Starmer welcomes release of Belarusian opposition leader's husband

The Prime Minister said his release was a reminder that 'democratic values cannot be silenced'.
This is wonderful news and a moment of hope. The release of Siarhei Tsikhanouski is a reminder that democratic values cannot be silenced. https://t.co/T2yCYixFSN
— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) June 21, 2025
The release of Mr Tsikhanouski and 13 other prisoners came just hours after the Belarusian authorities announced that the country's authoritarian president had met US President Donald Trump's Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg in Minsk.
Mr Tsikhanouski was imprisoned after announcing plans to challenge Mr Lukashenko in the 2020 election.
Following his arrest, his wife ran instead, rallying large crowds in her support across the country.
Sir Keir Starmer with Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya in 2022 (Stefan Rousseau/PA)
In response to his release, Sir Keir said: 'This is wonderful news and a moment of hope.
'The release of Siarhei Tsikhanouski is a reminder that democratic values cannot be silenced.'

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Telegraph

an hour ago

• Telegraph

Why ‘naive' Labour can't fix broken Britain

Heidi Alexander became the latest Transport Secretary to deliver unwanted news regarding HS2 last week, as she unveiled yet more delays to the crisis-hit high-speed rail project. She said it brought her no joy to tell households that not only will the scheme miss its target date of 2033, but it will also cost at least £37bn more than expected. In her words, the saga was an 'appalling mess' and a 'litany of failure'. Strikingly, her comments were almost identical to those made during a public inquiry into the Edinburgh Trams system in 2023, which was completed £400m over budget and five years late. To add insult to injury, producing this report cost the taxpayer £13m. Such damning examples of troubled infrastructure projects have given rise to a simple question in recent years: why is it so hard to get anything done in this country? Until recently, Sir Keir Starmer's diagnosis was simple: 'the party opposite'. But after nearly a year of governing with the biggest majority in 25 years, the Prime Minister, who insists he is a 'builder, not a blocker', has set his sights on a new enemy. 'When Labour came in, there was an expectation that relationships with the Civil Service would be put on to a much more stable, harmonious footing after what had been a decade of quite fractious relationships,' says Patrick Diamond, a public policy expert and former special adviser to Lord Mandelson. 'Suffice to say, it really has not worked out like that.' Like his predecessors, Sir Keir is waging war on Whitehall after concluding that Britain's state machinery is broken, even despite boasting more employees than ever before. He is hardly the first to say so. Michael Gove called it the 'blob'; Liz Truss described it as the 'deep state'; and Dominic Cummings said it was 'an idea for the history books'. Sir Keir issued his own critique in December when he said that too many civil servants were comfortable in 'the tepid bath of managed decline'. According to polling from YouGov earlier this year, 52pc of all MPs believe the Civil Service works badly, compared to 40pc who think it works well. 'There is a lot of frustration in Labour circles about the way the Civil Service works and the feeling that it's making it much harder for Labour to get things done,' says Diamond. '[People worry] this is going to undermine Labour's political position because in three or four years' time, it's going to be more difficult to turn around and say, 'We've changed the country in the way that we promised in our last manifesto.'' The Prime Minister's latest effort to solve this problem appears to borrow from the playbook of Boris Johnson's former adviser, Cummings, by bringing more radical thinkers into Whitehall. He has launched a new drive to attract 'elite' talent into government to help 'rewire the state', aiming to attract people who typically would not consider a role in the Civil Service. Concern over the performance of the central government is growing despite it employing a record 4m people. That includes 550,000 civil servants, the highest number since 2006. Chaos reigns across many of the state's most crucial functions, whether that be waiting too long to see a GP or spiralling hotel bills for asylum seekers. Productivity across the public sector is still 4.6pc lower than in 2019, while the health service is 10pc less efficient than before Covid. This means that the Government is pouring ever more money into the public sector without results. This is key because voters will simply lose faith in politics if no party can achieve real change in government, according to former head of the Civil Service, Simon Case. 'If we don't fix this, we'll just end up with politicians, but even more importantly, voters getting more and more frustrated that it doesn't matter who you vote for, nothing changes,' he says. 'That is a really big problem if people increasingly turn away from voting, engaging and caring about our democracy because they think it doesn't matter any more.' Yet Sir Keir faces a mammoth challenge to turn things around. Money is tight, discontent is rife and productivity growth is lacklustre. If he cannot find a way to overhaul Whitehall, his hopes of transforming the country will evaporate as quickly as his public approval ratings have already. The HS2 fiasco – which includes £100m spent on a bat tunnel – is just one of many examples of official failure. NHS gets a health check Experts believe Labour can make most headway with voters by making good on pledges to fix the NHS. 'Labour have made improving the NHS a central part of their pitch,' says Max Warner, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. 