And just like that, the Iran-Israel war seems to be over. The ceasefire, anticipated by Donald Trump on Tuesday, has held. The financial markets have surged to an all-time high, and oil has settled back down. The world breathes a sigh of relief.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the American strikes on Iran on Israel’s behalf were stunningly successful. None of the many things gravely warned about by the “restrainer” voices in the MAGA coalition materialised: no American fatalities; no Iranian attacks on American ships; no attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz; no oil war.
Trump has managed to square a circle, pleasing both his administration’s hawks and doves. He returned home from the Nato summit with extra spending commitments and “Daddy” ringing in his ears, thanks to Nato’s secretary general. He will surely sleep soundly in Mar-a-Lago this weekend.
I put this version of events to Fiona Hill, a British-American academic who was Trump’s security advisor during his first term, and an advisor to George W. Bush and Obama before that. Now she’s back in Britain, advising the Ministry of Defence and serving as Chancellor of Durham University. Unlike many in the European establishment, Hill doesn’t agitate against her former boss, although she is critical. But what does she make of this slam-dunk war narrative?
“It certainly seems like a win for Trump,” she starts — an initial concession, before a lengthy list of caveats. “He seems to have actually bullied both Israel and Iran into a ceasefire at the moment. But it’s also clear that he thinks of a ceasefire as peace. Rather than a long, negotiated agreement — and he’s even saying now that he doesn’t really care if there is an agreement with Iran.” The idea that the President has a knack for short, sharp, dramatic action is a theme that crops up often during our conversation. He has, she says, a short attention span and is unwilling to follow up with the long slog of careful diplomacy. Hill is quick to reference Trump’s efforts for a peace deal in Ukraine, which after an initial push were discarded as too difficult. But without putting in an effort, Hill suspects, the truce in the Middle East will not endure either.
For one thing, she says, it’s not clear how much damage the raids have done to Iran’s nuclear facilities: intelligence reports differ, and now that Iran has suspended co-operation with the IAEA we may not know any time soon. Israel may well conclude that further military action is needed. For another, the Iranian regime is intact, and very likely to renew efforts on its nuclear programme and extinguish any domestic unrest. “Look at what happened in Russia after the insurgency by Prigozhin,” she says. “We were all wondering what it meant for Putin and the stability of the Russian regime. Of course it just meant that Putin doubled down and took down Prigozhin in a rather dramatic fashion by exploding his plane. It led to the strengthening of the regime’s defences and Putin tightening up his inner circle. That’s the kind of thing you could see in Iran.”
As a demonstration of American power, does she think it was also meant to sound a warning to other governments in the region? “Yes it might have a sobering effect on others.” But there could be unintended consequences. “He may have inspired other authoritarian leaders to contemplate what they could do… particularly as Trump keeps referencing Hiroshima and Nagasaki and saying this will end the war. Whether those bombs really ended the war in the Pacific is itself debatable, but his framing also suggests to others — Russia, Ukraine, China and Taiwan — that taking that kind of dramatic military action is the way they might want to proceed in their own conflicts.” So there’s a second-order effect of taking unilateral military action in this way. It sets a precedent.
But it is on the question of nuclear proliferation that Hill is most persuasive — and prepared to say the quiet part out loud. The aggregate lesson to middle-tier powers is that, in this new world, you’d better have a nuclear bomb. “We are in a phase now where a lot of countries are thinking long and hard about acquiring nuclear capability because frankly they see what Russia did to Ukraine. And Ukraine gave up their nuclear arsenal… We pushed them to give them up in 1993-94 along with Belarus and Kazakhstan, and the message now is that as a result of that they were invaded. You can take the same message from Libya, what happened to Muammar Gaddafi after giving up nuclear weapons.”
“It is on the question of nuclear proliferation that Fiona Hill is prepared to say the quiet part out loud.”
So it was a mistake for Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons? “I thought it was a mistake at the time, to be frank. In terms of giving up their leverage — I’m on the record for saying that, which wasn’t very popular at the time… That’s the message to everyone else, the would-be nuclear powers in the world. You have guarantees from having nuclear weapons of not being attacked. We saw from India and Pakistan that there was a quick move to quickly calm down that conflict because both of them are nuclear powers.”
