The first few hours on the run are exhilarating; everything seems to happen at once. The noise and the danger are so present that the drills kick in and for a while, time seems to slow down. Later, as the adrenaline wears off, exhaustion and fear take over. That’s when resilience and courage are needed.

Alone, without a team, the US F-15 airman who crashed in Iran would have needed every ounce of his training and strength to continue to hide, move, communicate and pray for rescue. He wasn’t on the run for a night with his team, as I was 20 years ago, but for two days with no one. That’s tough.

Though the details are sparse, what is becoming clear is that the US combat search and rescue team have achieved a remarkable success. Across hostile ground, with a local population aware of the prize within their grasp, and with capable units tracking and searching for him, the airman was brought out.

That speaks to a military team of huge power and resourcefulness. There’s no other nation that could have done it. Fifty years ago, even the US wouldn’t have been able to do it.

One of the defining moments in recent Iranian-US relations was the attempted rescue of the so-called Iran hostages. In those first days after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it wasn’t clear that the regime would be so hostile to Washington. The cries of “Death to America” were yet to be heard on every street. Many in the Iranian military, which had switched allegiance from the Shah to the ayatollah, had trained alongside US troops or at US bases.

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The first attack on the US embassy that February by a Marxist guerrilla group was condemned. After storming the mission, capturing a Marine and threatening to kill the ambassador, the Iranian government helped retake the compound and restore US control. In September, another Communist group tried again, but the Islamic regime restored order. That’s what made the kidnapping of the 66 American men and women working at the US embassy in November so surprising.

This time, the assailants weren’t Leninist atheists, but Khamenei-supporting students who had not been stopped.

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What followed was Operation Eagle Claw, the catastrophic failed rescue attempt that left eight American rescuers dead and ushered in the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the election of Ronald Reagan, the creation of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and the beginning of four decades of hostilities between Tehran and Washington.

It also saw a young Donald Trump saying in an interview: “That this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking, is a horror.”

With a history like that, in hunting for the missing airman, Iran’s forces were looking for a prize to remind the US of the price of failure. While Americans were desperate not just to find their comrade, but also to ensure they could avoid a repetition of Iran’s capture of British Royal Navy personnel in 2004, and again in 2007.

No one was in any doubt that the stakes were as high as they could be from the moment the airman ejected. Every element of the US military machine would have been devoted to his recovery. The US has always seen the protection of its own forces as a key moral element of its fighting capability. Since the Second World War, pilots and special forces operators have been issued with silk maps that can be folded up and sewn into uniforms, and gold coins that can be taped to belts or hidden in boots, to help them orientate themselves and bribe their way out of trouble. No doubt, this airman had them too.

Maps were not only good for directions. They contained words written in all the languages that were likely to be useful, including requests for help and promises of reward. And the maps themselves would have their own value. Some armies promise their troops that should the serial number on the map be matched with a name, it can be turned into thousands of dollars at any embassy in the world. Again, a way of making it easier for them to hide or escape.

But the key is to remain hidden. In the desert, where few people are around and any outsider would be noticed, that’s not easy. After 24 hours, he would have been looking for water, not food. And while it wouldn’t have been too cold, he would have needed to hide from watchful eyes.

Still, technology would have made that easier. The airman would almost certainly have been carrying a personnel recovery device capable of sending encrypted bursts to satellites overhead, allowing rescue teams to track his position without him needing to break cover or risk a voice transmission. And drones would have been redirected to watch over him, marking threats and mapping routes in the area.

When the opportunity finally came, the combat search and rescue team, which was likely to be a mix of air force pararescuemen and special operations helicopters who had rehearsed this scenario hundreds of times, would have been sent in.

That’s why this succeeded while Operation Eagle Claw failed. In 1980, the teams hadn’t trained together, the helicopters broke down. Most fundamentally of all, the command chain was confused, leading to conflicting assumptions and orders. The disaster at their forward base, Desert One, was a system failure that the US military has corrected.

This rescue is proof that the years of integration and leadership that SOCOM offers have prepared the American military better than any other. That deep understanding of joint operations and relentless rehearsals has made US special operations the most capable in the world. Losing a C-130 and a helicopter won’t matter, so long as everyone is brought home.

For Britain, there is a harder lesson. We couldn’t have done it. We do not have the platforms, the satellites, the reach or the mass. Our rescue plan, if the airman were British, would be to call the US. Our only choice would have been reaching out to Washington or capitulating to Tehran.

The Americans got their man out because they decided, decades ago, that they would never accept the alternative. That’s given them a power that demands respect. Britain once had it. Like America, we could decide to have it again.

First published in The Telegraph 05 April

Stirling Castle controlled Scotland throughout the 16th century. Its position, scale and splendour spoke of a monarch dominating his kingdom with military and moral power.

That was no accident. James V was in his pomp when he called artists from across Europe to make his new French wife, Mary of Guise, feel welcome. The palace he built, begun in the 1530s, was the first Renaissance palace in the British Isles.

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French masons carved the façade. German engravings supplied the patterns. Scottish ambition paid for it all. Walk outside the Royal Palace today and the statues still stare down at you. Warriors line the south parapet. Below them stand the full-size figures: Venus, the goddess of love and fertility, is rendered twice for emphasis but it is no coincidence that the first of these is Abundance.

James V had understood what too many have forgotten: his legitimacy came not just from God, but from his bounty. He knew that he needed to provide for his people. Abundance was not a luxury; it was a doctrine.

Today, across Europe and here at home, too many have replaced the pursuit of abundance with the management of constraint and this fundamental defeatism is costing us all.

Energy, the foundation of every industrial economy since James Watt, has been deliberately restricted through carbon targets, planning vetoes, and a regulatory apparatus that treats the production of power as a problem to be contained rather than a capacity to be unleashed.