'The key target for this Parliament is that 92pc of those waiting for pre-planned hospital care in England should be waiting less than 18 weeks.' To this end, Rachel Reeves recently unveiled plans to give the health service a yearly £29bn boost as part of her spending review. Still, it may not be enough. 'That 18-week target has not been met now in essentially a decade,' says Warner. 'It will be really challenging to hit it by the end of this Parliament. It's more likely than not that they're not going to.' Currently, the health service is on track for a lost decade of productivity despite employing a record number of people and receiving tens of billions of pounds more in funding. 'The Government has continued to set targets for NHS productivity, but even if they hit those, hospital productivity will have only really just returned to pre-pandemic levels by the end of the Parliament or by 2028-29,' he adds. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, has shown he is not afraid of big decisions like scrapping NHS England, allegedly after no one there could tell him or Sir Keir's key adviser, Morgan McSweeney, how much it would cost to slash waiting lists. However, Alex Thomas, at the Institute for Government, warns that unwinding such a vastly complex organisation could prove to be a distraction. 'I do think [scrapping NHS England] will take up quite a lot of time and capital,' he says. 'They need to be careful that the activity they're pursuing isn't going to distract from the core objectives.' In recognition of problems within the public sector, the Government has already vowed to overhaul the Civil Service so it can push through change faster. Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a Cabinet minister who has for most of his life worked in the public sector, wants to run the state more like a start-up. 'If we keep governing as usual, we are not going to achieve what we want to achieve,' he said after launching secondments for private sector tech workers in government. This has been followed by pledges of holding civil servants personally responsible for achieving savings in their departments and getting rid of underperformers. Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has also said he wants to see government spending monitored in real time on a digital dashboard, an idea first floated by Cummings. This formed part of the Vote Leave architect's plans to create a new unit at No10 that would track departments' underperformance and waste in real time. 'Nobody's in charge' But Labour ministers cannot blame Whitehall for everything, observers warn. Many believe that despite having years to lay the groundwork in opposition, the new administration was not ready to rule. 'For a whole set of reasons, it just wasn't as well prepared as it could have been for power,' says Diamond. 'They came in with not that many policy commitments. There's a feeling in quite a lot of Whitehall departments that they're dealing with ministers who still have a lot to do in working out what their policy approach should be.' Some of this is down to naivety, says a former top civil servant speaking on the condition of anonymity. 'On the political side, there's a lot of frustration,' the source said. 'They thought – in the way that quite often politicians on the Left think – that they turn up, and just by the virtue of being different people, they would somehow be able to make it better, which is kind of quite naive. They're discovering that actually governing is hard. People don't often appreciate that making change happen is boring and hard.' Ministers are frustrated with the Civil Service and how Whitehall operates, complaining of an aversion to risk-taking, slow processes and uninspiring advice. It begs the question whether the British state's problem is the people who lead it, those who execute their vision or the system itself. Case, who was the most senior civil servant from 2020 to 2024, believes it is the system itself that has become far too complex and slow. 'The way we have organised our state means that it is extremely difficult to alter the status quo,' he says. 'The thing that isn't fair is that people say this is all down to the Civil Service. The Civil Service is actually only one very small part of the machinery of the state. 'At the heart of this lies the problem of power in the UK being far more diffuse than it used to be. The problem with the diffusion is that it feels like so many bodies are now responsible. What it can feel like to prime ministers is almost everybody's in charge, so nobody's in charge.' Case is not alone in this assessment. It is an opinion shared by Diamond, who is now a public policy lecturer at Queen Mary University of London after working in Tony Blair's government earlier in his career. 'What people underappreciate is that there isn't this thing called government that is a single bureaucracy where everybody works together and is coordinated,' he says. 'Most of these public services are vastly complex sets of organisations, some of which are not directly linked to each other, not accountable to each other or not directly controlled by ministers. 'The idea that there is just this lever you can pull ... Those levers are actually very hard to find, and even when you pull them, it doesn't necessarily mean that something's going to happen.' This is a common criticism from those who have experienced the Civil Service from the inside. Layers and layers of bureaucracy have, over time, created a system where no single employee has much agency or responsibility. As a result, when you are in the belly of the beast, getting anything done is difficult. 'People commonly talk about the great problems we have with getting things built in this country, whether that's houses or infrastructure,' says Case. 'They start to list off all of the different bodies that are statutory consultees, who get a say over how you're building your road or how you're building a nuclear power station. 