News & Comment

The government doesn’t seem to be indicating a path off the list,” says Tom Keatinge, director of think-tank Rusi’s Centre for Finance and Security. “And there should be one: that’s the point” ... “A lot of people thought there should have been tougher sanctions after the Skripal poisonings,” says Keatinge. “The government had an opportunity to make up for lost time".

Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow at the defence think tank Royal United Services Institute, also told Times Radio that European nations were “more reliant” on the strait than the US was. Trump is unlikely to get an agreement from the EU or Nato, so may turn to individual member states, Arnold said. “You won’t get an agreement at an EU level but it would be a second coalition of the willing to help Trump,” he said. “Trump does not like large multinational organisations … what he is prepared to do is play member states off each other, using the threat of sanctions and tariffs and do that.”

The region's security architecture depends tremendously on an external underwriter. In this case, the United States to provide that security. It's something that many of the Gulf states have not been happy with relying upon, even though they don't want to replace the United States per se or eject it in that regard, but they need to have some sort of system in place that allows them to be more resilient without that external support. And they've been trying to do that over recent years because they simply don't regard the United States as incredibly reliable."