Rebuttals 101: The UK, the US, Israel and Iran - what people get wrong
There are a lot of myths, rumours, and straight up lies underlying the recent conflicts between these nations - let's separate the fact from the fiction
Claim 1 - “The UK isn’t involved in the war”
On 28 February 2026, the day US-Israel strikes on Iran began, Starmer put out a statement saying “the United Kingdom played no role in these strikes.” In the same statement, he confirmed that “our forces are active and British planes are in the sky today as part of coordinated regional defensive operations” (Hansard, 28 February 2026). Both of those sentences were in the same announcement. British planes were flying, British bases were being used, and yet the official line was that we played no role.
By 2 March, Starmer was in Parliament saying it was his “duty to judge what is in Britain’s national interest” and confirming that UK jets were intercepting Iranian drones over Iraq (Hansard, 2 March 2026). He said base use was “strictly limited to agreed defensive purposes,” but the fact remains that the UK went from “we’re not involved” to active military participation in the space of two days, with no parliamentary vote beforehand. If that’s not involvement, the word has lost its meaning.
Claim 2 - “The UK has an independent foreign policy”
In January 2026, when asked in Parliament about US military action against Iran, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said “the US response will be a matter for the US Government and Administration, and it would not be right for me to speculate” (Hansard, 13 January 2026). This was the UK’s Foreign Secretary saying, publicly, that what the US military does is not for her to comment on, even when it directly involves UK bases and UK security.
And it goes deeper than just political deference. UK financial institutions comply with US secondary sanctions on Iran because any institution that processes dollar transactions, which is most major international transactions, needs access to the US financial system (HM Treasury, 2024). So UK banks won’t process perfectly legal UK-Iran trade, not because of UK law, but because they can’t afford to be cut off from the dollar. The UK has its own sanctions regime on paper, but in practice the country is locked into US policy through financial infrastructure. Add NATO obligations on top of that, where Iran has been framed as destabilising Euro-Atlantic relations by arming Russia against Ukraine (NATO, 2025), and the UK’s room for anything resembling an independent position on Iran is basically zero. The independence is the fiction, the alignment is the reality.
Claim 3 - “Iran is the aggressor destabilising the Middle East”
This one requires some historical memory, which is exactly what the framing is designed to prevent. In 1953, Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The UK responded with sanctions, a naval blockade of Iranian oil exports, and an MI6-CIA coup that overthrew him and installed the Shah (Abrahamian, 2013; Bayandor, 2010). The oil company had been paying Iran £16 million in royalties while making £170 million in profit (Hansard, 1951). Churchill called Mossadegh a “lunatic” (Hansard, 1951).
The Shah’s dictatorship produced the 1979 revolution. Western support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, where the UK secretly armed both sides and the Scott Inquiry later found that ministers had “deliberately misled Parliament” about it (Scott, 1996), deepened Iranian hostility to the West. The JCPOA was supposed to be the diplomatic solution, and Iran was in compliance when Trump pulled the US out in 2018, only recommencing enrichment a year later in 2019 (IAEA, 2019; Arms Control Association, 2024). The collapse of that deal produced the very nuclear threat it was supposed to prevent, and the current war is the attempt to fix the consequences of that collapse by force.
None of this means Iran’s government is blameless or democratic. But presenting Iran as the sole destabilising force in a region where the West has been overthrowing governments, arming dictators, and playing both sides of wars for seventy years is not analysis. It’s amnesia with a purpose.
Claim 4 - “We uphold the rules-based international order”
The UK votes for UN resolutions criticising Israeli settlements while supplying the F-35 components that Israel’s military uses to protect and enforce those same settlements (Campaign Against Arms Trade, 2024). The vote is symbolic, the arms supply is material. They also vote to condemn Iran at the UN but only materially act on the condemnation of Iran, not Israel.
The UK applied sanctions to Russia within weeks of the invasion of Ukraine, citing the rules-based order. It took over a year of sustained bombardment of Gaza before the UK suspended even 5% of its arms licences to Israel, and even then it exempted the F-35, the single biggest category (House of Commons Library, 2025). Same rules, same criteria, completely different application depending on who the ally is.
This is not an accident or an oversight. The “rules-based order” as the UK practices it means applying international law to adversaries like Russia and Iran while allowing allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia to operate with minimal consequence. It is a product of where Western power and its material interests sit, not a neutral framework applied equally to everyone.
Claim 5 - “Starmer learned from the mistakes of the past”
Starmer used this exact phrase in his 2 March statement to Parliament (Hansard, 2 March 2026), saying the UK had “learned from mistakes of the past” and would not join offensive strikes on Iran. The mistakes he was referencing, without naming them, were Iraq.
But look at the pattern. In January 2026 the government was still framing the Iran situation as diplomatic, with Cooper talking about sanctions and IAEA inspectors. By February, the UK had quietly moved Typhoons, F-35s, counter-drone teams and radar systems to the region (Hansard, 3 February 2026). By late February, Starmer was saying we played no role in strikes while confirming our forces were active. By 2 March he was in Parliament defending base use for US operations. That is the exact same pattern as Iraq, where the public position drifted steadily from diplomacy to involvement while each individual step was presented as limited, defensive, and different from what came before.
The “mistake” of Iraq was not that the government failed to learn. The mistake was that parliamentary and public opposition couldn’t stop a war that had already been decided on. And here we are again, with Starmer giving his speech to Parliament the day *after* he had already approved US base use (Hansard, 2 March 2026), which means Parliament was told about the decision, not asked to make it.
If that’s what learning from the past looks like, it’s worth asking what exactly was learned, and by whom. Because it looks a lot like the lesson was about how to manage the public better, not how to avoid the same sh*t happening again.
## References
Abrahamian, E. (2013) *The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations*. New York: The New Press.
Arms Control Association (2024) *Timeline of Nuclear Diplomacy With Iran*. Available at: https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/iran-nuclear-timeline (Accessed: 14 April 2026).
Bayandor, D. (2010) *Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited*. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Campaign Against Arms Trade (2024) *F-35 briefing update*. Available at: https://caat.org.uk/app/uploads/2024/10/CAAT-F35-briefing-update-v4.pdf (Accessed: 14 April 2026).
House of Commons Library (2025) *UK arms exports to Israel*. CBP-9964. Available at: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9964/ (Accessed: 14 April 2026).
International Atomic Energy Agency (2019) *Verification and Monitoring in the Islamic Republic of Iran in Light of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231*. GOV/2019/21. Vienna: IAEA.
NATO (2025) *Brussels Summit Communiqué*. Available at: https://www.nato.int (Accessed: 14 April 2026).
Scott, R. (1996) *Report of the Inquiry into the Export of Defence Equipment and Dual-Use Goods to Iraq and Related Prosecutions*. HC 115. London: HMSO.
UK Parliament (2026) *Hansard*. Available at: https://hansard.parliament.uk (Accessed: 14 April 2026).