Comment: Gulf crisis has shown that Britain cannot take its security for granted

The world breathes a sigh of relief as President Trump pulled back from his threat to ‘wipe out a civilisation’, and Iran agreed to allow ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

Hopefully this will mark the start of a return to relative normality, and the stock market has rallied, but the future remains uncertain.

The whole escapade has still left Iran effectively claiming sovereignty over one of the West’s most important strategic waterways, apparently able to control at will which ships can and can’t navigate the area. This is a truly terrifying prospect.

Donald Trump, so craven in his dealings with Vladimir Putin, decided instead to pick a fight with what he thought would be an easy target. He is claiming victory, but the reality is he bit off more than he could chew, and his recklessness has left United States in a weaker position than it was before. It has also left the western world at the mercy of the whims of one of the world’s nastiest regimes, and exposed the vulnerability of Europe’s defences.

Europhiles have wasted little time in claiming that the US is now an unreliable ally, and that the crisis has highlighted the need for a closer relationship with our European neighbours. But it has also highlighted how negligent the continent’s democracies have been with regard to defence, spending lavishly on welfare while assuming Uncle Sam will always come to the rescue. We now know that is not the case, and the debacle of Britain first taking six days to dispatch HMS Dragon, and then having to borrow a German frigate to fulfil its Nato obligations is a national humiliation it will take a long time to recover from.

We must all hope that the fragile ceasefire holds, that international free passage through the Strait of Hormuz is restored, and ideally that Iran’s unpleasant regime is removed by legitimate means that do not involve bombing the country ‘back to the Stone Age’.

But we must also hope that lessons have been learned. The days of reaping the ‘peace dividend’ are well and truly over, and Britain needs to be able to defend its own interests without clinging to the coat-tails of either the US or the European Union. If that means higher taxes and less government spending, it is something we will have to live with.

But it also means that we need a more balanced energy policy, that is neither driven by a dependence on Middle Eastern oil nor a zealous obsession with net zero.

The past week has been a huge wake-up call. We must not be caught napping again.