The shift came after escalating threats to British troops and citizens from missile and drone attacks. Just hours after the release of Starmer’s Sunday statement, the Ministry of Defence told the Daily Mail that it was responding to a suspected drone attack on a key British airbase in Limassol, Cyprus, at midnight local time. There were no casualties.
The government is also scrambling to help tens of thousands of Britons stranded in Gulf states amid airspace closures across the Middle East. Commercial interests are also at risk: A Gibraltar-flagged oil tanker was struck Sunday by “an unknown projectile” in the Strait of Hormuz near the United Arab Emirates, though the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Centre said it was able to proceed after the resulting fire was extinguished.
But Starmer’s Middle East balancing act — neither condemning nor celebrating Trump’s action, helping out but not joining in — risks pleasing no one.
“The Americans would have expected the U.K. to take this position,” former Foreign Office Permanent Secretary Peter Ricketts told POLITICO. “The American system, the Pentagon and State Department, won’t have been surprised. This is a long-standing British position.”
That didn’t stop Trump ally Lindsey Graham from immediately branding the U.K.’s initial understated joint response with France and Germany in the immediate wake of the strikes early Saturday “pathetic.”
At home, Starmer’s ruling Labour Party, which was beaten into third place by parties to its left and right in a by-election last week, is coming under pressure to take a stand against Trump from the victors of that election, the left-wing populist Green Party — which has already declared the U.S. and Israeli strikes illegal.