Boris Johnson Faces His Own Iranian Nightmare
What happens if Donald Trump wants to go where his British allies really don’t want to follow?
Where you lead...
Photographer: WPA Pool/Getty Images EuropeIn all those long months of Brexit negotiations and debate, Europe and the U.K. generally agreed on one thing: Their security partnership was too important to be dragged into the maw of Brexit politics. The U.S. assassination of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, and the threat of “nightmare” retaliations from Tehran, will test both that principle and the limits of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s relationship with President Donald Trump.
According to Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, the U.K. learned of the drone killing at the same time as the rest of us. Whatever was said when Johnson finally spoke with Trump in the aftermath, you can bet it didn’t resemble Ronald Reagan’s conversation with Margaret Thatcher in 1983 after the U.S. invaded Grenada, a Commonwealth country.