America’s closest allies are trying to prove they’re supporting the White House in the Middle East, while sticking to the very position that’s irked President Donald Trump: They’re not becoming more embroiled in the war in Iran.
Balancing on this tightrope is the U.K, whose prime minister, Keir Starmer, has tried to placate Trump with a “viable plan” to secure the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important waterways for trade.
This message hasn’t changed in the nearly three months since the U.S. and Israel launched their initial attacks on Iran on February 28, sparking retaliatory strikes across the Gulf and prompting Iran to effectively shutter the Strait of Hormuz to any ships it doesn’t deem friendly.
The U.K. says it’s deployed fighter jets and anti-drone systems to Middle Eastern countries that have come under Iranian attack, and stands ready to help clear Iranian mines littered across the strait—but only once a peace deal between the U.S. and Iran is reached.
“We’ve done quite a lot,” says British Armed Forces Minister Al Carns. Particularly, he adds, as the U.K. wasn’t “involved in the war in the first place.”
Carns was speaking on board RFA Lyme Bay, a British ship designed to carry around 350 sailors and dozens of armored vehicles to wherever they would storm enemy shores.
But the vast vessel been repurposed. It’s now the ship the U.K. is sending to sniff out an unknown number of Iranian mines in the Strait of Hormuz, detecting explosives that could be lurking unseen just below the surface.
Newsweek visited the ship in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar on Friday, where it was in the last stages of preparing to cross the Mediterranean to sail through the Suez Canal and on to the Persian Gulf. The Lyme Bay left the rocky outcrop on Monday.
It’s likely to be joined by at least one missile-loaded warship to protect the adapted vessel from Iranian or Yemen-based Houthi assaults in the world’s most-watched choke point.
The U.K. and France jointly announced in April they would lead a “strictly defensive” initiative to protect merchant ships in the strait and make sure the vital waterway is clear of explosives.
“We’re now pulling 40 countries together, [and] very specific and sophisticated capabilities, to try to clear those mines and ensure that commercial shipping can flow again and get the economy moving back to normal,” Carns told Newsweek.
The Drone Mothership
The Lyme Bay is the centerpiece of how the U.K. intends to do this. It’s already loaded up with different types of sea drones, each one designed to pick up mines capable of blowing holes in oil tankers or ships ferrying fertilizer by using sonar, magnetic and sound sensors.
Some of these mines are much like the device responsible for tearing open the side of the USS Tripoli, a U.S. warship that was sailing in the Persian Gulf when it hit an Iraqi mine in 1991. Others Iran has likely spread across the Strait of Hormuz can be activated simply by a shadow passing over the spot where the explosives wait to be detonated.
One model of underwater mine-hunting drone is whisked out toward a minefield on an unmanned boat, and can cover up to 25 square miles in its 20-hour life-span, said the sailors specializing in mine clearance aboard the Lyme Bay.
But to be really sure mines aren’t skulking unseen, the drone would need to go over a smaller area several times. Even so, unmanned systems would carve out safe corridors for commercial ships in roughly half the time traditional mine clearance vessels could manage it, one person on board said.
Once the drones latch onto signs of a mine, teams on the Lyme Bay can identify the device and choose a way to dispose of the threat. This could be specially-trained divers setting off the mine, or by shooting at it from a safe distance.
It’s a slow process. Even slicing out narrow routes for merchant ships could take months—although the U.K. will continue “as long as it takes,” Carns said.
The timetable, though, is up in the air. Trump has swung wildly in his assessments on how likely a peace deal with Iran is, and the military planning is still nebulous with no signatures yet scrawled across the dotted lines of an agreement between Washington and Tehran.
While U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted on Tuesday a deal could be reached in the coming days, Iran denounced a fresh set of U.S. strikes around the Strait of Hormuz on Monday as a ceasefire violation.
Coupled with a new insistence from Trump that an already complicated peace settlement would also involve countries like Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel—politically toxic in Riyadh—progress toward a Strait of Hormuz the U.K. and France would be willing to patrol appeared stalled.
But Iranian state television reported on Wednesday it had seen a draft of preliminary terms for an eventual deal between Tehran and Washington, which included a commitment from Iran to restore shipping levels to pre-war levels within a month.
The U.S., in turn, would lift the naval blockade it imposed on Iranian ports in April, according to the report.
For the moment, though, deadlock over the Strait of Hormuz remains and the Anglo-French-led effort is still pending. Iran last week established a new authority to control traffic through the waterway, only cementing its grip.
A trickle of ships have made it through, albeit far below the more than 130 ships that typically pass through the strait daily to transport around a fifth of the world’s oil and gas, and a third of its seaborne fertilizer supplies. A handful of Chinese-flagged vessels have completed the journey in recent weeks, although very few Europe-linked ships have managed to exit the strait.
The Diplomatic War
Admiral Brad Cooper, the top commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, said earlier this month help from the U.K. and European countries in making sure the strait is safe for commercial ships would be “appreciated at the appropriate time.”
The U.S. government, however, has been more cutting.
Rubio said earlier this month Trump was disappointed in how the rest of NATO had responded to the war in Iran. NATO says it’s aware of the U.S. president’s feelings on the alliance’s stance, and indicated it’ll feature high up on the agenda for the annual summit in Turkey, slated for July.
Trump himself has called NATO’s distance from the conflict a “very foolish mistake,” alluding to “a very bad future” for the alliance as a result.
The president, facing growing pressure over the Strait of Hormuz closure, has already announced thousands of U.S. troops will be pulled from Germany, following reports suggesting the Trump administration was mulling over withdrawing American troops from Europe as a form of punishment for U.S. allies.
Targeting Germany, however, was widely seen as a personal reaction to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s criticism of the U.S. attack on Iran. Just days after pausing a scheduled U.S. rotational deployment of thousands of soldiers that was already underway in Poland, Trump declared on May 21 he was instead sending an additional several thousand troops to the Eastern European nation.
Caught up in the confusion, American allies hope the longstanding military and diplomatic links with the U.S. will stay the course, despite the turbulence of the political rhetoric.
“It’s in our adversaries’ interests to see greater division rather than unity,” Carns said.
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