The case for keeping out of things

On 23 June, the Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, HMS Prince of Wales, arrived in Singapore. Reportedly accompanying her were various highly capable escorts, including HMS Dauntless (a sophisticated air defence destroyer) and HMS Richmond (one of the world’s best anti-submarine frigates). This force’s arrival marks the largest deployment of UK naval power to Southeast Asia — and Britain’s small naval support facility in Singapore — since HMS Queen Elizabeth and her strike group visited in 2021, and was naturally greeted with much fanfare. 

What made the general jollity of the carrier strike group’s arrival in Singapore on that particular day even more remarkable, however, was that — on the opposite side of the Indian Ocean — Britain’s most important ally was in the midst of a hot regional war with one of its most bitter foes. As bands played and corks popped in the Strait of Malacca, US forces around the Strait of Hormuz were on alert for the expected Iranian retaliation against their 21-22 June attack on Iran’s nuclear programme (and such retaliation duly arrived that night). What HMS Prince of Wales (with her large embarked force of F-35 strike fighters), Dauntless (with her ability to defend key assets against missile attack), and Richmond (with her particular talent for hunting hostile attack submarines, of which Iran possesses many) were notably not doing was hot-footing it back west to the Arabian Sea.

Less roleplay, more realism? 
In choosing not to deploy the large UK naval force that happened to be in the same ocean as the unfolding US-Israeli war with Iran (albeit on the opposite side of it) back to the Gulf region, but to instead proceed with the planned visit programme in Southeast Asia, HM Government thus made a noteworthy choice. After a post-Cold War era spent marching in lockstep with the United States’ Middle Eastern wars, London chose to sit this one out (at least as far as it could). Of course, Washington had already declared a ceasefire on its part in the campaign by the time such UK forces could have arrived in theatre — but that hostilities would pause on 24 June could not have been known as the UK Carrier Strike Group continued to sail away from America’s war over 21-23 June. 

Britain’s seeming “irrelevance” to the unfolding conflict in the Gulf was duly lamented by British commentators. Such lamentations fit with a longstanding impulse in post-1945 UK foreign-policy thought: the desire to preserve an influential “role” in the world, as an end in its own right, even as Britain’s relative power declined substantially. On such approaches, the case for UK involvement in the recent Iran conflagration would have been the fact of involvement itself; “irrelevance” to some major development in world affairs is correspondingly bad because it signifies loss of role in such affairs. 

Of course, the desire for — and pursuit of — such a role is not necessarily a bad thing; nations and their populations like to feel good about themselves, and if others see you as influential, then you can indeed wield influence (which often brings other benefits). But the problems emerge when pursuit of such a role stands in tension with other national interests: if the desire to be involved makes you poorer, say, or jeopardises your security. For the purposes of national prosperity and safety, the best thing a state can choose is often not to get involved in a conflict that could bring great costs, with perilous escalatory risks, for dubious benefits — at least except in circumstances where intervention is vital to national survival. Illustratively, one of the great successes of post-1945 UK foreign policy was resisting US pressure to enter the Vietnam War, despite the loss of international prestige associated with diplomatic marginalisation — just as Britain’s diplomatic and military centrality to 2003’s push for war in Iraq ultimately led to strategic disaster, despite the elevated world role that such centrality brought.   

This same tension — and same set of considerations — applies equally to the Iran situation: both during the past week of war, and potentially again in future, when the question of further action against Iranian capability development inevitably returns. While military absence from the US-Israeli campaign — and London’s noncommittal diplomatic line — may indeed have rendered Britain (relatively) “irrelevant” to an unfolding world event of great import, the UK’s peripherality to such an intractable mess can just as easily be coded as strategic success. Notably, London astutely let allies with more at stake bear the costs of weakening a UK adversary while eschewing costly entanglement and lessening the retaliatory dangers.  

Doing something isn’t nothing, but doing little can offer large advantages
Of course, Britain hasn’t actually done nothing to counter the Iranian threat. It retains a frigate and a pair of minehunters at its base in Bahrain; the former will have been at sea, liaising with US forces, and poised to respond if the recent war had widened further (which it could yet), while the latter would be a vital part of the Western response to any Iranian attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz. This is a relatively modest force, to be sure — but then, the British armed forces are modest things in general these days. RAF Typhoons flying from Akrotiri in Cyprus have also been constantly active countering regional air threats in recent years, and Britain put itself at the centre of efforts against Iran’s external bellicosity — risking costly blowback in the process — when Gibraltar-based Royal Marines seized an Iranian tanker accused of supplying Assad’s Syria back in 2019. Both the RN and RAF have contributed to the recent US-led campaign against Iran’s Houthi proxies in the Red Sea, furthermore, and UK intelligence capabilities and basing infrastructure will likely have contributed to US operations over the last week in all sorts of unseen ways. Even more basically, meanwhile, the very fact of Britain deploying its Carrier Strike Group to Southeast Asia and onwards into the Western Pacific — rather than rushing it back to the Arabian Sea — can itself be understood as supporting US operations in the Middle East (insofar as an allied carrier group in the Pacific can free some US forces to deploy elsewhere). And on top of all that, Britain has long led on the bread-and-butter diplomatic and intelligence work of countering Western adversaries’ proliferation efforts and broader regional hostility.

Sometimes, the best choice really is just to stay out — at least as far as one can — and let others bear the pain

Still, all such supporting activity notwithstanding, Britain’s choice not to deploy additional forces to the Middle East during a time of major war in that febrile region involving its most powerful ally — and to take a studiously passive line on that ally’s signature operation — remains noteworthy. It may indeed have rendered the UK (relatively) “irrelevant” to an unfolding global crisis, as per critics’ lamentations. But sometimes, the best choice really is just to stay out — at least as far as one can — and let others bear the pain. A country that does that always and everywhere may be a country that eventually ends up with few allies and empowered enemies. But a country that does it in cases where there are large downside risks for only modest upside gains is more likely to cling onto the power and prosperity that it still has — and in doing so, is thus more likely to actually retain that influential “role” in world affairs that so many Britons understandably prize.