On the menu today: The good news is that the two intermediate-range ballistic missiles that the Iranian military fired at the U.S.-U.K. joint base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean did not hit their targets. The further good news is that since Friday, we haven’t detected any additional missile launches like that. The bad news is that the Iranians have now demonstrated that they can fire missiles about 2,500 miles away, which means that if they have more missiles like that, they could threaten Europe. The British defense establishment has good reason to worry. Meanwhile, this proves the Iranians lie in negotiations . . . but this morning, the president says, via Truth Social, that the U.S. and Iran have had “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST.” The Iranians say they’re not participating in any conversations. Read on.
Ballistic Missiles Have Entered the Picture
On Friday morning local time, Iran fired two intermediate-range ballistic missiles at the joint U.S.-U.K. base in Diego Garcia, about 2,500 miles away from the nearest point in the coast of Iran. Thankfully, neither missile hit its target; one of the missiles failed in flight, and a U.S. warship fired an SM-3 interceptor at the other, according to U.S. officials talking to the Wall Street Journal.
This is a significant development in the war.
First, it means that Iran has the capacity to build, deploy, and fire at least two of these missiles. With missiles that can travel this far, Iran can now threaten most of Europe, with Paris and London just outside that 2,500-mile range. (For perspective, the distance between Los Angeles and New York is 2,451 miles.)
The Daily Telegraph reports that the British defense establishment woke up this weekend to realize that, at least for now, they have no effective defense against an incoming Iranian intermediate-range ballistic missile:
Sean Bell, a former air vice-marshal, said Britain had Bloodhound missiles during the Cold War to stop such attacks but its defenses had waned since then because of a lack of investment.
“The worry here is that if Iran was to launch a ballistic missile that was heading our way, unlike Israel, unlike America, unlike Diego Garcia, we have no defenses against that in this country,” he told the BBC on Saturday evening.
“Whilst we could track it, it would be able to strike us. Now, I think the chances of that happening are fairly slim.”
The UK’s only line of defense against ballistic missile bombardment comes from the Royal Navy’s fleet of six Type 45 destroyers. . . .
However, much of the Type 45 fleet is in port and unloaded, meaning they would be ineffective against an immediate missile strike. . . .
Mr. Bell said: “Unless a Type 45 [destroyer] happened to be sailing by, and it is unlikely to be in the right place at the time, the fact remains we have no missile defense against ballistic missiles in this country.”
Now, for what it’s worth, the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Steve Reed, told the BBC this weekend, “There is no specific assessment that the Iranians are targeting the U.K. or [that they] even could if they wanted to. . . . I’m not aware of any assessment at all that they are even trying to target Europe, let alone that they could if they tried. But even if they did, we have the necessary military capability to defend this country.”
Boy, the word “specific” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because during this conflict, Iran, or possibly its proxy Hezbollah, has already fired drones at the Royal Air Force base in Akrotiri, Cyprus, and one damaged a hangar. (An ironic sentence from the March 3 article at that link: “If Iran or Hezbollah wanted to ‘punish’ the U.K. it’s unlikely it would try to hit its base on Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean — it would opt for RAF Akrotiri only some 160 miles (260 kilometers) away.”) For a long time, the Iranian regime has denounced the United Kingdom as “the little Satan” to our “Great Satan.”
I understand why a Labour government wouldn’t want a public panic and would downplay the likelihood of Iran targeting the U.K., but you don’t improve your situation by denying the problem. Fraser Nelson, writing in The Times of London:
A British official who has been talking to Pentagon figures tells me they see us as a shadow of our former selves. “We were always a small force in comparison, but the fighting power we could deliver was meaningful. We could always be relied on. That’s not the case any longer.”
If you have a long memory, you may recall the Iran deal negotiated by the Obama administration put no limits on Iran’s development of ballistic missiles. As one critic of that deal wrote in 2016:
We recently learned President Obama dismantled a key part of the ballistic missile sanctions against Iran eight years early. But this past July, the President praised his Iran deal, saying, “We are not taking the pressure off Iran . . . with respect to ballistic missiles. As I just explained … we maintain the eight years on the ballistic missiles under this particular UN resolution. . . . So we have not lost those legal authorities.” Once again, the White House lied to the American people about its concessions to the Iranian regime.