Britain’s Grangemouth refinery is closed, North Sea plans are vetoed, and the Gainsborough Trough sits untapped for its gas. In Germany, the story is similar: shuttered nuclear plants and American gas imports at four times the price it once paid for Russian supplies.France alone is resilient with its own nuclear plants, but even they depend on other sources.

The continent that launched the industrial revolution is choosing to make energy expensive and is surprised when industry leaves.

In Britain, we’re doing the same with capital. Pension funds that once financed railways in Scotland and bridges in Wales, creating the infrastructure to connect a growing economy, have been herded by regulation into government bonds.

The money isn’t destroyed but nationalised: extracted from productive investment and lent back to the state to fund its own consumption, generating the returns of the bureaucrat, not the entrepreneur.

That is, starving companies that might have grown cannot find backing. The heirs of Adam Smith look elsewhere as the savings of millions of working people are converted, silently, into gilts that fund today’s spending rather than tomorrow’s prosperity.

James V would have recognised the parable of the talents enacted as fiscal policy, but seen us as the foolish servant who was scolded, not the wise ones who returned a profit.

The result is invisible but can be felt: Europe today is ageing and protecting the past, instead of aspiring to the future. That’s not just bad for the young; it hurts us all.

Emigration is as important as immigration and seeing rural communities from the Scottish Highlands to southern Italy leave is heartbreaking.

To the family, it’s a lost connection; to the state, it’s a debt paid in education now uncollected in taxes. That’s no way to build a future.

Losing abundance has also unbalanced our relationships, as Henry Kissinger saw decades ago. In 1966, he warned that it was in neither America’s interest nor Europe’s that Europe should become “the Greece to our Rome, a political backwater, interesting culturally but unable to play an active role”.

Hegemony without allies is demoralising, he argued, and the only way for America to sustain its influence was to share both the costs and the responsibilities of the common defence.

The alternative was that its allies would simply shift those burdens onto Washington. That is precisely what happened. And now Washington is deciding, not unreasonably, that it has had enough.

Stirling Castle is a museum now and tourists, many American descendants of those who once built it, walk through rooms where James V once danced. It is beautiful, lovingly restored, and entirely powerless.

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That is the fate Kissinger described, and it is the fate Europe is choosing: culturally interesting, strategically irrelevant, a playground for visitors – underwritten resentfully by another’s protection.

This is bad for Europe, for America and bad for the West. A world in which the United States carries the full burden of defending the liberal order is brittle. Alliances work when every member has something to offer and something to lose.

A Europe that has outsourced its energy, nationalised its capital, and hollowed out its defence industrial base has very little left to contribute and very little leverage with which to shape its own security.

The statues at Stirling Castle depicted abundance because James V understood that abundance is the precondition of power. We have chosen scarcity, called it virtue, and wondered why the power followed the energy to where it is welcome. It is time to build again.

First published in The Telegraph 23 March 2026

This is a modern-day Manhattan Project, again a partnership between the U.K. and the U.S. The team behind Helios began in 2014 as Cambridge Quantum in England before joining with Honeywell Quantum Solutions, an arm of the U.S. industrial giant, to create Quantinuum. The field of quantum computing makes possible cracking encryption, creating innovative technologies, and discovering new drugs. Classical computers process information as ones or zeros in bits. A quantum computer uses qubits—shorthand for quantum bits—to harness the behavior of subatomic particles, which can exist in multiple states at once. That lets it explore vast numbers of possibilities simultaneously, a capability that could accelerate artificial intelligence development.

The Quantinuum team had a major breakthrough this month, solving quantum computations using 94 error-protected logical qubits. Quantum machines are sensitive to noise, or outside interference that disrupts a qubit’s state and causes errors. This test demonstrated that the computer can correct errors from qubits, indicating that larger computers without errors are possible.

The comparison with Los Alamos may sound extreme, but the stakes are comparable. A nation that masters this technology will be able to break any standard encryption on earth and accelerate other sciences beyond the understanding of countries without quantum computing. This holds the same profound implications for defense and intelligence today as nuclear physics did 80 years ago.

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Quantinuum couldn’t have been built by one country alone. The software, algorithms and theoretical science came from the U.K. The hardware, manufacturing infrastructure and capital came from Honeywell and the U.S. investment ecosystem. Cambridge Quantum’s founder, Ilyas Khan, was a fellow of the University of Cambridge Judge Business School. Quantinuum’s chief executive spent nearly 25 years at Intel. Its head of AI previously worked at Google DeepMind in London. This is an Anglo-American enterprise in its DNA, just like the Manhattan Project, though this time our race is against China.

In 1943 the Quebec Agreement formalized a collaboration between British and American scientists who would build the atomic bomb. The Americans provided scale, industrial capacity and money, building on scientific breakthroughs from Britain. The British government moved its nuclear work to the U.S. to complement the work done by U.S.-based scientists. Together they changed the world.

Britain has produced more than 70 quantum companies. PsiQuantum emerged from research conducted at the University of Bristol and now is based in Silicon Valley. Oxford Ionics, acquired by IonQ for more than $1 billion, is an Oxford University Innovation spinout. Riverlane in Cambridge is building quantum error-correction technology that may prove as important as the hardware itself. The U.K.’s 10-year National Quantum Strategy is backed by £2.5 billion (about $3.3 billion). Under the Aukus security partnership among the U.S., U.K. and Australia, the Quantum Arrangement known as AQuA is already accelerating joint military quantum capabilities.

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The U.S. brings scale, capital markets and defense procurement to turn breakthroughs into deployed systems. Together with the U.K. we are in the lead.

