Practically all Europeans, and certainly the US, are coming round to the grim understanding that a significant reconfiguration of alliances will be required in the Middle East if ISIL is to be checked. In the UK two public figures known for sticking doggedly to a favoured cause whatever the cost, Sir Richard Dannatt and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, have said that the time has come to talk to Assad, a large part of whose country is now controlled by or has actually become, the Islamic State.
Interviewed on the media our new Foreign Secretary would have none of it, citing upsetting moderate Sunnis as the reason. This shows a disappointing and continuing lack of grasp of the strategic realities emerging in a changing world in which Britain, partly for historic reasons, seeks continually to meddle. What all Sunnis want, especially the moderates, is an autonomous self governing state and they will go along with anyone ( at the moment they are with ISIL) in order to get it. There are two ways that it can happen. One is a part of some kind of Iraq federation including the Kurds and Shia with similar self governing territories; this was once possible but it now little more than a pipe dream. The other is within a new set of boundaries overlapping both Iraq and Syria, approximating roughly to the territory under the control of IS. This would require an ascendancy of the moderates, who are in the majority, over the jihadists, whose actual numbers are far fewer than the media sensationalizes.
The military destruction of either IS or Assad is impossible without a scale of conflict in which no country in the West, including the US, is willing to engage. It is also the fact that the surrender of either would simply lead to new insurgencies. What is required is a settlement in which everybody gains something, above all peace at a price worth paying. To achieve that somebody will have to talk to Assad. Britain has ruled herself out: she will live to regret it.
But then has she? Or is this, once again, the grand deception, in which Britain is historically the champion where, in pursuit of its interests, it says one thing and does the other?