The facts are clear. The entity in question is the only Iranian bank designated by the United Nations for providing support to Iran’s main ballistic missile-related organizations, and was described by the Treasury Department as “the financial linchpin of Iran’s missile procurement network.” Ballistic missiles were not supposed to be a part of President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, but they became one simply because he negotiated from a position of weakness. He wanted a deal so badly and at any cost that he let Tehran name their terms.
The critic who wrote that is now the U.S. secretary of state and national security adviser, Marco Rubio.
Second, Iran lied, once again demonstrating that negotiating with this regime is pointless. Here’s Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, in an interview with India Today, February 25:
We are not developing long range missiles, and we have limited the range of our missiles below 2,000 kilometers intentionally by ourselves because we don’t want anyone — we don’t want it to be like a global threat. This is only to defend ourselves. Our missiles have defense nature. They are only to build deterrence and to help us defend ourselves exactly as they did in the last June war. . . . So our missiles [are] our reliable means of defense, and we have no intention to extend their range.
What’s left of the Iranian regime will make promises that they have no intention of keeping, lie at the negotiating table and in television interviews, cheat, steal, block international inspectors — you name it.
Whenever this topic comes up, advocates of diplomacy bring up U.S. negotiations with the Soviet Union during the Cold War and contend that if American diplomats could meet and hammer out agreements with their counterparts from that fearsome adversary, then we can do the same with other countries. But the Russians cheated on their treaties all the time, both during the Cold War, and after! It’s hard to see the point of negotiating with someone who you know is going to break their promises at some point; it’s like bragging about the great deal you got from the used car salesman who always sells lemons that break down shortly after they leave the dealership.
During the writing of this newsletter, President Trump posted on Truth Social that the U.S. would pause all military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for a five-day period, subject to the “success of the ongoing meetings and discussions.”
For what it is worth, the Iranians say they aren’t negotiating:
Iran’s IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency said on Monday that there were no negotiations with the United States and that conditions in the Strait of Hormuz would not return to pre-war levels.
“No negotiations have taken place, and none are underway,” a senior security official told Tasnim.
Third, as of this writing on Monday morning, Iran hasn’t fired any additional intermediate-range ballistic missiles. This may mean Iran doesn’t have any other missiles like this built, doesn’t want to expose the launchers, wasn’t satisfied with the results, or fears the consequences of firing more.
Now, if you were the Iranians, and you had more intermediate-range ballistic missiles that you could fire, would you sit around waiting for the right moment and right target, and just hope that the U.S. Air Force and IDF don’t drop a bomb on where those missiles are stored? Or would you fire them as soon as they were ready, at any potential long-range target that could cause heartburn for the U.S., Israel, and their allies?
And if they haven’t fired any more intermediate-range ballistic missiles since Friday . . . is that a sign that they only had two remaining that were working?
Put yourself in the shoes of the Ayatollah and the IRGC for a moment.
Some of them aren’t afraid to die, but if they’re going to die, they would much rather die in battle resisting the Great Satan than get strung up from gallows set up by their own people. If they surrender, as President Trump demanded, they lose power. If they survive the war, they can make a somewhat plausible argument that they “won,” in the sense that the U.S. military and the IDF hit them with just about everything they had, and the regime held onto power.
The war is unpopular, gas prices continue to rise, and Iran’s seemingly thorough defeat in its conventional forces is not mirrored in its use of nonconventional and asymmetric warfare — mines, fast boats, drones. The Iranians are a small-scale threat to the U.S. military, so they’re not directing most of their attacks against U.S. military forces themselves; their most consequential attacks are against the Middle East’s energy infrastructure, driving up energy prices around the world.
I don’t envy our leaders for the difficult choices that lie ahead of them.
ADDENDUM: Over in the most recent print issue, a soup-to-nuts accounting of how so-called moderate Abigail Spanberger has proven to be anything but moderate in her first months as governor of Virginia.