But others are moving fast. China has committed an estimated $15 billion to quantum research, with its new Five-Year Plan listing quantum among high-priority future industries. Origin Quantum in 2023 announced the sale of China’s first commercial quantum computer and made the Origin Pilot operating system open source this year, allowing it to reach beyond U.S. export controls. France has committed €1.8 billion (about $2.07 billion). Germany €3 billion, Japan $7.4 billion. Major world powers know this technology will deliver a strategic advantage for the rest of the century.

There are echoes of the explosion in artificial intelligence. In December 2015, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and others co-founded a small laboratory in San Francisco called OpenAI. Almost nobody noticed until seven years later when ChatGPT arrived and the world understood that AI companies had achieved a massive technological leap.

Quantum computing is perhaps a decade behind AI. The science is real, and the money is flooding in, but it is still a niche field. While AI companies are raising hundreds of billions of dollars, quantum investment is measured in single-digit billions.

That is changing. While global public investment exceeded $10 billion early last year, IBM has targeted 2026 to demonstrate scientific quantum advantage. Google’s Willow chip has shown error correction improving with additional qubits, a milestone pursued for 30 years. With the last stage complete, Quantinuum’s road map targets fault-tolerant quantum computing—where the computer can operate correctly even in the presence of errors—by 2030. To get there, majority-owner Honeywell announced plans in January for an IPO expected to value Quantinuum at $10 billion.

But this story is about more than money. As in 1943, most people haven’t yet grasped what is coming. When they do, the countries that moved first will hold advantages and those that didn’t will discover that the future belongs to those who build it themselves.

First published in the Wall Street Journal, 23 March 2026

On Monday, Mark Carney arrived at Downing Street and Keir Starmer wished him a happy birthday. Ottawa and Westminster are always close, but with oil surging past US$100 a barrel and the war continuing in Ukraine, the need to plan together for what is to come has never been more important.

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The next morning, President Volodymyr Zelensky flew in. The two conflicts on two continents are both fuelling challenges that we will have to face at home as the world scrambles to adjust because of our dependency on chokepoints we struggle to secure.

Iran has made the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s crude still nominally flows, the centrepiece of its retaliation against the American and Israeli strikes. It has already disrupted prices, and very soon it could have an impact on supplies – affecting shipping and repricing, in real time, every good travelling anywhere, from Seoul to Saskatchewan.

Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s demands for cooperation, countries have been reticent to involve themselves in the operation. Japan said it would be legally “very difficult.” France and Britain ruled out a naval contribution. Australia’s transport minister declared the country “well prepared to weather the economic crisis” and confirmed no ship would be sent, though her statement that Australia holds 37 days of petrol and 30 days of diesel sounds more like a warning than a reassurance should the blockade endure.

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All this points to a reality the world has not calculated: resilience is more than volume, it’s options. With little flowing from the Persian Gulf, that means thinking hard about those we can trust. And when it comes to CANZUK – Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand – there’s no one we can trust more than each other.

I’ve seen what we can do when we choose to act together. In Iraq, my commander was Australian, there was a Canadian in the unit and we had a New Zealand doctor. The Aussie was in his own armed forces, the others in the British, and none had changed their passports. But that didn’t matter. We all held Crown commissions and operated under structures of command, law and trust that have been built over generations.

We didn’t need a new treaty to fight together, just the political will to show up. That interoperability, tested time and again, is an asset no other group of nations possesses, and it goes beyond the battlefield.

Between us, we can offer each other resilience based on trust that none can match. Canada produced 5.3 million barrels of crude oil per day last year, a national record, and is now increasing output by a further 140,000 barrels daily as part of the International Energy Agency’s emergency response. Australia holds the world’s largest uranium reserves, roughly a third of all known deposits, centred on the Olympic Dam mine, the single biggest uranium deposit ever found. Canada, too, holds enormous reserves in the Athabasca Basin in Saskatchewan. New Zealand already generates more than 80 per cent of its electricity from renewables, principally hydro and geothermal. Britain retains a substantial North Sea production base, which needs drilling, and is building the largest offshore wind capacity in Europe while committing to a nuclear program whose fuel needs could and should be met from within the alliance, through Edmonton and Adelaide, not Astana and Moscow.

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Together, we represent a combined GDP of US$8.85-trillion, defence spending at over US$140-billion and rising. We’re already in Five Eyes, and the CPTPP, but most importantly united by the constitutional reality that each recognizes the same head of state. These are more than sentimental ties. They are institutional facts with practical consequences for how fast agreements can be reached and how far trust extends when supply chains come under pressure.

Hormuz and Kyiv remind us what matters. Energy dependence finances the very aggression that threatens us and leaves our friends exposed.

Together, we can build the resilience in arms and energy based on preferential supply arrangements, shared strategic reserves, aligned nuclear fuel cycles and joint investment in critical infrastructure, which would cut costs and create opportunity for us all.

Sharing the burden of protection, the security of supply, and the cost of innovation would build on the interoperability I witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the intelligence sharing that runs daily through Five Eyes, and in the submarine program AUKUS is delivering.

The objection will be distance, but that’s a strength, not a weakness. It gives us each a footprint in a part of the world we could never control but from which we can draw strength.

With liquefied natural gas (LNG) crossing oceans by tanker, and uranium shipped in containers, distance is no longer as great a problem as political imagination. Closer cooperation has been treated as nostalgia, but the reality is that the wars in Iran and Ukraine show it matters today. From Alberta to South Australia, the trust already exists. What is missing is the decision to act.

Mark Carney was in London this week. He met Britain’s Prime Minister and our collective King. The conversation should not end there.

First published in The Globe and Mail 17 March 2026

The Conflicted Podcast is well worth subscribing to if you are interested in following what’s going on in the Middle East. You can link to it here:

Ignore the Western voices and listen to the Iranian people themselves. After living for two generations under a regime more violent and brutal than any this century, they are speaking clearly enough. Iranians around the world, and inside Iran itself, are celebrating the death of Ali Khamenei. Recordings from Tehran show people pouring into the streets. These are not orchestrated displays. They are the spontaneous relief of a nation that has endured decades of murder, oppression, and corruption at the hands of a theocratic tyranny.