'Each one of these may have been a sensible decision, but the problem is nobody over the decades has stopped to think about the accumulation of each of these. It should not take 10 years to build a nuclear power station.' Bloated bureaucracy This view is echoed by another former, anonymous civil servant. 'A change of government doesn't change lots of the ways that our state is just totally bent out of shape, and lots of things don't work,' they said. 'You can't fix those things overnight. 'You've got far too many people. Big organisations with lots of bureaucrats are just a nightmare. It means every individual job is less interesting. You've got much less space to operate in, and many more people to have to check with about whether what you're doing is going to interfere with what they're doing. It just begets a kind of endless meetings culture.' The Civil Service has swelled by 134,000 staff from a low point of 416,000 in late 2016, meaning that the bulk of austerity headcount cuts have now been reversed. While some of this rise reflects that the UK needs more administrators post-Brexit, ministers are keen to stem the rise. The Government is poised to cull as many as 50,000 civil servant jobs in the coming years in a push to find savings. It comes after Covid created a politically contentious culture of working from home that has become hard to undo. Departments such as the Treasury still only have an office attendance of 63pc, the latest available figures for March show. Figures released by the Cabinet Office also showed long-term sickness among civil servants hit a post-Covid high in the year to March 2023, the latest data available. 'Not being in the office has made people feel a lot less part of a collective,' says the former civil servant. 'There's just a kind of passivity and a sense of helplessness on both sides. I don't think either the ministers or the civil servants in government feel very powerful.' There are also questions over Whitehall's ability to attract and retain the best talent. Despite fast-growing wages in recent years and gold-plated pensions, many jobs attract far worse pay than in the private sector. As a result, the Civil Service cannot expect the best candidates, insiders say. 'If you're really good, you will literally be able to double your salary by going and working in the private sector, doing what counts as pretty much the same job,' the former civil servant says. 'The Civil Service should be about half the size at least, and the people should be paid more. It doesn't make financial sense for a very clever person in their early 30s to choose to be a civil servant.' Pay will only become a more salient factor as the Government seeks to adopt artificial intelligence to make efficiencies, experts warn. Diamond is adamant that the Government must pay to hire the best, particularly as the likes of Meta offer £74m signing-on bonuses to poach leading AI researchers. 'The tension has always been the question of whether civil servants should be paid more than the Prime Minister,' says Diamond. 'If you think about trying to recruit people out of the technology sector who can do all sorts of AI processes the Government's going to need, the idea that it is unacceptable to pay them more than the Prime Minister is a bit naive given what it would take to attract such people. Thomas, at the Institute for Government, adds: 'There is legitimate concern about the extent of specialist skills in the Civil Service, the speed of staff churn and people moving around. There needs to be a really clear focus on skills and capability, and building that in order so that ministers can get things done.' Cutting the fat The Civil Service needs to be scaled back to improve performance, he believes. 'There should be more rounds of compulsory redundancy and compulsory exit in the Civil Service based on performance,' says Thomas. 'You talk to most civil servants, and they are frustrated with how performance isn't well managed. 'Some of these mutually agreed exits and cuts that are going to have to come following the spending review's reduction in administrative budgets are an opportunity for the Civil Service to get more match fit.' Like other experts, he believes the central Whitehall machinery, such as the Cabinet Office, needs to be overhauled. The Government is in the process of slimming it down, but Thomas says: 'There's definitely further to go to get a No 10 Cabinet Office machine that's really humming.' A quagmire of quangos, a big and unwieldy Civil Service and ministers still finding their feet give a flavour of Labour's teething issues. Even a tentative proposal to scrap the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and hand its responsibilities to bigger, better-resourced departments appears to have been judged too ambitious and quietly shelved. These challenges explain why Sir Keir, after less than a year in power, is voicing opinions similar to those of Cummings. 'It's not that the civil servants are anti-Labour or anti any other particular party. I think the challenge is that change is always more challenging,' says Clive Betts, the Labour MP for Sheffield South East. 'The other problem is, in this social media age... you go on your computer and immediately say, 'This needs to be done', and you assume that it can be done. I had emails within two weeks of the last election saying, 'Why haven't you done taxi licencing, why haven't you changed it?' 'We know what needs to be done. But the process of getting it changed, and the actual details of the change and how you write the new legislation will take some time. The public, I think, is less understanding of those challenges,' Betts says. With Britain facing an acute housing crisis, more than 6m people waiting for hospital treatment and Europe's highest industrial energy prices, there is much to do and little time. After only 11 months in charge, Labour is trailing Reform in the polls and Sir Keir's personal rating is in the doldrums. Mandelson's former adviser, Diamond, points out that Blair confessed to only finding his stride with the Whitehall machinery in his second term. Sir Keir may not have that luxury.

