News & Comment

When it comes to applying pressure, the Iranians have shown they can asymmetrically do so very effectively, very quickly, with relatively little military cost,” said HA Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at Rusi, the London think-tank. “But in so doing, they’ve wrecked their connections with pretty much the whole Gulf Arab region . . . It’s not clear the relationship will ever really fully recover.”

The fact that all parties know the writing is on the wall for the peacekeepers has meant a shift, and is a key factor in Israel’s decision to use “scorched earth” tactics, said Urban Coningham, a Middle East analyst at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi). “The Israelis have changed their tactics in southern Lebanon dramatically, especially compared to 2005. And the tactics they’ve used are yielding much more success.” “[This is] partly because Unifil is clearly on the way out, there’s no political will for it and the US are not willing to support it at all. “So I think Israel feels like they have a much freer hand than they would have. This is partly about Unifil but it's also part of the breakdown of international norms which we’re seeing in Trump 2.0.” Coningham said he had sympathy for the “impossible” situation Unifil commanders found themselves in. “Their mandate is peacekeeping but it’s essentially been an active conflict since the 1980s,” he added.

We don't actually have a good understanding of what the total costing of the defence programme looks like. That's in part because the MoD hasn't been able to publish what used to be called the equipment plan, which it did on an annual basis, for about three years now. The last one, the National Audit Office said, had a gap in it that ranged over ten years from a few billion pounds up to potentially nearly £30 billion."