The scale of Khamenei’s brutality deserves to be stated plainly. In recent months alone, his security forces may have killed between thirty and fifty thousand young Iranians. Women were murdered for refusing the veil. Gay men and women were persecuted and killed. And alongside the violence, enormous corruption left ordinary Iranians unable to obtain the most basic medicines: aspirins, blood thinners, the things we take entirely for granted. People have been dying in misery while the regime hoarded the nation’s wealth.

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This was not merely an Iranian tragedy. Khamenei’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tried to kill British soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. They sent agents to London to murder journalists at Iran International. Khamenei supported the fatwa against Salman Rushdie that resulted in one of Britain’s greatest living novelists being blinded in one eye. Through the IRGC and its proxies, his regime murdered tens of thousands of Lebanese and Syrians, slaughtering Sunni Muslims across the Middle East for decades. I will not mourn this man, and nor should anyone who values human life and human liberty.

The strategic picture is shifting rapidly. Maduro has gone in Venezuela. Assad has gone in Syria. Khamenei has gone in Iran. Putin is watching and what he sees should concern him. Russia has lost its supplier of the Shahed-136 drones, manufactured in Iran and fired at Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. Yes, there are risks. Higher energy prices could temporarily benefit Moscow. A successor in Tehran could prove more hardline. Iran could attempt to close the Straits of Hormuz. The picture is uncertain, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But the broader trajectory is unmistakable: the network of authoritarian client states that has sustained Russian and Iranian power projection is fracturing.

The real question for us is not whether Khamenei’s death is welcome, the Iranian people are answering that. It is what Britain intends to do about what comes next. We have allies and citizens in the region. Rockets are falling on the UAE, a country that has welcomed people of every faith and background, including many British citizens who have built their lives there.

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There is a clear and obvious distinction between participating in strikes against Iran and deploying a Type 45 destroyer to the waters around the United Arab Emirates to defend against ballistic missiles. I cannot think of a single credible argument against protecting people from incoming rockets. The Royal Navy exists precisely for moments like this.

Equally pressing is the need to keep the Straits of Hormuz open. Approximately a third of the gas that keeps the lights on in the United Kingdom comes from Qatar, transiting those waters to Milford Haven. There is a ship roughly every three or four hundred miles in that passage. Keeping that flow moving is not a matter of foreign adventurism. It is a matter of keeping the British economy running and British homes heated.

Any Prime Minister worth their salt should be ordering the Royal Navy into the Gulf: to provide anti-missile defence for our allies, to protect British citizens, and to ensure the energy supplies on which this country depends continue to flow. The Iranian people are speaking. The strategic landscape is transforming. Britain must not stand idle while the world changes around it.

Instead we have a leadership paralysed by indecision, unwilling to declare the war illegal and oppose it or to support our allies in countering the biggest threat to our economic security, and the security of our allies in the Middle East in a generation.

We’re doing worse than nothing. Britain is stating clearly that is has nothing: no leadership, no strength and, if this continues, no friends.

The IRGC, under the orders of Ali Khamenei, have murdered British soldiers, tried to murder our citizens around the world, and many thousands more in Syria and Lebanon, I will not mourn his death.

We do not have the assets to get involved in attacking sites in Iran, but we should be defending our interests. Where are the British ships providing missile defence for the UAE? Where are the Royal Navy vessels keeping the sea lanes open and the energy flowing to the UK that will keep our lights on? We have found ourselves silenced by the worship of a dead god as the priests of international law are not recognising what it is for: keeping us safe; and are instead using it as an excuse for inaction.

A British Prime Minister who isn’t prepared to put our forces on readiness to protect our allies in the UAE, Bahrain, and elsewhere is not defending our interests.

We have HM's Armed Forces but Belgium's PM.

The end of Nicolás Maduro’s rule in Venezuela along with U.S. threats to Iran shows we are in a new imperial age. This time, it isn’t only about armies, it’s about data. Artificial intelligence is revising our concepts of sovereignty and power, adding an important realm in which two nations dominate: the U.S. and China. The story is still being written, but power is concentrating in these two poles.

Sovereignty here doesn’t mean access to powerful tools or building applications on top of them. It means the ability to design, train, operate, secure and deploy foundational AI systems capable of highly advanced functions in national defence and other sensitive areas of the state without external permission or dependence. By that definition, the field already looks far narrower than most policy debates assume.

Look how the global environment has changed. For roughly 35 years after the Cold War, globalisation favoured efficiency. Supply chains linked across continents. Manufacturing migrated to lower costs. Capital and talent flowed freely. States accepted dependence in exchange for market access. The internet connected markets, narratives and politics.

That era began to unwind in the early 2020s. The pandemic exposed the fragility of supply chains, borders closed, and governments rediscovered sovereignty under pressure. What began as diversification hardened into localisation. Migration slowed across the U.S. and Europe. Security displaced efficiency as the organising principle of economic policy.

Geopolitics followed. China accelerated its bid for primacy. Russia chose war and severed itself from Europe. Across the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific, integration gave way to rivalry, and dependence became a liability.

Yet even as globalisation reversed, connectivity didn’t. Space-based networks extended internet access. Data, content and influence continued to move across borders. The result is a world that is simultaneously deglobalising and hyperconnected. In this strange new environment, modern AI emerged.

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As frontier models, the technology capable of large-scale problem-solving, became widely available starting in 2022 as ChatGPT, adoption occurred at an unprecedented pace. Within months, billions of people had access to these powerful cognitive tools. Control over the underlying systems, however, concentrated into the hands of a few firms in the U.S., with China as the only rival ecosystem.