The Independent

an hour ago

• The Independent

Mea Culpa: I know why the caged metal bird won't sing

We had a wonderful mixed metaphor in a comment article about rich people allegedly fleeing the country to escape Rachel Reeves's clampdown on non-doms: 'The UK, once a favoured magnet for the world's billionaires and multimillionaires, has fallen off its perch.' I tried to imagine a toy bird attached to a metal perch by a magnet, possibly a special kind of magnet 'favoured' by rich people, but it didn't work. Not only did we mix our metaphors, we overdid the first one. We meant that the UK had once been favoured by the world's mobile rich, or that it used to be a magnet for them, but both together was too much. In a bird cage. Fission power: Sometimes it is fine to split an infinitive. In the headline, 'Trump lacks the strength to usefully wield US soft power,' hardly anyone would notice that 'to' and 'wield' have been separated. In another headline, however, it didn't work at all: 'After 30 years – it's time to again ask what women want.' The natural rhythm there is 'to ask again'. Putting 'again' in the middle of 'to ask' is like when we write, as we sometimes do although I haven't seen it in the past week, 'the government on Saturday said…' When oh when? On Wednesday, we compared the prime minister's approach to the European Court of Human Rights with his predecessor's handling of the European Union. The headline said: 'Why Keir Starmer risks making the same mistake as David Cameron when it comes to Europe.' This is not wrong; it is just weak. 'When it comes to' is one of those phrases of verbal fluff that gives away a badly constructed sentence. What we meant was: 'Why Keir Starmer risks making the same mistake on Europe as David Cameron.' Hanging by a thread: In an article about a woman's campaign to educate students about coercive control in relationships, we lost our thread. 'Now studying for a master's degree in sociology at the University of Cambridge, her petition, which has been signed by more than 105,000 participants, has received cross-party support and was delivered to No 10 on Monday afternoon.' A natural reading is that the petition was studying for a master's degree. We broke it up into two sentences. Bevvied: We wrote about the confusion caused by the Office for National Statistics when it announced the most recent consumer price inflation figure. It had admitted that the previous month's figure was wrong: it was 3.5 per cent and it should have been 3.4 per cent, but it wasn't going to go back to correct the official series. 'The decision not to correct was taken so as not to disrupt a bevvy of contracts linked to the CPI,' we said. Thanks to Roger Thetford for pointing out that we meant 'bevy', a group, rather than 'bevvy', short for beverage, usually an alcoholic one. It may be, however, that both words come from the same source, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. 'Bevy' dates from the 15th century as a collective noun for quails or ladies, it says, from Anglo-French bevée, of unknown origin. 'One supposed definition of the word is 'a drinking bout', but this perhaps is a misprint of bever (see beverage). If not, perhaps the original sense is birds gathered at a puddle or pool for drinking or bathing.' The online dictionary comments: 'The quest for a clear and logical origin in such a word might be futile.' Amid celebrations: Finally, let me pause my campaign against 'amid' to allow Mick O'Hare to praise a good and helpful use of the word. In our report of the Premier League fixtures for the 2025-26 season, we said: 'Arsenal have away trips to Manchester United and Liverpool in their first five fixtures, amid home ties against newly promoted Leeds, last season's revelation Nottingham Forest and Pep Guardiola's Manchester City.' Amid? Used to mean 'in the middle of' and not just to bolt two parts of a sentence together? Alleluia.

