The shift came after escalating threats to British troops and citizens from missile and drone attacks. Just hours after the release of Starmer\u2019s Sunday statement, the Ministry of Defence told the Daily Mail that it was responding to a suspected drone attack on a key British airbase in Limassol, Cyprus, at midnight local time. There were no casualties.<\/p>\n
The government is also scrambling to help tens of thousands of Britons stranded in Gulf states amid airspace closures across the Middle East. Commercial interests are also at risk: A Gibraltar-flagged oil tanker was struck Sunday by \u201can unknown projectile\u201d in the Strait of Hormuz near the United Arab Emirates, though the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Centre said it was able to proceed after the resulting fire was extinguished.<\/p>\n
But Starmer\u2019s Middle East balancing act \u2014\u00a0neither condemning nor celebrating Trump\u2019s action, helping out but not joining in \u2014 risks pleasing no one.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Americans would have expected the U.K. to take this position,\u201d former Foreign Office Permanent Secretary Peter Ricketts told POLITICO. \u201cThe American system, the Pentagon and State Department, won\u2019t have been surprised. This is a long-standing British position.\u201d<\/p>\n
That didn\u2019t stop Trump ally Lindsey Graham from immediately branding the U.K.\u2019s initial understated joint response with France and Germany in the immediate wake of the strikes early Saturday \u201cpathetic.\u201d<\/p>\n
At home, Starmer\u2019s\u00a0ruling Labour Party, which was beaten into third place by parties to its left and right in a by-election last week, is coming under pressure to take a stand against Trump from the victors of that election, the left-wing populist Green Party \u2014 which\u00a0has already declared the U.S. and Israeli strikes illegal.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The shift came after escalating threats to British troops and citizens from missile and drone attacks. Just hours…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":453081,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1641,5138,69121,138,625,2793,8926,461,65728,59,57,58,585,9084,1805,420,3714,632,151,50,633,423,56181,20651,470,224,472,56,54,158,55,163220,637],"class_list":{"0":"post-453080","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-afghanistan","9":"tag-airlines","10":"tag-airspace","11":"tag-americas","12":"tag-british-politics","13":"tag-buildings","14":"tag-department","15":"tag-elections","16":"tag-emily-thornberry","17":"tag-gb","18":"tag-great-britain","19":"tag-greatbritain","20":"tag-iran","21":"tag-israel","22":"tag-john-healey","23":"tag-keir-starmer","24":"tag-media","25":"tag-middle-east","26":"tag-military","27":"tag-news","28":"tag-nigel-farage","29":"tag-parliament","30":"tag-populism","31":"tag-priti-patel","32":"tag-rights","33":"tag-social-media","34":"tag-stability","35":"tag-uk","36":"tag-united-kingdom","37":"tag-united-states","38":"tag-unitedkingdom","39":"tag-war-in-iran","40":"tag-westminster-bubble"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/453081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}