Cracked Alliance, Soaring Oil: How the Iran War Is Exposing Britain’s Most Dangerous Illusions

Brent crude is at $120 a barrel — up sixty per cent since the bombs began falling. Jet fuel across Europe has hit the equivalent of $190 per barrel, grounding airlines and repricing every flight you were planning to take this summer. The IEA’s emergency meeting is convening in Paris. And in Downing Street, a prime minister who chose carefully calibrated distance from an American war is now being accused of cowardice by his own former predecessors, and of aggression by the Iranian government that has just threatened to treat British military bases as legitimate targets.

Welcome to the week that revealed just how exposed Britain truly is — to global energy markets it cannot control, to an American ally it cannot fully trust, and to a conflict in which there are no good positions, only less bad ones.

“Late to the party”: the Trump problem

The phone call between Donald Trump and Keir Starmer that took place this week was, by all accounts, uncomfortable. Trump, who has spent the past fortnight castigating European NATO allies for their reluctance to commit fully to the American and Israeli military operation against Iran, had already publicly accused London of being what he called “an ally that wants to join the war after it’s won.” The language was characteristically blunt, but the underlying accusation carried weight that no amount of diplomatic smoothing can entirely dismiss.

Starmer’s position has been, from the outset of the conflict, a studied attempt to occupy the middle ground. Britain has not joined the military operation. It has not provided offensive support. What it has done is allow the United States to use British bases for what Downing Street carefully describes as defensive operations — a distinction that satisfies neither Washington, which wanted more, nor Tehran, which drew no distinction at all.

Iran’s ambassador in London was explicit this week. British bases used in any operations against Iran, the ambassador said, could be considered legitimate military targets. The statement was a diplomatic provocation designed to land precisely where it did — in the morning papers, in the parliamentary debates, in the calculations of every civil servant responsible for assessing the risk to British personnel and infrastructure in the Gulf region. It worked.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s successor, the current incumbent Cooper, responded with a statement that was notable for what it did not say as much as for what it did. “We do not have to be on the same line as the United States on every question,” Cooper told journalists — a formulation that, in the context of a live military conflict involving America’s closest declared ally, constituted a significant departure from the rhetoric of solidarity that has characterised British foreign policy for decades.

The domestic fallout has been immediate. Opposition parties, sensing political vulnerability, accused the government of simultaneously antagonising Washington and emboldening Tehran — the worst of both worlds. Tony Blair, who knows something about the political hazards of aligning too closely with American military adventurism, nonetheless argued this week that Britain should have offered more unambiguous support to Washington. The fact that Blair made this argument — given what happened the last time a British prime minister followed American bombers into the Middle East — tells you something about how the political geometry of this conflict is shifting.

Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, struck a different note, calling for the cancellation of King Charles’s planned state visit to the United States next month. The visit, which was scheduled months ago as a gesture of alliance solidarity, has now become freighted with symbolism that nobody in either government needs. Sky News reported that for the first time in a considerable period, public opinion appears to be aligning with Starmer’s cautious position — a reminder that British voters, whatever their politicians say, have a long memory of what unlimited solidarity with American foreign policy costs.

The numbers that matter

Strip away the diplomatic choreography and the political theatre, and what you are left with is a set of economic facts that are increasingly difficult to manage.

Brent crude at $120 per barrel, up sixty per cent since the conflict began, is already well beyond the threshold at which energy costs begin to drive meaningful inflationary pressure across every sector of the British economy. Jet fuel at the equivalent of $190 per barrel in Europe means that aviation — already one of the industries most slowly recovering from the disruptions of the past five years — faces a pricing crisis that will take months to feed through into consumer ticket prices but will do so with certainty.

The Qatar Energy Minister’s warning this week that oil could reach $150 per barrel if the strait remains closed did not emerge from thin air. It reflected a genuine assessment of the arithmetic: roughly twenty million barrels per day normally transit the Strait of Hormuz. Alternative routes — around the Cape of Good Hope, through existing pipeline infrastructure — can absorb, at most, a fraction of that volume. The strategic petroleum reserve releases being coordinated by the G7 and the IEA are meaningful gestures, but they are buying time rather than solving the underlying problem.

The IEA’s member states hold a collective 1.2 billion barrels in strategic reserves — an enormous figure in absolute terms, but representing only about sixty days of the volume that normally moves through the strait in peacetime. Every week the closure continues consumes a larger share of the buffer that was designed to handle short-term disruptions, not indefinite ones.

Fatih Birol and the Turkish dimension nobody is writing about

At the centre of the international emergency response stands a man whose name is not well known outside energy and policy circles, but who is arguably more consequential to the outcome of this crisis than most of the politicians currently making speeches about it. Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, is Turkish. He was born in Ankara, trained as an economist, and has spent decades building the IEA into a genuinely influential institution capable of coordinating responses across thirty-one member states.

This week, Birol convened an emergency meeting with G7 finance ministers — an almost unprecedented step that signals the depth of institutional anxiety about where energy markets are heading. His public statements have been measured but direct: the world is experiencing a supply disruption of a severity not seen since the 1970s, and the policy response must be proportionate to that reality rather than to the political comfort of governments that would prefer the problem to be smaller than it is.

The fact that the person managing the world’s emergency energy response is Turkish is not, of course, a matter of Turkish government policy. Birol works for an international institution, not for Ankara. But it is a reminder of something that the Hormuz crisis is making visible more broadly: that Turkey’s position at the intersection of East and West, of energy producer and energy consumer, of NATO ally and independent diplomatic actor, has produced individuals and institutions with a particular kind of credibility and reach in moments of global crisis.

Turkey’s IEA membership, its pipeline infrastructure connecting Caspian and Middle Eastern energy to European markets, its diplomatic channels to Tehran — these are not incidental features of a country that has sometimes seemed to its Western allies to be an awkward partner. They are strategic assets. And in a crisis shaped precisely by the failures of pure alignment, they are becoming increasingly visible as such.

What Britain needs to understand

The Hormuz crisis is, among other things, a tutorial in the limits of the foreign policy Britain has practised for the past three decades. The assumption that the “special relationship” with America provides both strategic direction and political cover has been tested by Trump’s accusation and found wanting. The assumption that energy security could be managed through market diversification rather than genuine strategic reserves has been tested by $120 crude and found wanting. The assumption that Britain could support American military operations at arms length without incurring meaningful risk has been tested by the Iranian ambassador’s statement and found wanting.

None of these failures is necessarily fatal. Britain retains significant strengths — financial markets, diplomatic networks, intelligence relationships, institutional credibility. The IEA, for all that its chair is Turkish rather than British, coordinates reserve releases that give the UK real tools to manage the immediate price shock.

But the medium-term questions are harder. If the strait remains closed for weeks rather than days — and there is currently no credible diplomatic process that would reopen it quickly — the inflationary pressure on British households will intensify at precisely the moment when the government has the least political headroom to absorb it. Bond yields are rising, as the notes in this week’s briefings observed: that is a signal that markets are beginning to price in the possibility of a sustained stagflationary episode, not a temporary spike.

For the Turkish and British-Turkish communities watching this unfold, the crisis has a particular texture. It is a crisis in which Turkey is simultaneously a NATO ally subject to pressure, an independent diplomatic actor with channels to Iran, and a source of some of the most important institutional leadership the world has right now. The man running the global energy emergency response is from Ankara. The ship that got through the strait flew a Turkish flag.

These are not small things. They are worth noticing — and worth writing about, in a magazine that exists precisely to see both sides of this particular horizon.