07 Feb The Future of UK Foreign Policy on Iran

While insisting that the war in Ukraine remains the UK’s top foreign policy priority, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took the opportunity to express his unease about Iran’s domestic and international activities, when he faced the House of Commons Liaison Committee in December last year. Although Iran has long been a policy preoccupation for the UK, Sunak’s choice to focus on it at this moment was arguably unexpected and striking. But fast-forward just one month and we can already see that the state of relations with Iran has rocketed up the UK’s international agenda. So why the growing concern? Will it last? And what is 2023 likely to hold for UK-Iranian relations?

Current Relations

Already strained UK-Iranian relations have further soured in recent months, with the UK watching the theocracy’s recent steps with unease. Its brutal clampdown on the recent civil unrest which centred on basic women’s rights, its enrichment of uranium at the highest levels in Iran’s history, its supply of weapons to Russia for its war in Ukraine, and its destabilising behaviour in the surrounding region are of growing concern. 

Further accelerating tensions, January 14th saw Iran execute British-Iranian citizen, Alireza Akbari, on an accusation of spying for the UK, prompting Sunak to condemn the Tehran regime as “barbaric”. Shortly afterwards, the UK, the EU and the United States hit back with a fresh round of sanctions on Iran, which were immediately met with retaliatory sanctions from Tehran. Once again, we see how efforts to calibrate an already difficult and multifaceted relationship can be knocked off course by an act of brutality.

The deterioration of this relationship between Iran, the UK and the West more generally is a further nail in the coffin of recent efforts to reignite the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the international deal designed to constrain Iran’s nuclear activities. United States President Joe Biden went as far as to refer to the JCPOA as “dead”. Again, broader considerations intervene: the West has become increasingly unwilling to negotiate with a regime that has supplied drones to Moscow and uses repression to crush civil unrest at home. Perhaps more graphically, a revival of the deal would include unfreezing billions of dollars of its assets overseas, throwing the Iranian regime a much needed economic lifeline and provoking strong reaction in the United States itself.

However, with Iran currently enriching uranium at a level only one technical step away from weapons-grade, and with Israel implicitly threatening military action if diplomacy fails to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, failure in the negotiations has intensely high stakes. How to balance managing the nuclear threat, without aiding a brutal regime, is fresh in the minds of policymakers.

Where next? 

UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly made it clear in December that, like the other Western signatories to the JCPOA, the UK was seeking to follow a two-track policy on Iran: preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons remained the UK’s number one priority, but the UK would seek to act when Iran’s other actions are unacceptable, such as the supply of drones to Russia which prompted a round of sanctions on Iranian leadership. 

However, the British calculation of priorities is likely to now be recalibrated, following Akbari’s execution. The Government is faced with the decision of whether to follow January’s round of sanctions with further measures that risk the door on the nuclear deal being closed indefinitely, or whether the danger of proliferation in the Middle East is too great to risk pushing Tehran too far. On the analogy of the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, Akbari’s execution could foreshadow a sustained escalation in tensions, considering that United States-Saudi ties are only just recovering.

If the UK wishes to pursue a retaliatory route, the Government could follow the United States and push ahead with the official designation of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) as a terrorist group. Some Government figures have openly supported the move, and the European Parliament indicated overwhelming EU consent by approving a, crucially, non-binding recommendation to add the IRGC to the EU’s terrorist blacklist.

It appears that FCDO officials are reluctant to go down this route however, as the IRGC is a State institution and the UK has traditionally been less inclined than the United States to sanction official organisations in this way. At the same time, Iranian officials have confirmed that the country would counterattack if the EU were to do so, with Iran’s foreign minister not ruling out withdrawing from the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, or expelling United Nations nuclear inspectors – moves which could end all prospects for future cooperation.

So for the UK and its allies, the situation remains a careful balancing act between reacting against unacceptable behaviour on multiple fronts, and triggering action which significantly exacerbates the proliferation risk. Already Israel is widely believed to have been behind a recent attack believed to have struck an Iranian ammunition target, in an extension of the longtime Israeli-Iranian shadow war. An escalation in Iranian-Western hostilities would give Iran increased incentive to disrupt efforts to stabilise regional tension, including denying support for the peace process in Yemen and withdrawing from Iranian-Saudi talks. The West also stands to benefit from reducing hostilities if it encourages Iran to limit increasing ties with China, with whom Iran has tightened ties in the face of crippling sanctions.

Bilateral relations effectively find themselves in what has been referred to as a “deep freeze”. Iran has an understanding that the sanctions relief from a deal is likely to be minimal, and so has refused to alter its position on approving International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections. Meanwhile, with sanctions piling up, the Western alliance is showing no signs of making its own concessions without corresponding moves from Tehran.

With limited options to stop Iran from expanding its nuclear programme and the West’s acute reliance on Middle Eastern oil and gas to shore up energy requirements, we can reasonably expect to see Western officials continue to try and keep the door open for diplomacy. This may well include the UK and EU moving away from a terrorist designation for the IRGC and towards some form of provisional agreement that limits Iran’s nuclear activity in return for limited sanctions relief. However, in the short term, as the likelihood of forthcoming re-engagement around the JCPOA looks increasingly frail, we are most likely to see relations continue along the current simmering, albeit wholly unsustainable, status quo, in which both sides assert their muscle but neither seeks to cross the red lines that would lead to an escalation.

One development we can expect, however, is an increased focus on Iranian policy as a growing priority issue for the UK in 2023. While the West’s focus is firmly fixed upon Ukraine, the issue of Iranian nuclear enrichment and destabilising regional behaviour remains a looming shadow. We must await to see to what extent the refresh of the Integrated Review indicates a level of heightened British concern around Iran’s destabilising behaviour.