This concentration reflects three hard requirements of AI sovereignty.

First, elite competence. Not mass digital literacy, but a very small pool of people capable of building, training and operating large-scale frontier AI models. This talent is scarce, globally mobile and increasingly clustered.

Second, energy at scale. AI is power-intensive. Training and operating frontier models requires vast quantities of reliable electricity. This is a physical constraint, not a regulatory one.

Third, financial depth. Frontier AI demands sustained investment over long time horizons, often without near-term returns. Only systems with extraordinary amounts of capital can absorb that cost.

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At present, only the U.S. and China appear to have all three at the necessary scale and under sovereign control.

A few countries have some of what AI sovereignty requires. The Gulf states have capital and energy but lack elite AI competence. The U.K. has exceptional talent but lacks energy scale and sufficient financial depth, as shown by the sale of DeepMind to Google in 2014.

Britain can claim DeepMind as a national success, proof that British universities and culture can produce world-class AI talent. But that talent now serves U.S. strategic priorities, operates under U.S. corporate governance, and would be subject to U.S. export controls in a crisis. The building is in King’s Cross. The sovereignty is in Mountain View.

Continental Europe should possess all three requirements but has struggled to retain its best people, many of whom now work for American-owned firms. Russia is perhaps in the worst position: It has energy, but elite competence and capital are fleeing.

There is also a fourth, less-discussed constraint. AI isn’t merely built; it must be trusted. As AI becomes embedded in the military, intelligence and cyber programs of the state, dependence on foreign systems becomes harder to justify. So autonomy is yet another requirement of AI sovereignty.

For countries outside the U.S. and China, this doesn’t mean the race is over, but it is narrowing. Some will align closely with one of the leaders. Others will seek partnerships to secure influence at the margins. Few will be able to sustain the fiction of full independence.

AI sovereignty isn’t a prize many nations can win. The strategic task then is to determine how to retain agency when technological power is concentrating rather than dispersing.

First published in the Wall Street Journal 29 January 2026

Every day this year something has gone wrong for the Islamic regime in Tehran. Now, protests have erupted across the country, more widespread than any since the government murdered Mahsa Amini in 2022.

Now, we’re seeing clashes with groups from shopkeepers to students of every age and demographic. Calls for the end of the ayatollahs, the restoration of the monarchy and for freedom have been heard from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf. It’s true the economy is collapsing, but this isn’t about economics – it’s about liberation.

In the Caribbean, things have gone from bad to worse. For decades, Venezuela provided the enabling functions that allow a terror-state like Iran to operate. After sanctions froze their assets, stopped trade and interrupted operations, who would step in to help? Early on there were some Middle Eastern nations only too willing to take a cut to launder money, but as Syria has fallen and others have stepped away, Caracas became the most important enabler. A week ago that changed.

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Removing Nicolás Maduro may have violated Venezuelan sovereignty but it eviscerated Iranian logistics. Where will the stormtroopers of the regime, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and their terrorist proxies in Hezbollah, get diplomatic passports now? How will they get around sanctions to pay agents across Europe and America to threaten BBC Persian Service journalists in London or US-based dissident Masih Alinejad? Where will they machine parts for their ballistic missiles and the drones they target across the Middle East, and sell on to Russia to murder Ukrainians?

They will now have to pivot in a way that would make the most networked nations struggle. The Iranian regime has few friends left and Moscow, their most important partner, is busy.

The start to 2026 could hardly have gone worse for the 86-year-old Supreme Leader, but the

year has only just begun and the direction is set. What’s likely to follow shows why this regime is finished. Despite his age, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is fighting back. He has called for the protestors to be dealt with, encouraging the security forces of the regime to murder those who come on to the streets.

Already we’re seeing the results. Morgues full, prisons stacked, many injured and the hospitals that care for them raided. This is full-spectrum repression. But it’s struggling. The regime is just over. The factors weighing down the ayatollahs now are just too great.

Iran is a young country. Less than half the population remembers the time of the king so their idea of tyranny isn’t monarchy but theocracy. They’ve forgotten the downsides and instead now hear the stories of freedom – no veil, no corrupt IRGC, no religious enforcers – that their grandparents recount. It sounds like a liberation.

Executions in jails doubled in 2025

The regime has also grown more repressive. Norway-based Iran Human Rights said that the number of people executed in Iran’s jails doubled in 2025 from the year before. That hardly speaks of a stable dictatorship. And of course the strikes by Israel and the US didn’t just knock out the nuclear sites, they decapitated the military and demonstrated the impotence of the regime despite the billions spent on weapons and the lies told about Iranian greatness. Is it any wonder the Emirati gold souks have been filled with Iranian buyers for the past months?

The question now is: what next? That’s hard to predict but it doesn’t look good for the ayatollahs. Despite a helicopter crash killing the last president at the start of 2025, this regime has managed to right itself from previous earthquakes. This time, though, it feels different.

The gap between the elite and the masses has grown as the IRGC has enriched itself through corruption and left the police, army, navy and air force out of the industrial level of graft. Even the rurally-drawn militia, the Basij, has found itself struggling as acts of god and man have left them thirsty with water shortages. Even Tehran is gasping.

And now there is the question of succession. After almost 50 years of condemning the hereditary monarchy, the only viable successor to the leader is his 56-year-old son, Mojtaba. We’ve reached the final stage of the revolution George Orwell described in Animal Farm: four legs good, two legs better.

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But the economy is in free fall. Inflation is rampant. The government is buying rials to try to stabilise prices, and it’s bringing whatever weapons it can get from Russia. But none of that is enough. Reports of gold going overseas are growing, army and police defections are rising and without drone sales or transatlantic drug deals from Venezuela, there’s no money coming in.

