Britain's Iran policy has been slammed as complacent and lacking long-term thinking in a new report.
A leading expert on Iran has warned that ongoing Iran conflict has exposed flaws in the UK's approach to Iran as Tehran directly targets Jewish and Israeli people in the UK.
The paper, written by Professor Ali Ansari, a leading authority on Iran, for Policy Exchange, features a foreword from Tory MP Tom Tugendhat, who pointed to years of British failure of "strategic thought".
Tom Tugendhat told GB News: "GB News has long raised the profound threat presented by the Islamic Republic of Iran - and rightly so. The ruling theocratic regime has plotted to kidnap and murder dissidents on British streets, while deploying criminal groups to terrorise Jewish communities through arson attacks and vandalism.
"Abroad, it arms Russia's invasion of Ukraine, bankrolls terrorist proxies across the Middle East and threatens the shipping and energy routes our economy depends on - all while racing toward nuclear weapons."
The Iran war broke out after the White House's negotiations with Tehran fell through - but Prof Ansari has argued the focus on the nuclear programme has obscured the wider challenge posed by Iran, including proxy networks and attacks inside the UK.
Mr Tugendhat added: "It is clear that Tehran is pursuing a sustained campaign of aggression against the British homeland and our interests in the Middle East to intimidate our people, fracture our alliances and force Britain into retreat.
"As Policy Exchange makes clear in Professor Ali Ansari's new report, it cannot be allowed to succeed."
A Commons report released last month noted that "dissidents, journalists, regime opponents, Israelis, Jews, and sectors including government, travel and universities" had all been targeted by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Earlier this year, an Iran-linked group was sanctioned by then-Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper after it claimed responsibility for a series of attacks at British locations linked to Jewish and Israeli communities, including an attack on Haztola-owned ambulances in Golders Green.
Britain has been gripped by a "status quo-ism" which has resulted in Whitehall responding to problems as they arise rather than responding to a considered assessment of its interests, Prof Ansari said.
"Policy suffers from a structural, institutional and ideational deficit which hampers the development of a coherent strategy towards Iran, beyond short-term crisis management," he wrote in the paper, titled British Policy and the Iran Crisis: Masterly Inactivity and the Marginalisation of Britain.
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Prof Ansari also argued the Iran crisis has exposed the decline of the UK's regional military presence, harming the UK's relation with Middle Eastern allies.
And Mr Tugendhat said: "Despite months of warning and an American military build-up visible from space, Britain's long-practiced masterly inactivity gave the the clear impression of amateurly irrelevance in a region where appearance is everything."
As the Iran war broke out, it was revealed Britain was not ready to send a warship to the region.
The former Security Minister said this "revealed to the world that we are increasingly unable to match our interests with either the military capacity to defend them or the strategic confidence to shape events".
Prof Ansari said Britain's attempts to exercise soft power without "credible hard power" was "marginalising Britain into irrelevance".
The report is now calling for the creation of a long-term Iran strategy and to restore military capacity to defend British interests, assist Gulf allies and protect freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.
Mr Tugendhat said the Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband needs to "remember his department isn’t there just to maintain relationships but to promote Britain and expand our interests, robustly if necessary in the face of oppression".
Prof Ansari has also called for the UK to work with European partners, namely France, to secure constraints on Iran's nuclear programme, to protect the Foreign Office's Iran Unit and to reform career structures to reward regional specialisation and give reserach analysts a greater role in the development of policy.
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