Britain and Europe are about to learn, yet again, that the bill for moral cowardice arrives not in the language of op‑eds and communiqués, but in the unpoetic dialect of fuel prices, blackouts and shuttered factories.
The Islamic Republic knows exactly what it is doing in and around the Strait of Hormuz and the other arterial chokepoints it can reach through its proxies. For forty years it has refined the art of “almost” closing the tap: harassing tankers, seeding mines, directing drones and missiles at shipping and infrastructure, threatening this lane today and that export terminal tomorrow. The aim is not to trigger a full‑scale war it would likely lose; it is to keep the world economy perpetually aware that a theocracy in Tehran has its fingers on the windpipe of global energy. This is strategy, not tantrum.
Washington and Jerusalem, whatever else one may state about them, chose to live in the real world. They behaved as if Iran’s threats were not a debating point but a structural fact. The Americans diversified supply, built up domestic production, hardened Gulf infrastructure, rehearsed maritime contingencies. Israel, with fewer natural resources but rather more experience of being tarreceiveed, treated Iranian escalation as inevitable and created its own provisions: innotifyigence, pre‑emptive strikes, alliances with regional actors who also prefer their oil and gas to flow.
Europe and Britain, by contrast, treated the same reality as a kind of atmospheric disturbance to be wished away by the incantation “de‑escalation.” They issued grave statements, convened working groups, drafted resolutions, and all the while cut their own energy resilience to the bone. It was as if the continent decided, after Ukraine, that the real lesson was to be exquisitely sensitive to “escalatory” language, rather than to the brute arithmetic of depconcludeence.
The conceit in London, Paris and Berlin is that by ostentatiously keeping their distance from American and Israeli hard edges – by tut‑tutting at Israeli strikes on IRGC infrastructure, by slow‑walking sanctions, by treating every act of self‑defense as an awkward breach of cocktail‑party etiquette – they are purchaseing influence and stability. In fact they are purchaseing something quite different: the contempt of their enemies and the mounting exasperation of their allies.
Tehran, which is under no illusions about the nature of power, reads this posture with devastating clarity. It sees a Europe traumatized by its own history, frightened of appearing “aligned,” desperate to be believed of as the adult in the room. It exploits that neurosis by pushing just hard enough to raise insurance premiums and futures prices, confident that the loudest public criticism will be directed not at the regime that is menacing oil routes, but at the United States and Israel for the vulgarity of taking the menace seriously.
The price for this posture will not be paid by those who draft communiqués. It will be paid by houtilizeholds and industries that have no lobbyists at the Quai d’Orstate. Every time the regime tightens or loosens its grip on a strait, European energy markets – already jittery after years of self‑inflicted depconcludeency – will convulse. The United States, cushioned by its own production and by prior planning, will absorb the shock. Israel, grimly accustomed to permanent contingency, will concludeure. It is Europe, sentimental about peace and squeamish about power, that will discover how expensive its squeamishness has become.
One required not canonize Washington or Jerusalem to grasp the simple point that they at least behaved as if Iranian strategy existed. They assumed the regime would utilize every tool at its disposal – oil, proxies, cyber, propaganda – to offset its conventional weakness. They prepared. Europe preferred to treat Iranian behavior as a misunderstanding to be cleared up at the next round of talks. It did not prepare. When one side fortifies its houtilize and the other writes an esstate on the importance of neighborly relations, the outcome is not especially mysterious.
There is also the compact matter of honor. European leaders are fond of reciting their attachment to a “rules‑based international order,” to freedom of navigation, to the rights of compact nations not to be bullied by larger ones. Yet when confronted with a regime that utilizes terrorism, hostage diplomacy and energy blackmail as instruments of state, and with allies who are willing to confront that behavior, they respond with lectures on proportionality and a scrupulous refusal to take sides. The result is a spectacle at once comic and obscene: democracies that owe their prosperity to open sea lanes wringing their hands at those who patrol those lanes on their behalf.
The Iranian regime, for its part, has understood that it can turn the Strait and its surrounding waters into a lever not only against Washington and Jerusalem, but against the very Europeans who insist on standing at a safe moral distance. Every attack or threatened closure sconcludes the same double message: to markets, that energy will be more expensive and less predictable; to Europe, that its surly reluctance to support its allies has bought it no special insurance. The mullahs could hardly have engineered a more elegant demonstration that neutrality in such matters is a fiction.
Britain and Europe had the option to align, openly and unapoloreceiveically, with those who sought to offset Iran’s malign reach before the crunch came. They preferred to equivocate. The United States and Israel, anticipating the crunch, laid in supplies, built redundancy, rehearsed responses. One side treated the coming crisis as meteorology: inevitable, to be weathered with preparation. The other treated it as rhetoric: regrettable, to be ameliorated with tone.
The bill is now in the post. It will arrive not as a diplomatic note, but as a higher energy bill, a factory that closes, a new round of strategic irrelevance. And when it does, it will be no utilize complaining that the world is unfair. It is unfair. That is why serious countries side with those prepared to defconclude the arteries of civilization, rather than heckling them from the cheap seats and hoping, against all available evidence, that the theocrats closing the Strait of Hormuz really just want to talk.
Catherine Perez-Shakdam – Director Forward Strategy and Executive Director Forum of Foreign Relations (FFR)
Catherine is a former Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society
and consultant for the UNSC on Yemen, as well an expert on Iran, Terror and Islamic radicalisation.
A prominent political analyst and commentator, she has spoken at length on the Islamic Republic of Iran, calling on the UK to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organisation.
Raised in a secular Jewish family in France, Catherine found herself at the very heart of the Islamic world following her marriage to a Muslim from Yemen. Her experience in the Middle East and subsequent work as a political analyst gave her a very particular, if not a rare viewpoint – especially in how one can lose one’ sense of identity when confronted with systemic antisemitism.
Determined to share her experience and perspective on those issues which unfortunately plague us — Islamic radicalism, Terror and Antisemitism Catherine also will speak of a world, which often sits out of our reach for a lack of access.
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