The National

2 hours ago

• The National

Donald Trump's ultimatum is a threat to Iran and the Middle East

What this means, one assumes, is that the Iranian government must – within the next 12 days – open all areas of its nuclear enrichment facility at Fordo to ­investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), thereby proving that it is not developing a ­nuclear bomb. Failure to do so will risk the site ­being hit with a US 'bunker buster' bomb – or a GBU-57 Massive Ordnance ­Penetrator, to give this particular weapon of mass destruction its proper name. The dangers of such a development are, obviously, grave, not only for the ­environment and people of Iran (who would likely suffer catastrophic ­radioactive contamination), but also for the geopolitics of an already deeply ­unstable Middle East. The world recoils from the prospect. Even Keir Starmer – who has made himself Trump's sycophant-in-chief – has urged restraint. There is, however, one ­regime which greets the possibility of such a reckless escalation with the glee of an excited toddler in a sweetie shop. That regime is, of course, the ­Benjamin Netanyahu administration in Israel. Ever since the attacks of October 7, 2023 – in which Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and, I suspect, self-organised groups of young Palestinians killed 300 Israeli ­military personnel and 900 ­civilians – ­Israel has sought opportunistically to ­extinguish, not only the Palestinian ­people of Gaza but all of the Zionist state's many enemies across the region. The US is, needless to say, deeply ­involved in Israel's regional war efforts, which have – over the last 20 months – involved military action against Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran. Without American weapons, ­intelligence and finance, it is ­unimaginable that Netanyahu could have been able to conduct war on so many fronts. Nevertheless, the Israeli prime ­minister would prefer that the US was already ­engaged directly, alongside Israel, in ­military action against Iran. He has been urging US attacks on Iranian nuclear sites for well over a decade. Trump's two-week deadline ­expresses tensions within the US security ­establishment and within the president's own MAGA movement. The property ­developer-turned-politician was re-elected to the White House on the promise that he would keep the US out of foreign wars. READ MORE: Labour blasted as 'deeply authoritarian' over plans to proscribe Palestine Action Much of the MAGA base rallies ­enthusiastically to Trump's promise that, on his watch, the US will not suffer the ignominy of seeing one of its diplomatic missions overrun and its ambassador killed (as was the case with John Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya, in 2012). Never again, the president has vowed, will US forces be seen withdrawing from a foreign country in disarray (as occurred in Afghanistan in 2021). Many of Trump's supporters – ­including the ultra-conservative journalist Tucker Carlson – are pushing back against the prospect of US attacks on Iran. Trump is caught between presenting himself as the 'peace president' and – to use his own words – being 'very, very pro-Israel' (so 'pro-Israel', indeed, that he has openly advocated the mass expulsion of the Palestinians in Gaza who have, thus far, survived Israel's genocide of more than 56,000 people). There are, however, a series of ­problems with the insistence by both Trump and Netanyahu that Iran is on the ­immediate brink of having a nuclear bomb. As ­recently as March of this year, Trump's now director of national intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard testified to US ­lawmakers that Iran had not restarted its nuclear weapons programme. Indeed, in June, Gabbard tweeted a video in which she warned against the 'political elite and warmongers' who are 'carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers'. Referring, perhaps, to the war in Ukraine, tensions between India and ­Pakistan and/or the Middle East crisis, she opined that the world is 'on the brink of nuclear annihilation'. However, Gabbard's March testimony – made when she was Trump's trusted nominee for DNI – is now proving so inconvenient to the president that, on Friday, he felt it necessary to reject her comments of less than three months ago. Trump has averred that he 'doesn't care' what Gabbard said in March, and that her testimony on Capitol Hill was simply 'wrong'. For her part, Gabbard has sought to save her job by resorting to the MAGA playbook. Blaming 'the dishonest ­media', she accused journalists of 'intentionally taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news'. Gabbard's testimony in March was a reflection of the analysis of the US ­intelligence establishment. It was entirely at odds with Netanyahu's claims. Speaking at the UN, the Israeli prime minister said that Iran was 'months away' from having nukes. At another meeting of the UN, he insisted that the Tehran administration was just 'weeks away' from having 'an entire arsenal of nuclear bombs'. The problem with these pronouncements – as was pointed out last week by American satirist Jon Stewart on his ­always well-researched Daily Show – is that they were made in 2012 and 2015, respectively. When it comes to Israeli claims regarding the supposed Iranian nuclear weapons programme, Netanyahu has less credibility than Liz Truss denying that she crashed the UK economy. There are, in all of this, more than a few shades of Tony Blair's 2003 'dodgy dossier', the entirely discredited file with which the UK government sought to prove that