Ich war britischer Botschafter im Iran. Trumps Krieg hat die Welt gefährlicher gemacht

Full story here: In the midst of what is increasingly – and I am glad to say more honestly – being described as the [Third Gulf War](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/real-cost-trumps-1bn-war-4341025?ico=in-line_link), I had to fly suddenly to Bulgaria to look after my daughter following a bad skiing accident.

Taking a tram in Sofia, with its broad, Soviet-era boulevards and concrete cityscape, I missed my stop and ended up walking through a housing estate of unmistakably Soviet design – 1970s construction, paving stones that shifted underfoot so that water squirted up and soaked my leather soles. It was an oddly vivid moment, as though I had stepped into a dystopian novel. And yet, paradoxically, I felt far safer than I would have in some London boroughs.

It is a city that still bears the imprint of formalist, constructivist ambition: stark lines, ideological geometry, and a quiet insistence that architecture can shape society.

There is a certain irony to this. I recall the working groups I attended as a freshly minted British diplomat in Brussels at the end of the Cold War — earnest gatherings devoted to building a new European society and security order. There was, at the time, a sense of arrival. Even I, so wet behind the ears, could sense that I was witnessing something unusual in the span of geopolitics. Looking back three and a half decades later at the end of my diplomatic career, it feels less like an end point and more like an intermission.

That sense of hope returned later to me in a different guise in Tehran. As British ambassador in 2016, I was something of a curiosity – mistrusted, certainly, but also carefully protected. There were no bodyguards. There was no need. The regime, for all its suspicion of the Old Fox that I represented, understood the value of control. Safety, in that context, was a by-product of predictability.

In January of that year, I saw queues outside polling stations during the Iranian elections. There was, briefly, a sense of possibility — a fragile hope that [Iran](https://inews.co.uk/topic/iran?srsltid=AfmBOopJVpu5Og3sHYwK2s0kWvm3ygYF1SbBedOIhh8owUvf3JoO9ehC&ico=in-line_link) might follow a trajectory not unlike that of East Germany – or Bulgaria – in the late 1980s. It was never a perfect analogy, but it served its purpose: it allowed us to believe in movement, in change, in an eventual convergence.

So, where did that all go so badly wrong? In just 10 years, we have moved from reintegrating Iran into the international community to the [brutality](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/trumps-stone-age-threats-death-sentence-gulf-4332318?ico=in-line_link) and geopolitical [crisis of the Third Gulf War](https://inews.co.uk/opinion/trump-gambled-destroying-irans-regime-instead-new-life-4327475?ico=in-line_link). The careful, if uneasy, equilibrium that once existed with the Islamic theocracy of Iran has been replaced by something far less stable, unknown and threatening. The oppressive but mostly contained and predictable theocracy of former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, deeply penetrated by Mossad, has, in no more than a month, become a more fluid, military-led, and unrestrained, less predictable autocracy.

This transformation did not occur in a vacuum. It is the product of decisions – some impulsive, some calculated – that have collectively dismantled what little trust remained. A difficult but familiar adversary has been replaced by something more volatile: a regime that feels existentially threatened and is therefore more likely to take existential risks.

Moreover, in another unintended consequence, the war has revealed that Iran can not only threaten the world economy through its geography but it can also extort – for the first time – a toll for oil tankers and other merchant shipping transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran appears to be aiming to continue doing so regardless of whether a [fragile two-week ceasefire](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/trumps-ceasefire-cracking-3-scenarios-play-out-4344736?ico=in-line_link) turns into lasting peace. As the Iranian parliament passes legislation codifying Iran’s control of the waterway, White House planners might wonder why they didn’t see this coming.

From Tehran’s perspective, the lessons of the war are stark. Compare the fate of [North Korea](https://inews.co.uk/topic/north-korea?srsltid=AfmBOoo9QYTtK42wOfgXo_XvmU76qUKIZoL5lLVt8b1TeD4wwOfzcRcf&ico=in-line_link), armed with [nuclear weapons](https://inews.co.uk/topic/nuclear-weapons?srsltid=AfmBOoqeKAjRJ1hzUPxQIciSq771kX9jjhXoAw8SdGArJwAYy7bTmJ29&ico=in-line_link) and therefore largely untouchable, with that of Libya, whose leader surrendered his programme under Western pressure and paid the ultimate price. The conclusion is hardly surprising: nuclear capability is not merely a deterrent; it is a guarantee of regime survival. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted as much at the end of the G7 foreign ministers’ recent meeting in France. Asked why the US was entertaining a delegation from Moscow, he said one had to deal with nuclear powers. Tehran will have been listening carefully and drawing its own conclusions. The Islamic Republic finally obtaining a nuclear weapon might yet prove to be the most significant of the unintended consequences unleashed by [Donald Trump’s](https://inews.co.uk/topic/donald-trump?ico=in-line_link) latest military adventure.

Equally damaging is the growing perception – widely held, and not without justification – that the West is an unreliable partner. Agreements are entered into, then abandoned. Commitments are made, then reinterpreted. Trust, once eroded, is not easily restored.

The consequences of all this are likely to endure long after the current conflict subsides. The Iranian regime will almost certainly remain after the war ends – until it implodes at a time yet to be foreseen under its own internal contradictions. But it will be more defensive, more suspicious and more determined to secure itself against external pressure. The Middle East, already a region of chronic instability, will become more dangerous – not only for those who live there, but for Western interests, including those of the United Kingdom. The [Gulf states, caught in the middle of the conflict](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/trumps-stone-age-threats-death-sentence-gulf-4332318?srsltid=AfmBOookNmzdkEDiJ_XTUtm-r5GjdDXqXOog-sqouiKMHZyYQbnnjJzi&ico=in-line_link) and its main victims through little fault of their own, may be diminished.

On its present trajectory, the Third Gulf War seems set to produce a lose-lose outcome all round – it didn’t need to be this way, and if the US and Iran can make the massive diplomatic leap towards engagement, it doesn’t need to turn out that way either.

[*Nicholas Hopton*](https://www.nicholashopton.com/) *is Director General of The Middle East Association and also runs the geopolitical consultancy Belmont Advisory Limited. Nicholas is a Distinguished Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and a Nonresident Senior Fellow of The Atlantic Council. He is Chair of the Advisory Board for the Middle East and Mediterranean programmes at the Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge. Previously, Nicholas served as the British ambassador to Libya (2019-21), Iran (2016-18), Qatar (2013-15), and Yemen (2012-13)*

The very UK who overthrew the democratic Iranian government and put in a brutal dictatorship as well as murdered Palestinians when they refused to allow the formation of Israel, thereby creating never ending conflict and misery. The same UK who told the Ukrainians not to make peace with Russia. Yeah the UK should know they are one of the leading contributors to this instability. He should hang his head in shame and keep his big gob closed. What a sickening human pretending that the UK was for peace.

The sanitization of the IRGC by the West due to Trump’s war is honestly repulsive.