Whether the king returns, democracy succeeds or another tyranny replaces the current one, we can’t know. What is certain is that this regime is over, at the latest, when the ageing Supreme Leader dies.

First published in the Daily Telegraph 8 January 2026

Venezuela and Iran are part of the same story but no one is reporting the connection.

Let me explain why:

Caracas may be 7000 miles away from Tehran but is an essential component of the Islamic Republic’s logistics of terror.

They have provided services from shadow banking and financial support, to Venezuelan diplomatic passports for Iranians and their terror proxies.

The truth is, Iran could never have spread fear and murder as widely without the support of Venezuela.

That makes the charge of narco-terrorist only one that could have been brought against Nicolás Maduro.

As the heir to Hugo Chavez, Maduro helped the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to fund groups like Hezbollah by enabling their transatlantic drugs trade.

That’s why President Trump’s actions in removing him are much more than an updated Monroe Doctrine in the Caribbean.

In changing the leadership of Venezuela, the US is supporting the Iranian people to overthrow their leadership and warning others, very clearly, of the consequences of supporting Tehran’s murderous agenda.

Clearly there are more details to come from the US and the intervention in a sovereign state should never be taken lightly, but let’s be clear, whatever the legality of this action, it is undermining an Iran who have committed atrocities towards their own people and across the world.

This is much more than a hard arrest, it’s a game changer for those who have been trying to harm us.

To understand why, we must be clear about what the Islamic Republic is and what it does.

The Iranian regime is not simply an authoritarian government pursuing policies we dislike. It is a system that survives by repression at home and aggression abroad, and it has deliberately targeted Britain and British citizens. Tehran’s agents have plotted assassinations and attacks on British soil, pursued journalists and dissidents living under our protection, organised violence against British forces in the Middle East, and attempted to kill British diplomats. Iranian backed attacks on Israel have killed British citizens, while the regime’s sponsorship of Hamas has contributed to radicalisation within the United Kingdom itself.

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Beyond these direct threats, Iran has played a central role in destabilising an arc of states stretching from Afghanistan to Lebanon. That destabilisation has driven refugee flows from Iran itself and from countries whose institutions have been weakened or shattered by Iranian intervention, including Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon. These flows do not stop at the region’s borders. They reach Europe and Britain, placing sustained pressure on public services, social cohesion, and political trust.

Iranian weapons supplied to the Houthis have helped close the Red Sea to commercial shipping, driving up insurance premiums, freight costs, and ultimately prices paid by British consumers. Hezbollah’s growing arsenal has altered the security calculus across the Eastern Mediterranean, increasing risks to British interests in the region, including the sovereign base areas in Cyprus. All of this has unfolded alongside Tehran’s military partnership with Russia, which has helped sustain Moscow’s war in Ukraine through the supply of drones, missiles, and components, raising the cost of food and fuel across Europe. At the same time, sanctions busting Chinese tankers have secured discounted Iranian oil, marginally lowering manufacturing costs in Asia while European industry pays more.

This isn’t abstract geopolitics. The Iranian regime has been an enemy of Britain because it has chosen to act as one, and defending ourselves has already carried a real and growing cost.

At home, the nature of the regime is even clearer. The Islamic Republic systematically persecutes entire communities by identity. Baha’is are denied legal recognition, barred from higher education, stripped of property, imprisoned, and in past decades executed solely for their faith. Jews, though formally recognised, live under constant pressure, surveillance, and antisemitic incitement from the state. Gay men and women are criminalised, imprisoned, tortured, and in some cases executed under laws that make consensual same-sex relationships punishable by death. Women are beaten, jailed, and killed for refusing obedience. Protesters are shot, hanged, or disappeared. This is not incidental cruelty, it is the nature of the system itself, and the way it governs.

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For years, Western policy rested on a comforting but dangerous assumption, that this regime could be moderated through engagement, economic integration, and diplomatic recognition. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was the clearest expression of that belief. It promised stability by buying time and restraint by offering legitimacy. I did not accept that logic at the time, and I said so publicly. I was one of the only Members of Parliament to speak against the JCPOA, not because I opposed diplomacy in principle, but because the agreement misunderstood the nature of the regime it sought to manage. It treated Tehran as a conventional state seeking security, rather than as an ideological system that uses instability and violence as tools of rule.

In practice, the deal liberated billions in frozen assets and future revenues. That money did not flow into hospitals, schools, or infrastructure for ordinary Iranians. It flowed outward, into militias, missiles, and mass graves. Cash that could have rebuilt lives at home was instead used to fill graveyards in Syria, to arm Hezbollah, to sustain militias in Iraq, and to entrench Iranian power across the region. Confrontation was postponed, but decay accelerated. The system did not moderate, it hollowed out.

The unravelling did not begin tonight. It began to accelerate decisively in January 2020 with the death of Qasem Soleimani. Soleimani was not merely a senior general. He was the architect of Iran’s regional empire, the man who bound together militias from Lebanon to Yemen, balanced rival factions, and exercised authority through a careful mixture of fear, loyalty, and money. His removal did not collapse the system overnight, but it exposed how dependent Iran’s external project had become on a single figure and how fragile the structures beneath him really were.

Since then, the regime has grown more brittle and more reckless. Proxy forces have acted with less discipline. Repression at home has intensified as confidence has ebbed. Economic mismanagement has deepened. The state has survived, but it has done so by narrowing its base and escalating violence. Each major protest wave since 2020 has gone further than the last, revealing not only the depth of popular anger but growing anxiety within the elite itself. The uprisings unfolding tonight sit squarely within that trajectory.

It is not Britain’s role to decide Iran’s future. That responsibility belongs to Iranians alone. But the implications of either meaningful change or continued decay would be global and immediate. A different Iran would reshape energy markets overnight. The return of more than six million barrels a day of oil would lower prices, ease inflation across Europe and North America, and place acute fiscal strain on petrostates, particularly Russia. The energy risk premium that has distorted economies since 2022 would fall, with direct consequences for manufacturing costs, household bills, and government finances.

