There is a particular kind of clarity that comes from a crisis: the clarity of exposure. Of seeing, in sharp relief, the gap between what a state claims to be capable of and what it can actually do. The conflict erupting across the Middle East since 28 February offers that clarity about Britain’s position in the world.
The US and Israel have launched a coordinated campaign against Iran’s nuclear programme, leadership, and security infrastructure. Iran has retaliated with hundreds of ballistic missiles and thousands of drones against US bases, Gulf states, and Israel. UK military facilities in Cyprus, Bahrain and Qatar have been targeted. A drone struck within 800 yards of British personnel at RAF Akrotiri. And the prime minister has appeared at the dispatch box to explain, with evident strain, why Britain was not consulted on the initial strikes, will not join offensive operations, but has agreed its bases may be used for defensive purposes by allies who did not think to ask us first.
The decision to stay out of offensive action reflects hard-won lessons from Iraq. But the situation itself is revealing. Britain is a passive platform for the strategic decisions of others. It was not in the room. It is managing the consequences, carefully, from a distance. That is the end product of a long process of institutional erosion.
The Fifth Industrial Revolution is not a future event
When I write about the Fifth Industrial Revolution, I am describing the present. This conflict is a demonstration of what 5IR statecraft looks like: AI-enabled precision targeting; drone swarms in their thousands; autonomous systems operating across multiple domains; cyber operations woven through kinetic strikes. Iran has launched more than 2,000 drones in five days. The US and Israel have struck hardened underground facilities that previous generations of weapons could not have reached. State power is being redefined in real time.
The question for Britain is not whether this is happening, but whether the institutional architecture of the British state is capable of responding to it. The honest answer is that it is not.
What Cameron and Osborne actually chose
George Osborne and David Cameron made a deliberate political choice. The “there is no alternative” framing was a political argument dressed as economic necessity. Serious economists disputed it at the time. The IMF subsequently acknowledged the pace and depth of consolidation had been excessive. These were not the inevitable consequences of the 2008 financial crisis. They were decisions about which budgets would bear the burden, and which institutional capabilities the state could afford to sacrifice. The answer, in practice, was most of them.
Austerity did not merely cut public services. It destroyed the connective tissue of the strategic state. The Cabinet Office lost its analytical spine. The Foreign Office closed embassies and shed experienced staff at precisely the moment when the world was becoming more dangerous. The Ministry of Defence produced the Ajax programme, saw Regular Army numbers fall below 73,000, and accumulated capability gaps that no subsequent review has closed. The gap between threat assessment and resource allocation (a chronic British vice) became a chasm under Cameron and Osborne, and it has not been fully closed since.
What was lost cannot easily be rebuilt. Institutional memory, once destroyed, is not quickly recovered. The capacity to think strategically, to maintain the networks of influence that allow a state to shape events rather than react to them, requires sustained investment over decades. The choices made between 2010 and 2016 were not inevitable. Their consequences, however, are proving to be.
The geometry of British power
Britain occupies an increasingly uncomfortable position. Too implicated in US-led alliances to sit aside; too under-resourced to shape the agenda from within. President Trump expressed his disagreement with Britain’s decision not to join the initial strikes. That signal deserves to be read clearly. Washington no longer treats London’s equivocations as the counsel of a trusted equal. The idea that Britain can sustain the special relationship without the investment it historically required is being tested against reality.
Britain retains real assets: a Security Council seat, significant intelligence capabilities, armed forces that command genuine respect. But assets are not strategy, and reputation is not capability.
The only work that will matter
We have argued throughout this series that Britain’s core governing failure is not a shortage of ideas but a persistent inability to translate strategic intent into delivery. The Iran crisis makes this visible in the international sphere as the pandemic did domestically. The government’s commitment to increasing defence spending is welcome, but money directed into institutions that lack procurement expertise and strategic clarity produces waste as readily as capability. The MoD’s track record is not reassuring.
What is required is not reorganisation, which has been tried repeatedly and disappointed repeatedly, but sustained investment in the human systems and institutional structures that make delivery possible. A governing culture honest about the gap between ambition and capability, rather than one that uses the language of transformation to manage perceptions of decline.
The Iran crisis will not be the last. The 2020s are characterised by exactly the compounding instability that overwhelms states whose strategic capacity has been hollowed out. The question for British government is not whether it can manage this crisis. It is whether it will use the clarity the crisis provides to begin rebuilding the institutional foundations a strategic state requires. That work is longer and less visible than any crisis response. But it is the only work that will matter.
Vijay K. Luthra is a public service transformation specialist and former civil servant, local government councillor, school governor and NHS NED