Jay Mens

Donald J. Trump returns to the Oval Office for the second time as the least interventionist American president since 1941. As the Islamic Republic of Iran – which recently tried to kill him – is at its lowest point in forty years, could the end be near? And what does that all mean for the UK? The death of the Islamic Republic has been predicted many times before, always prematurely. But today, with the fall of Syria's Bashar al-Assad, economic collapse at home, and an incoming Trump administration, the moment feels different. The Iranian rial is trading at 820,000 to the dollar; it was 59,000 back in 2017. It has lost more than $30 billion (£25 billion) in contracts due to the collapse of the Assad regime.

The incoming Labour government has pledged a more robust Iran policy than the Conservative party has had over the last decade. The bar is low. Somehow, nothing new came of Iran’s women’s movement, support for Russia, assassination attempts on British soil, and attacks on all our regional partners – or the unprecedented cross-party consensus this all generated. Tehran may never have a better window for building a bomb Labour is apparently planning a pivot that includes proscribing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), cracking down on Iran’s domestic networks, and more robust deployments to the Middle East and Mediterranean. Whether Keir Starmer's party will implement these plans is another question. The key difference is that U.S.

The Middle East never fails to surprise. Sunday was no exception. Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and several other senior Iranian politicians were killed in a helicopter crash in East Azerbaijan. One cannot help but wonder at the extraordinary misfortune not only of crashing, but of doing so in a foggy, rainy, muddy area that took rescue workers 15 hours to reach. Despite the profile of the accident’s victims, however, this is probably not an accident that changes the course of history. The Iranian presidency has become increasingly irrelevant in an increasingly-Soviet system. That trend is set to continue.

Three American soldiers on the Syria-Jordan border were killed by Iranian drones on Sunday. Since October, Iranian drones and missiles have injured nearly two hundred American troops. The pipe dream that was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – the Iran deal – could not seem more distant. The equation at the heart of the deal, more money for more Iranian concessions, vanished shortly after an agreement was concluded in 2015. In the years since, Iran’s funding to its regional proxies exploded, and its proxies’ attacks on Israel and the Gulf states continued unabated. The Houthis in Yemen, who emerged in earnest after the deal was struck, are now a global pest. Iran’s reformist movement, which the carrot of doux commerce was meant to empower, has been all but decimated.