the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq had 'weapons of mass destruction'. Back then, the Labour prime ­minister claimed that Saddam could deploy ­chemical or biological weapons against UK military installations in Cyprus in just '45 minutes'. Blair's later claim that he fell victim to erroneous intelligence would struggle to convince an unusually naïve ­five-year-old. The Iraq debacle exposed the leader of 'New Labour' as a lying warmonger. If the Blair dossier was dodgy, the ­Israeli claims about Iran (claims which are now backed by the US) amount to a ­multi-volume ­encyclopaedia of malevolent falsehoods. Yet, if – as Trump told journalists on Friday – 'my intelligence ­community is wrong', one can only assume that the US president's source of ­supposed '­intelligence' on Iran's nuclear ­programme is the Netanyahu regime. READ MORE: Owen Jones: Opposing Israeli violence is 'extremist'? The world's upside down The irony in all this is that the ­governments in West Jerusalem and ­Washington insist that Iran cannot ­become a nuclear weapons state because its government is untrustworthy and unstable. This from an Israeli coalition government that comprises: Netanyahu's far-right, ultra-nationalist Likud party; the fascist Jewish Power party of national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (who is a lifelong supporter of the late leader of fascist Zionism Meir Kahane); and the fascist-theocrats of the Religious ­Zionism party (which is led by Israeli finance ­minister Bezalel Smotrich). The idea that this ragtag collection of genocidal fanatics should be considered a trustworthy custodian of the 90 to 400 nuclear warheads Israel has sitting in the Negev Desert is beyond laughable. ­Likewise the notion that Trump – who is ­currently at war with much of the ­population of Los Angeles – is a ­statesman with whom the nuclear codes of the world's most ­powerful military should be ­considered safe. On the issue of Iran's nuclear ­programme – as on so many other ­geopolitical questions – US policy is characterised by flagrant hypocrisy. The demand that Iran open up its facility at Fordo to IAEA examiners can only be made because the Tehran government is a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Israel, by stark contrast, has never signed the NPT. Mordechai Vanunu – the former nuclear technician who blew the whistle on Israel's secret nuclear weapons programme in 1986 – spent 18 years (11 of them in solitary confinement) in Israeli jails for his brave and principled actions. As Marwan Bishara – Al Jazeera's ­excellent chief political analyst – said ­recently, Israel's influence over the White House is a case of 'the tail wagging the dog'. This influence is not down to the clout in Washington DC of the much-vaunted 'Israel lobby', much less to the conspiratorial power of a supposed '­Jewish lobby' (an antisemitic trope that insults every Jewish person who speaks out against the Israeli genocide in Gaza). Rather it is explained by the crucial role Israel plays – and has always played – for Western, particularly US, imperialism in the oil-rich Middle East. In 1943 – five years before Zionist forces visited the Nakba (Catastrophe) of mass murder and 'ethnic cleansing' upon the Palestinian people – Sir Ronald Storrs (former British administrator in Jerusalem) expressed his hope and belief that a future Israeli state would be a 'little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism'. In 1953 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz described the Zionist state as the Middle Eastern 'watchdog' for the Western powers, and the US in particular. The State of Israel's highly militarised, belligerent role in the Middle East makes it an extremely valuable asset for Western imperialism. That was true during the Suez Crisis in 1956, in which – against the urging of an unconvinced US – Israel joined its ­patrons France and the UK in the ­disastrous ­invasion of Nasser's Egypt ­(following the Egyptian leader's ­nationalisation of the Franco-British-owned Suez Canal). It was also the case in the Six-Day War in 1967, in which US president Lyndon Johnson's administration assisted Israel in its ­victory over Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Jordan, and in its consequent illegal occupations of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Ever since then, Israel has been relied upon to use military force, or the threat of it, to keep Arab states and Iran in line. That is why the US finances Israel to the tune of $3.8 billion annually. Israel is the number one recipient of US foreign aid, accounting for 5% of the total US international aid budget (and rising, given Trump's cuts to aid spending). This to a country which – with a population of around 9.7 million – accounts for just 0.1% of the world's population. Israel's watchdog role makes it indispensable to US interests in the Middle East. However, its interests and US interests are not identical, and, from time to time, the watchdog slips its leash and acts in ways that make life difficult for Washington. Trump is currently caught on the horns of this dilemma. His MAGA base is split between 'no more foreign wars' isolationism and 'very, very pro-Israel' militarism. He has given himself 12 days to decide whether to set light to the tinderbox of the Middle East by involving US forces in direct attacks on Iran or simply continue to 'green light' Israel's bombardment in ­Persia. His choice will come down to his estimate – in his own extremely right-wing, nationalistic terms – of what best serves the economic and political ­interests of the US imperium.