Counterfactuals are always fascinating fun to think up and debate. “What if Caesar/Napoleon/Hitler had done X instead of Y?” But two of our best living historians, Professor Sir Niall Ferguson and Lord Roberts of Belgravia, have shown their real usefulness, too. In Virtual History, Ferguson imagines, among other scenarios, the impact on the world of Charles I winning the English Civil War. Lord Roberts asks every guest on his podcast for their own “what if”.
It’s also a crucially important tool in modern geopolitics. We always make the mistake of judging an action against the baseline of an unchanging status quo, rather than the different paths that could branch out if such an action had not disrupted the flow of events. What if Britain had remained in the EU, for example? We surely would not have been as fast at helping Ukraine; our Covid lockdown would likely have been longer and more painful than it already was; our AI labs would be behind.
We should look at the Iran War through the same lens. What if it hadn’t happened? What if it had happened 10 years earlier? We cannot know for certain, of course, but it does help us to get into the mindset of Donald Trump and his team, and to try to assess the value of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran.
The reality on the ground inside Iran was stark. By mid-2025 Iran was assessed to have had nearly a thousand pounds of 60 per cent enriched uranium. This is so close to weapons grade, that American intelligence said that the Iranians could have fuel for a bomb in under a week. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) thought it could make enough for nine weapons. They were likely days, not years, from the bomb.
Now, picture what would have happened if they had actually crossed that line. A nuclear Iran doesn’t just get a weapon. It gets a shield. The IRGC and the Houthis could control the Strait of Hormuz (as well as the less often discussed Bab-el-Mandeb Strait between Yemen and Eritrea, connecting the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden), and forever dictate terms to ships with infinitely more certainty than their threats today are armed with. Hezbollah operates with nuclear cover. The Gulf states face a simple choice: bow or build their own bombs; Saudi Arabia has already said it would. A nuclear cascade across the most volatile region on Earth would follow.
Worst of all, the conflict we have just seen to defang the regime suddenly becomes impossible. This is exactly why the ayatollahs wanted nuclear weapons in the first place. Then the axis of resistance, led by China and Russia, can hold the region to ransom and make any Western intervention in Ukraine, Taiwan or elsewhere even more difficult. Suddenly, short-term oil price hikes don’t seem so existential.
So how did we nearly let it happen? Tehran executed a brilliant strategy, with extraordinary patience, over two decades. The ayatollahs pursued a deliberate multi-track approach: building a regional proxy network of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, to name but a few, that made the cost of confrontation appear unbearable.
Then a stroke of unforgivable Western naïveté – Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This gave the Islamic Republic both international legitimacy and billions in sanctions relief, while tying Western hands. The JCPOA deliberately excluded both the missile programme and Tehran’s regional behaviour. Many of us warned at the time that Iran would use the breathing space to fund proxy operations and accelerate ballistic missile development. That is exactly what happened.
While the regime was playing a decades-long game of chess, Western capitals were obsessing over the press cycle for the next summit. Thank goodness Jared Kushner and the first Trump administration ripped the deal up and embarked upon the Abraham Accords, the greatest hope for the region in living memory.
But with 46 million Muslims across the European continent, governments here that spent years courting those votes suddenly discovered they couldn’t behave robustly on Iran for fear of domestic violence and unrest. There have been at least 20 IRGC-linked plots foiled in Britain alone. German spooks have warned about Iranian attacks on Jewish institutions. French intelligence saw Iranian recruiters infiltrate the criminal underworld. Europe’s insane immigration problems have imported, along with the cultural issues and crime, the Iranian regime’s own enforcement arm.
The Government still refuses to proscribe the IRGC, hiding behind the legal distinction that it forms part of the Iranian state. Along with the refusal from either party to ban the Muslim Brotherhood, this is terror and cowardice from Britain’s legacy parties. It is the principal reason I joined Reform; Nigel Farage has been the one politician willing to call for this.
All the while, the regime’s genius was to make confrontation always seem premature. There was always another round of talks, another sunset clause, another International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection to wait for. A so-called hardliner would be replaced by a so-called moderate. Each delay bought another year of nuclear enrichment, another generation of drones (used to such devastating effect by Russia in Ukraine), another $1bn flowing to proxies. The same proxies were then empowered to kill British soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere, of course.
So when we assess the conflict, which is likely far from over despite the ceasefire, we should consider not just the way it was carried out, or the consequences of action. We must consider the counterfactual of inaction. And we should rebuild a British foreign policy landscape that is capable of considering the different outcomes and the impact that they might have on the British national interest.
What would be the effect on our energy security, our trade and investments – and above all the safety of our people – if this intervention, or indeed any other, had not happened?
Politicians may not be interested in foreign affairs. But as the world gets more dangerous, they should be. The counterfactual of Britain failing to consider the impact of action and inaction alike, is a terrifying one.