The extension of this principle is sobering. If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia will follow. And Hill believes that the proliferation will go far beyond the Middle East. “The Turks, seeing themselves as a regional power with global aspirations, would certainly like to have a nuclear weapon; South Korea has had to be talked out of developing one for the obvious reason of what North Korea might do; Japan, the country that actually had nuclear weapons used against it during the Second World War, has often fretted about its own security and the reliability of the US nuclear umbrella. And of course in Europe there’s been a lot of discussion about developing a European nuclear umbrella if the United States is no longer a reliable ally.” This week’s announcement by Keir Starmer, she says, of a fleet of UK nuclear-capable planes should be seen in this context. “This is a new world that we’re in. It’s no longer the United States and the Soviet Union dominating the nuclear discussion.”
To extrapolate, then, might we find ourselves, in 20 years’ time, in a world with 20 nuclear powers? Hill’s answer is unsettling. “That’s highly likely at this particular moment,” she responds. “We’ve got this breakdown of the global order that was established by the United States after the Second World War. We’ve had 80 years of the US playing that very important role… Trump is basically saying, sorry, this system no longer works for us, we don’t want any part of it. And that leads to others thinking: how do we establish other orders that we find beneficial?” And meanwhile, China is rapidly headed towards becoming a nuclear superpower on a level with Russia. If they decided to act together, then, she says it would be “very troubling”. Quite the understatement.
Meanwhile, easily lost amid the maelstrom of the past week’s news, there was a Nato summit. It went off without calamity, culminated in a communique that re-affirmed Article 5, and even set an ambitious new target of 5% of GDP to be spent on defence. Surely that’s another success, I suggest. Isn’t it more proof that the old security architecture is still standing?
“Nato absolutely still is a useful organisation but it’s only reliable if we have built up the European pillar. That requires real dedication and political will among European powers. We already had Spain basically saying, sorry, we can’t afford to build up our spending, and we’ve had a lot of fudging on this issue of 5%. I jokingly call it ‘article 5%’ — unless you pay 5% of GDP, there’ll be no opportunity of collective defence. That’s certainly how Trump sees it… He really does believe that the United States is providing a service to European allies in terms of security, and one way or another they need to be remunerating the US for that service. He’s going to take out the payments through trade.”
Even if these promises are swiftly forgotten, one thing the world will remember about the summit was secretary general Mark Rutte referring to Trump as “Daddy”. Hill laughingly refers to it. “After 80 years of relying on Daddy, or living in Daddy’s basement,” she says, “it’s long past time for Europe to step up.”
And yet, when you drill down, Europe can’t possibly match Putin’s enormous nuclear arsenal. Without America’s help here, then, Russia would inevitably be the dominant military power in Europe. This, then, would leave us incapable of defending ourselves as the outside threat grows. What is Europe’s next move?
What we can do, we should do, is Hill’s message — one that she took into the UK’s Strategic Defence Review. We improve our intelligence networks, invest in public-private partnerships for new war technology and massively speed up our pace of innovation in defence. “We’ve been operating at a snail’s pace. One of the biggest shocks from my experience of the UK SDR was just how long it took from putting out a request for projects to delivery — it’s a minimum of six years. I said that to an American counterpart just the other day who had been in charge of procurement at the Pentagon. And he laughed and said: ‘that’s what it’s like here too’.”
But to get to that “war footing”, according to Hill, means a lot more than military hardware. “You can be attacked in so many different fashions,” she says. “Cyber attacks. Influence attacks. Poisonings. Acts of sabotage. Undersea cables. GPS blocking… We have to admit that we’re very vulnerable. The biggest risk to the UK is the disabling of our critical national infrastructure.”
Such is the threat, she suggests, that each of us should have a plan for our families, including a “preparedness kit” for possible disasters. “We don’t need to gather big arsenals in our bunkers, but we do need to work out how we are going to help each other out in any eventuality.”
The war, according to Fiona Hill, is far from over.
