Iran

When you talk about a clear British strategy, I'm afraid I think the Chinese may find that quite hard to see because when Labour came to power it launched a China audit and a year after that, we all expected some form of clear policy to emerge but it didn't. Then Foreign Secretary David Lammy said that we had to understand that most of it remains secret, so one presumes it remains secret to the Chinese and it remains a secret to most of the British government in fact, because few government officials are fully vetted and therefore cannot see secrets."

Abu Dhabi regards that they helped Egypt a lot over the past 15 years,” said HA Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, the London think-tank. “So they expect backup on positions that they have on issues that they consider to be primarily Emirati in focus.”

Saudi Arabia is trying to project an image of maturity, stability and statecraft: the actor behaving with composure while others escalate,” said HA Hellyer, an expert in geopolitics and Middle East studies at the Royal United Services Institute and the Center for American Progress. “Mecca and Medina are simply too sacred, and too central to the global Muslim consciousness, to be drawn into geopolitical retaliation. Riyadh would be extraordinarily reluctant to restrict Iranian access to the hajj absent a clear and specific security threat.”