yearn passionately for an open, freer, more prosperous, pluralist, pro-western society. But this destructive, un-thought-through US-Israeli regression into the worst excesses of imperialist vandalism crushes hopes of peaceful change – the only kind that lasts – and hastens a collapse into warring camps. What may emerge is not a reborn, friendly Iran but a fractured country held hostage by a more brutal, paranoid, ever-threatening hardline rump regime embroiled in endless conflict with its people and the west.

It’s argued that Britain is so closely enmeshed with the US in matters of defence, security and intelligence-gathering that it cannot afford a definitive break over Iran. This is a counsel of despair. For most of its long history, Britain has somehow got by without always highly conditional American help. It could do so again, though it might be painful for a while. It would be a positive boon, for example, if the UK’s unaffordable, undesirable Trident nuclear missile submarines, which rely on US technology, were scrapped. Dependencies such as these give unstable, war-addicted Trump dangerous leverage over the UK. Best be rid of them before he uses it.

Nine days and counting. How much longer? Weeks? Months? Trump and Israel’s manipulative Trump-whisperer must be stopped, both for Iranians’ sake and for the future peace and security of the Middle East, Britain and its remaining allies. The existential threat to democratic values, laws and freedoms posed by Trump, Netanyahu and authoritarian bedfellows such as Vladimir Putin is ubiquitous – and growing. For Britain’s Keir Starmer, an honourable man undeservedly mocked by a sleazebag, this is the biggest, most important lesson of the war: know your enemy – and act accordingly.

This is Trump’s war of choice. But Britain has choices, too. Two hundred and fifty years after the American colonists broke free of empire, it’s time for a British declaration of independence.

Cover photo:  Smoke rises after an Israeli airstrike in Beirut's southern suburbs, 6 March 2026. Photograph: Hussein Malla/AP