Iran fired two intermediate-range ballistic missiles at a joint UK-US military base in the Indian Ocean late last week, marking a further expansion of the war as Donald Trump weighed plans to deploy US troops to unblock a vital trade waterway.
The strike, though unsuccessful, highlighted the range of Iran’s missiles and the strategic importance of Diego Garcia, where the US keeps a large number of heavy bombers as well as nuclear submarines and guided-missile destroyers.
Iran targeted the base about 2,500km away, before the UK agreed to allow the US to use it and RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire for “specific and limited defensive operations”. The decision means the US can now use those bases to counteract Iranian missile sites targeting international shipping in the Strait of Hormuz as well as British allies in the Gulf, widening the UK’s involvement in a war from which it has sought to distance itself.
“We were not, and continue not to be, involved in offensive action and we have taken a different view from the US and Israel on that,” the UK foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, told Sky News in an interview yesterday. “We will not be drawn into a wider conflict”.
An Iranian drone was targeted at the RAF base in Akrotiri, Cyprus earlier in the war but the attempted strike on Diego Garcia is the furthest Iran has struck anywhere since the US and Israel began their attacks last month.
The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Keir Starmer was putting British lives in danger by allowing UK bases to be used for “aggression” against Iran. “Vast majority of the British People do not want any part in the Israel-US war of choice on Iran,” he posted on X on Friday. “Iran will exercise its right to self-defence.”
Trump said the UK “should have acted a lot faster” in giving the US permission to use Diego Garcia. The remote base has been a source of strain in the relationship between Starmer and Trump, who has pilloried the UK and other European allies for failing to support the war on Iran more robustly.
The UK, Germany and Italy have balked at sending warships to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran closed in response to the war.
“COWARDS, and we will remember,” Trump wrote on his website Truth Social, describing the opening of the strait as a “simple military maneuver” [sic]: “So easy for them to do, with so little risk.”
Energy prices have surged since Iran closed the strait through which a fifth of the world’s oil usually passes. In an effort to tame oil prices, the Trump administration has lifted sanctions on Iranian crude oil already stranded at sea for more than 30 days.
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The US is also reportedly considering plans to occupy or blockade the oil terminal on Iran’s Kharg Island as a means of pressuring Iran to loosen its stranglehold on the strait.
The US will suffer “unprecedented losses” if it follows through on its threats of military aggression against Kharg Island, an Iranian military source told a news agency affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. One option would be for Iran to destabilise the Red Sea, the source told Tasnim.
Iran continued to lash out across the region yesterday. In Israel, first responders treated wounded in the town of Dimona for shrapnel injuries from a missile strike. The country’s nuclear site is located nearby and Iran had previously threatened to hit it.
Three weeks into the war, the endgame remains unclear. Shortly before posting that he might consider winding the war down because the US was “getting very close” to achieving its military objectives, Trump told reporters outside the White House he didn’t want a truce. “You don’t do a ceasefire when you’re literally obliterating the other side,” he said.
Photograph by U.S. Navy via AP, File