China would lose access to heavily discounted Iranian oil secured through sanctions busting, weakening its leverage in the Persian Gulf and raising costs for refiners and manufacturers across Asia. That shift would narrow the gap with Europe and force Beijing to deepen dependence on Moscow and Central Asia for energy. Russia would lose far more than cheap drones. Its military and political partnership with Tehran would unravel, cooperation in Syria and the Caucasus would end, and Moscow’s influence across the Middle East would diminish sharply without Iran as a strategic ally.

Iranian backed militias would fragment. Hezbollah’s power would be degraded. Houthi attacks on shipping would become harder to sustain. Insurance costs would fall and global freight prices would ease. Iraq would gain greater room to govern as militia dominance weakened, unlocking further energy flows from the Persian Gulf and compounding the benefit to energy importing states worldwide.

None of this would be risk free. Periods of succession always carry danger, and nuclear escalation risks would rise before they fell. But if a less confrontational leadership emerged, sanctions would end, capital would surge back into Iran, and investment would be diverted away from other states, reshaping regional alignments and reducing demands for American security guarantees.

A recent analysis in Engelsberg Ideas rightly cautions against romanticising regime change. There are no clean endings and no guaranteed transitions. That warning is justified. But so is clarity. The status quo is neither stable nor contained, and it is far from cost free. It is a system that survives by spreading fear at home and disorder abroad.

At the centre of this moment lies a simple moral truth. The Islamic Republic has killed more Muslims than any of the enemies it claims to resist. Iranians, Syrians, Lebanese, Yemenis, Sudanese, and others have paid the price for a regime that imprisons women, murders religious minorities, executes gay people, and exports violence while cloaking itself in the language of resistance.

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Iran is moving again tonight because that system is rotting from within. Whether that rot produces renewal or catastrophe will be decided by forces beyond Britain’s control. But we should be clear about what is failing, why it is failing, and why it matters. History does not always announce itself politely. Sometimes it speaks through crowds in the street. Tonight, Iran is speaking. The world should listen.

The SAS charity looks after those who have given everything to keep us safe. Those who have stood on the rough wall and defended our freedom and have stared into the heart of darkness and come back changed. Some have made mistakes, some are heroes, all have made choices on our behalf in conditions when most of us would be frozen by fear.

By accepting to become patron even after the accusations of abuse in recent years, the Prince of Wales is stating clearly not that he is excusing or ignoring any crimes but that he has the political maturity and honesty to see the compromise people make in conflict and stand with those who serve. That leadership is sadly lacking in Westminster with Labour’s legalism.

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There are no excuses for crimes but Prince William is resisting the temptation to pretend that war can be rendered clean, bloodless, or morally effortless through legal abstraction; and rejecting the false binary that those who fight on the nation’s behalf must be either saints or villains, with no space for human reality in between.

With both the Chief of the Defence Staff and head of the Secret Intelligence Service warning us that Russia is bringing us closer to conflict, this is no time for the luxury beliefs that have infected our politics for a generation. The SAS is key to our counter terrorist defence and discreet operations in support of our allies around the world.

Soldiers are not saints. They are human beings placed in conditions of extreme danger, fear, exhaustion, and moral pressure. They operate in environments defined by uncertainty, speed, and irreversible consequence; but they are also men and women who risk everything for the safety of the nation. Any ethical framework that cannot hold these two truths together is inadequate to the task it claims to perform.

The growing civilian legal intervention in war represents a fundamental category error. Armed conflict is not a form of peacetime governance, subject to the assumptions and expectations of civilian legal regimes.

Those preaching the shift towards normalising courts in conflict often presented this as moral progress. In reality, it reflects a refusal to accept the distinctive nature of war itself. Combat is not policing by other means. It is an exceptional condition in which control is partial, information is fragmentary, and decisions must be made under severe time pressure with consequences that cannot be undone.

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The Law of Armed Conflict exists precisely to address this reality. Better known as the Geneva Conventions, it recognises necessity, proportionality, distinction, and command responsibility within a context of chaos rather than certainty.

As I argued more than a decade ago in the Policy Exchange papers Fog of Law and Clearing the Fog of Law, its strength lies in its acceptance of imperfection. It does not demand error-free outcomes. It demands judgment exercised in good faith under conditions of risk. That is the moral and legal foundation on which disciplined armed forces are built.

The Geneva Conventions do not excuse crimes either. The concept of war crimes was most clearly demonstrated in the Nuremberg Trials just after the Second World War using a concept dating to 1474 when Peter von Hagenbach was executed for the atrocities he committed during the occupation of Breisach.

By contrast, those who impose the European Convention on Human Rights into active combat operations import peacetime legal expectations into an arena where they cannot sensibly operate. Rather than clarifying responsibility, it reverses it. Decisions authorised at the political and strategic level are retrospectively judged at the tactical.

Responsibility is pushed downwards onto junior soldiers, enabling those who will the ends to distance themselves from the means by which those ends are achieved. War is willed in the abstract but disowned in the concrete. Those closest to the point of action carry the burden of blame, while those who set objectives, constraints, and rules of engagement retain moral distance.

The result is not higher ethical standards, but an ethics of delegation without responsibility. What is presented as accountability is in reality a mechanism for moral displacement. It is the legal expression of Kipling’s poem: “Tommy this, an’ Tommy that”.

This has consequences beyond individual cases. A state that authorises force while denying ownership of its inevitable costs engages in moral bad faith. It criminalises service and leaves the weak vulnerable by imposing restrictions on the strong who would defend them.

