Israel’s latest attack on Iran is something that Prime Minister Netanyahu has been itching to do for decades. However, successive US presidents prevented him from implementing a strategy that poses an extremely high risk and has the potential to drag America into military action. Trump has now effectively given Israel the green light. Iran has already promised to launch strikes against US and UK targets in the area. If that happens Trump will be under enormous pressure to respond with more force, adding fuel to an existing and long-standing regional conflict. He has talked tough on Iran and made extraordinary claims that it will be “easy” to make a deal with the Ayatollahs based on increasing trade with the USA.
Trump seems to think these fundamentalist clerics are like him, only interested in money and mammon. It's a shocking misreading of the motives behind the Israel/Iran missile and drone exchanges.
Most of his predecessors were extremely circumspect when discussing the Middle East and cautious about the language they used. Trump doesn't have the same inhibitions or the diplomatic or even basic language skills to tread with care while carrying a burning torch through a fuel dump. If anyone is likely to stumble accidentally into a conflagration it's him.
Read this unhinged post on his Truth Social platform:
It is at once stupid, threatening, and clumsy. The sort of stuff a twelve-year-old bully in 7th grade might say. They are not the words that any other president of any nation on earth in human history would have written. And you can be sure nobody in the US State Department, not even Marco Rubio, saw the message before it went out.
American foreign policy has been reduced to managing the fall-out from one crazed delinquent in The White House and the world is now in a far more dangerous place than it has been in my lifetime.
Daniel Hannan
Next week marks the ninth anniversary of the 2016 EU Referendum. The day after that will be the notional date in the future that Daniel Hannan used in his Newsnight video and article for Reaction Life two days before voters went to the polls.
To remind you, this is the opening paragraph:
"It’s 24 June, 2025, and Britain is marking its annual Independence Day celebration. As the fireworks stream through the summer sky, still not quite dark, we wonder why it took us so long to leave. The years that followed the 2016 referendum didn’t just reinvigorate our economy, our democracy and our liberty. They improved relations with our neighbours."
No doubt it had the desired impact and caused some waverers to cast their vote for the Leave camp.
In Hannan's fantasy world, everything in Britain had improved by getting out of the EU. Brussels was apparently the source of every ill affecting us, and there were many. Once outside of the regulatory shackles that Hannan barely understood and couldn't identify, all would be well:
"The United Kingdom is now the region’s foremost knowledge-based economy. We lead the world in biotech, law, education, the audio-visual sector, financial services and software. New industries, from 3D printing to driverless cars, have sprung up around the country. Older industries, too, have revived as energy prices have fallen back to global levels: steel, cement, paper, plastics and ceramics producers have become competitive again."
Well, on 23 June 2016, Mr (as he then was) Hannan, now ensconced in the House of Lords with several hundred other unelected representatives that he used to despise, got his way, and out of the EU we came. I assume he would have liked to celebrate by publishing a valedictory piece telling us all how right he had been all along. Sadly for him (and us) that is not possible. He can't claim to have been half right, not even a quarter right. No, he was totally and utterly wrong, although wringing that admission out of him will take a bit longer.
He has an article (free to read if you give The Telegraph your email address, otherwise archived HERE) with the rather downbeat title: Britain is turning into a Third World country.
Safe to say that back on 21 June 2016 when his clip went out on BBC's Newsnight and was watched by several hundred thousand viewers, it wasn't the sort of thing he thought he would be writing in June 2025.
Now, let us try to imagine what the result of the referendum might have been had Lord Hannan possessed a crystal ball and had made a video for the BBC telling us what life would actually be like today, or admitting that he would be writing about Britain literally becoming a third-world country.
The outcome may not have changed, but you can be sure it would have been much closer than it was.
You won't be surprised to learn that in his latest effort he doesn't actually mention Brexit or his video forecast of nine years ago. A good memory in these matters is an 'unpardonable sin' as Elizabeth Bennet once said in Pride and Prejudice, and he clearly thought it wise to draw a veil over his prediction which has turned out to be disastrously wrong.
He recalls some of his early childhood in Lima, Peru where he lived with his parents, who worked in the UK diplomatic corps, until the age of nine, presumably listening to fairy tales about a Britain that nobody living there would have recognised, and he now rails against immigrants:
"What a sad decline. Lee Kuan Yew [of Singapore fame] once recalled how, when he was studying law at Cambridge, he had taken the Tube to Piccadilly Circus and had been astonished to see people buying newspapers and leaving the correct price in an honesty box, open to any passer-by.
"Such behaviour is now unthinkable in Piccadilly Circus. It might be found in Singapore, which has successfully inculcated in its huge immigrant population a sense of national cohesion. But in Britain, partly because of what Eric Kaufmann calls asymmetric multiculturalism – that is, celebrating minorities while denigrating the majority – any such sense of trust is evaporating."
I am in the majority (white British) but I don't feel denigrated. Do you?
The people who think they have been, are in the minority in my opinion. They are the racists, closet and otherwise, who like Hannan and Trump are turning their attention to the immigrants seeking a better life in a safer place.
Next, he will be arguing for Britain to quit the European Court of Human Rights. Watch out for that.
