Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, once a Tory foreign Secretary, made a little intervention in the Commons today earning him a news clip, to urge restraint in building bridges with Iran, likening the potential relationship as similar to that with the Soviet Union in the Cold War. What drivel!

There is a generation of Western politicians who survive from the Cold War which they understood to the finest hairline tuning, but who have entirely failed to rise to the intellectual challenge of the fluid diplomacy of the modern world and the threats it faces from insurgencies, extremists and fanatical religious conglomerations. This is no longer a world of power blocks and rivalries challenging each other from closed spheres of influence and control. It is a world which is globalized and interdependent in a way unparalleled in human history, which requires a new kind of diplomacy to navigate its crowded waters. It is a diplomacy of building alliances on issues as they arise, based on common interest and the advance of the common good. It is more about making friends than confronting enemies; the more of the former, the fewer of the latter.

The spectacular failures of  post 9/11 Western foreign policy become hourly more apparent to all who can see. Apparently Sir Malcolm is not one of them. As Boris would say, time to put…………!

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The US and Iran are discussing what to do to curb the ISIS advance in Iraq and how to bring stability to this stricken country. The talks are informal and they are at official rather than leader level. But they are happening and that fact alone is the most significant diplomatic development in the this whole theater of conflict and tension in the middle east since 9/11 for sure, and maybe for decades.

What these two countries now recognize, one a superpower, the other the only Islamic democracy which functions as a stable nation, is that they have a common interest in halting the rise of Islamic extremism as an organised military power grouping, with the potential to cause murder and mayhem on an industrial scale and redraw maps to create a new medieval state. This moves the US closer not only to Iran, which is a very good thing indeed, but also the war aims in Syria of Assad. This is also a good thing but few in the West will dare admit it even if they pluck up the courage to think it. The Sunni royal autocracies in the Gulf will be unsettled, even alarmed. In  Jerusalem (or Tel Aviv) lights will burn late.

There is another aspect. The foreign policies of Washington and Moscow, which have differed somewhat over the middle east, are now drawing much closer together. If the West, Iran and Russia find a common position and press it, it may well be that the Jihadist surge will have reached its high water mark. This may be wishful thinking. We shall have to wait and see. In the end the solution will be political not military, and may involve some kind of federated separation between Shia, Sunni and Kurd in the countries presently organised as the single entities of Syria and Iraq.

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