A DEAL with Iran may be close, US leaders say: and nobody imagines that the war they began with such bombast and savagery three months ago has been a success.

All talk of regime change is abandoned and Iran’s monarchist exiles are already accusing Donald Trump of surrender. Most suggested agreements would leave Iran stronger than before it was attacked, with formal rights over traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and sanctions lifted. Iran has exposed the limits of US power — and of US alliances.

But that doesn’t mean the US is no longer a threat. The Trump who once denounced “forever wars” is replacing them with “everywhere wars” — ratcheting up US aggression on multiple fronts. The administration scrambling to extricate itself from the Iranian stalemate is making blood-curdling threats against Cuba, and there is a very real danger that the end of one war will prompt the start of another, equally unprovoked and illegal.

We have to demand more of our politicians than cautiously staying on the edge of Trump’s wars. Steering clear of engagement in Iran is sometimes cited as a positive achievement of the Keir Starmer government (not least by Starmer himself).

Like so much Starmer says, it’s a lie: US aircraft were permitted to use our air bases to bomb Iran throughout, where other European countries including Spain, France and Italy barred the US from using their airspace to prosecute the war. But even they did not go far enough. The diplomatic attitude of Britain and most of Europe to the Trump regime is one of cowardice — and it leaves us irrelevant.

Europe has played no role in ending the war, despite the huge economic damage it has done to European economies, but then “Europe’s diplomatic irrelevance in major Middle Eastern diplomacy has become so normalised that its exclusion barely registers,” as Iranian-Swedish analyst Trita Parsi writes.

It also did nothing to prevent the war. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi pointed out in February that “several countries are presently attempting to avert the eruption of all-out war in our region. None of them are in Europe.”

European powers took a wait-and-see attitude once the US and Israel had launched their unprovoked attack. Enthusiasm in some quarters — from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, for example, and from Britain’s Tories and Reform UK — cooled as it became clear the US wasn’t winning.

But there was no principled opposition. The worst single atrocity of the war, the US bombing of a girls’ primary school in Minab, killing 160 people, mostly children, took place on the first day and was widely reported but not condemned by Downing Street or European capitals.

Iran’s retaliatory fire, aimed, logically, at US bases in neighbouring countries being used to attack it, provoked more condemnation from our government than US-Israeli bombing of Iranian towns and cities. There is no suggestion that the US might be barred from international sporting contests, as Russia has been over Ukraine, or that countries might boycott the Fifa World Cup on US soil; nor of economic disengagement or even reduced military co-operation.

This abject attitude enables Trump. Military setback in Iran will only tame the beast if it faces wider consequences. Araghchi’s scathing reference to Europe’s passivity applies today to Cuba: what are we doing to stop a criminal war on a country that has done us and the US no harm, indeed that Britain owes a debt of gratitude to for being the only country to let our Covid-infected citizens dock in for repatriation and medical treatment in 2020? We are doing nothing, and it’s a disgrace.

Staying on the sidelines is no cause for congratulation. The British state remains wedded to US imperialism. We need a mass movement for peace to break that chain. The International Conference Against War on June 20 in London is an important step in building it.