Britain needs to adopt a “coherent strategy” in dealing with Iran by working more closely with Arab allies or risk becoming “irrelevant” on the diplomatic stage, a leading expert on the Tehran regime has said.
Professor Ali Ansari has deeply criticised what he sees as the lacklustre approach taken by the UK government towards tackling the threat Iran poses.
He warned in a paper for the Policy Exchange think tank that Britain’s lack of credible military power had undermined its diplomatic influence, suggesting it risked turning a reliance on “masterly inactivity” into “exquisite irrelevance”.
“The application of soft power requires a measure of credible hard power to sustain, support and project,” he wrote in British Policy and the Iran Crisis: Masterly Inactivity and the Marginalisation of Britain.
He argued that successive governments had failed to develop a clear-headed long-term strategy towards a regime that poses an increasing threat to UK interests.
Naming a current example, Prof Ansari told The National that the UK had to also take security measures “very seriously indeed” to ensure freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.
“Britain needs to develop a coherent strategy with Arab partners and allies to ensure this and cannot absent itself from the problem,” he added.
“For historical, geopolitical and economic reasons, while we may neglect Iran, Iran will not ignore us,” Prof Ansari argued. “The Islamic Republic remains a growing threat to the British homeland with its continued interference in internal politics, attacks on dissidents as well as Jewish and Israeli targets.”
In 2024, Pouria Zeraati, a presenter for the London-based Persian-language channel Iran International, was stabbed in an attack that UK police linked to the Iranian regime. Possible links to Iran were also made in the torching of four Jewish community ambulances in Golders Green, London, in March this year, and an arson attack on a synagogue.
In the report, the lecturer argued that British policy suffers from a “structural, institutional and ideational deficit” which prevents the development of a strategy beyond short-term crisis management. The report calls for Britain to rebuild expertise on Iran within Whitehall and strengthen the defence of its Arab allies.
The lecturer at St Andrew's University stated that an absence of “historical literacy and cultural understanding” among decision-makers has encouraged an over-reliance on legalism and technicalities, particularly with regard to Iran’s nuclear programme. He levelled criticism at Britain's reliance on the E3 diplomacy – the grouping of France, Germany and the UK – to try to put pressure on Iran after the collapse of the JCPOA nuclear deal.
Prof Ansari concluded that Britain must recover the knowledge it once possessed, arguing that Iranian expertise within the Foreign Office had “atrophied”.
“If Britain has been respected and at times feared in Iran, it is because it has used its soft power with considerable dexterity and with a knowledge of its subject that has been regarded as peerless,” he said. “Britain has neglected what it once knew and must re-learn what it has forgotten.”
Arab strategy
In the paper, he accused Britain of failing to challenge Tehran’s narratives, allowing the regime to shape the political debate.
“The realities of authoritarianism are set aside in favour of a policy that seeks to bring Iran ‘in from the cold’ through accommodation and the avoidance of provocation,” he wrote, arguing that this has emboldened rather than contained Tehran.
The result was a “stubborn status quo-ism”, leaving Britain without either the will or the capability to tackle difficult issues.
Tehran playboys
Britain must also go after senior Iranian figures responsible for murder and torture by shutting down money transfers that enable their children to “live like playboy millionaires in the West”, the UK’s former security minister said.
Tom Tugendhat has also called on the government to take tougher action against the Tehran regime, which has “attempted assassinations and kidnappings” against dissidents on Britain’s streets. His words appeared in the foreword to the Policy Exchange report.
Mr Tugendhat, a Conservative MP, said the absence of a Royal Navy ship in the Arabian Gulf at the start of the Iran war exposed the country’s declining ability to match its interests with the military capacity to defend them.
“Allies are perplexed that those who once guaranteed their security have forgotten so much. Enemies are enheartened,” he wrote. He then argued for greater sanctions on figures in the regime responsible for violence against the Iranian people.
“Setting out concrete sanctions against those who organised their torture and murder should be clear,” he said. “Financial transfers that enable the lifestyles of their children to live like playboy millionaires in the West” should be closed off.
But the former minister stated that the problem extends beyond Iran and reflects a wider failure to prepare for foreseeable crises and to understand Britain’s adversaries.
The UK government said it was cooperating with allies on a “viable plan” to restore freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz and working with France to organise an international maritime security operation. But the response has also exposed the limits of European military capability, with shipping through Hormuz falling by more than 90 per cent since the conflict began.