The strategic implications are severe. When those trained and authorised to use force are constrained by inappropriate legal fear, power does not disappear. It migrates. Adversaries unconstrained by such norms are empowered and exploit hesitation and delay. We have effectively neutered ourselves, ceding moral and physical ground to those willing to use violence without restraint or accountability.

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This dynamic reshapes behaviour on the ground. Commanders are made cautious when boldness is required not only to win but to save lives. They become risk managers rather than leaders. Soldiers learn that hesitation is punished and safer than action, not because it saves lives in battle, or wins wars, no one is responsible for that, but because it reduces exposure to future legal jeopardy. This does not make war more humane. It makes it more dangerous, more prolonged, and more corrosive to moral agency. Lives are lost not through excess, but through paralysis.

Standing with the SAS Association in this context is not a denial of law, nor a claim that soldiers should be beyond scrutiny. It is a rejection of scapegoating and a defence of the proper application of the right law. Where credible evidence exists of criminal conduct under the Law of Armed Conflict, investigation and prosecution are necessary. But accountability must be rooted in a legal framework that understands war as war, and a moral framework that assigns responsibility to those who authorise it.

First published in the Daily Telegraph here, 24 December 2025.

Last Christmas, Finnish authorities boarded and detained the oil tanker Eagle S in the Baltic Sea. The Estlink 2 undersea power cable linking Finland and Estonia was cut and other telecommunication cables damaged. The vessel, registered to the Cook Islands and suspected of being part of Russia’s shadow fleet, had dragged its anchor across the seabed, severing the link.

Whilst no shots were fired, the attack on two NATO states had cost millions and silenced trade. That wasn’t the first time we have seen how exposed the sea has become. From the Russian spy vessel Yantar just outside the UK’s area of the North Sea, to the numerous warships in Irish waters, mapping and sabotage of our maritime networks is growing. With so much traffic and trade now moving unnoticed on cables on the seabed, this is a vulnerability that could see many systems go dark.

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These slow, ambiguous, and, some would claim, plausibly accidental attacks are increasingly how pressure is applied at sea, particularly in the Baltic and North Atlantic. Moscow and Beijing are exploiting our and our allies’ reticence to act militarily and instead turn to legal and administrative answers. That cannot last, it is already threatening our future.

So the question must now be: how do we shift the dial to deliver effective deterrence to these bullies? What tools do we need in our arsenals to allow states to see, record, and attribute this behaviour early enough to deter it, and if needed, to intervene? What kit can we have which allows interchangeability with our allies so that we can respond together more impactfully than alone?

The problem this maritime coercion exposes is not just about intent, but also our capability to respond. Most navies are built to fight battles, not to provide persistent awareness across the surface, air, and seabed in what remains legally a peacetime, but is now a competitive environment. The demands on manpower and endurance are high and difficult to maintain. That’s why technology is increasingly seen as the answer.

Uncrewed systems allow persistent aerial surveillance, surface monitoring of commercial traffic, and underwater inspection of cables and pipelines better than traditional crewed ships, but these systems do not operate alone. They require power, command and control, maintenance, data fusion, and legal authority. That shifts attention to the ships that support them.

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Today, there is growing demand for ships that can sustain that presence across allies: a surface combatant with space and flexibility, endurance, and the ability to integrate unmanned platforms across multiple domains. The UK’s Type 31 frigate is the Royal Navy’s choice. Prioritising flexibility, modularity, and integration over specialised, single roles is the capability requirement of allied fleets.

These ships function less as fixed weapons platforms and more as hubs: as bases for aerial drones extending surveillance range, surface drones tracking or shadowing vessels of interest, and underwater vehicles inspecting seabed infrastructure. Their primary contribution is not firepower, though they have that too, but coherence: turning many distributed sensors into a shared operational picture that can be used by multiple nations simultaneously.

That is particularly important for the Joint Expeditionary Force, which operates in the Baltic Sea where incidents like the Estlink 2 damage occur: crowded, shallow seas with dense infrastructure and constant probing activity that rarely crosses the threshold of attack but is clearly hostile. In this environment, escalation control matters, and that requires persistent observation, clear attribution, and the ability to coordinate across countries. Combat power alone won’t help.

When a suspicious vessel damages a cable, speed is vital. The value of the navy lies in already having data from underwater inspections, surface tracking, and aerial surveillance, collected and shared across allied systems, allowing immediate action. Speed acts as a deterrent, not just an enforcement. That demands common standards, shared architectures, and platforms designed from the outset to host allied equipment.

This is where modular design becomes strategically important. A vessel that can embark different nations’ drones, sensors, or command modules without bespoke integration enables genuine burden sharing. One ally may specialise in underwater systems, another in aerial ISR, another in data processing or legal attribution. The ship itself provides the connective tissue. For the Royal Navy, the Poles, and the Indonesians, the choice is the Arrowhead 140, known as Type 31 in the UK, being built in the Rosyth shipyard in Scotland.

As other Nordic states consider their next steps, building on existing maritime capability to protect their seas and shallow waters deepens the existing strength of others and extends the network. The UK and Norway’s maritime sensors and autonomous systems are most valuable when they can be combined with power-plants and others’ extensive new capabilities. Shared platforms, with a shared approach to design, allow those strengths to reinforce one another.

Last year’s Christmas present was the warning that we cannot continue responding to challenges; we have to get ahead of them. This isn’t achieved through single-vessel or single-navy choices alone, but through meeting the realities of present-day maritime competition unfolding in our waters and building 21st-century fleets structured to get ahead of it.

As threats to our economic security focus on the seabed and the grey zone, the most valuable ships we can invest in are those that integrate, connect, and persist, rather than those that simply carry the most weapons, and the choices of our allies will affect our own protection. The Baltic is not a foreign sea, and the connections to Ireland matter to us all.

Russia has shown it is serious, so the question is: are we?