Iran deal confusion, Starmer out, Colombia’s rightward shift, and UK anti-migration anger

The talks are “looking good”, according to Washington. Iran wants sanctions relief, Trump looks desperate to get out, and Israel is still not convinced. So is the Iran war actually ending — or is Tehran walking away with the money, the leverage, and most of the cards?

This week, Professor Clionadh Raleigh and Bron unpack the latest US-Iran talks in Switzerland, why the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz matters, and what this supposed progress really amounts to. They look at whether Trump is trying to wash his hands of a war he failed to finish, why Lebanon remains a major fault line in any agreement, and why a deal that sounds stabilising on paper could leave Iran in a much stronger position in practice.

They also discuss Colombia’s rightward turn and what a tougher security agenda could mean for violence and the state, before turning to Keir Starmer’s resignation, rising anti-migration tensions in the UK, and what Britain’s increasingly combustible political mood might produce next.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Iran is not some major military power that the US government cannot take on. But if you go in there strategy-less, you're not going to be able to achieve that goal of a regime that has been entirely set up to survive.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Conflicts of interest brought to you by ACLED.

SPEAKER_02 0:22

Hello everybody and welcome back to Conflicts of Interest. My name is Cleaner Rowley. I am back in the UK, and now I'm able to speak to Ron directly, who has had a very active weekend of painting.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Yeah, not been a fun weekend, but um definitely feeling it now. And embracing this week because it's gonna get really hot. It's bloody diabolical. I was trying to remember when it was or what temperature it was when the roads were melting.

SPEAKER_02 0:49

Do you remember that two years ago? I don't, but Sam has this incredible memory for days slash years it was hot in Britain. And he will often, I think it was 1996, is one particular one he brings up, like with regularity, right? But because Sam works on climate change, I'm always kind of saying to him with some sympathy, I was like, listen, if it's like this more often, you're gonna have absolutely no takers on the whole climate change stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

No, it's a good point. It's a good point. And with with working as we do remotely with an international organization, I do feel slightly ridiculous on a call with someone in like Honduras and saying, Yeah, I'm really too hot. But please understand, we don't have aircon. This we're not built for this.

SPEAKER_02 1:30

I'm delighted that there's no air conditioning. It's it's one of the things about the States is this constant availability of air conditioning. I say that now and like people are screaming at me because they're too hot inside the house, but never. I went to Italy last summer. It was like the eighth realm of hell down there, right? Well beyond Dante's Inferno. And even then I was like, I refuse. I just point blank refuse to turn on that air conditioning. I mean, the whole family practically left me.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Well, I can imagine. It would have smelled. I can't stand being too hot. I can't concentrate on anything. So if you can make your way through the news about UK's heat wave. Yeah. There's the the deal that people are still using the term deal despite what was the actual wording? A memorandum of temporary understanding or something. Yeah, the total capitulation of the US.

SPEAKER_02 2:16

Yes, everyone of those.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

And then the strait was closed on the weekend. What is going on? They signed this initial agreement, and so that included people that we were talking about last week weren't at the table, like Lebanon. And this was all with immediate effect, and was some commitment, wasn't there, to this kind of we're gonna get a resolution in 60 days. Then straight was closed, there were more attacks from Israel over southern Lebanon, and then the talks have moved to Switzerland.

SPEAKER_02 2:44

Yeah, so there is a bunch of things going on, some of which are clear and some of which are not. Basically, the Iranian regime and the US are out there promoting kind of vastly different interpretations of what has been agreed upon. But as of this weekend, they've made a lot of committees, which, as you know, Braun, I have no time for process or committees, so I don't not think that this is a step forward at all. But the idea here is that they have 60 days to work out the tenets of some sort of longer standing deal or agreement, and that Iran wants more than ever to have this promise, which of course the Trump administration can't deliver because it's not very good with promises, but they want to promise that this war will not restart, right? Everybody else who is kind of horrified by the current agreements that the US has made, who wanted a deal at all costs, at all costs. You know, there was real desperation on the part of the US in order to get this. They are happy to say, oh, fine, fine, fine, we're not going to do anything. Just give us these little bitty things so we can go back and say that it's been a success. And so Iran has no incentive to give up anything and is not giving up anything. As a result, they're, as we mentioned before, about to get a ton of money. This deal, again, is not really worth the paper it's printed on, if it's printed at all, because it does not include the actual main players here being Israel and Iran's arrangement about security within the Israeli realm, but also it doesn't include a lot from the Gulf who have been thrown under the bus at this in this way. So the US just wants to walk away from it, right? Which means that everybody else then has to live with it and and isn't a party to the deal, so why would they? But I'll I'll say something there that's important, which is that everybody's claiming that Israel is the reason that this isn't going well. But two things that are important, which is that no one's considered Lebanon in this, right? Lebanon is not Hezbollah, Hezbollah is not Lebanon, and the idea that this is being written so that a terrorist group, right, the world's largest militia, can be protected is a pretty outlandish thing to actually acknowledge, which is why no one's bothering to acknowledge it. And instead, they're saying, Oh, Israel's being terrible and it's it's violating a peace agreement that it's not party to. And in fact, there's been several ceasefires between Hezbollah and Israel, which have been violated by both parties.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

So when you say the US just want to walk away, couldn't they just walk away? The problem's now Iran hasn't had any direct contact with the states where they are. If the states just kind of pack their bags. And there was conversation about this slightly earlier on, wasn't there, when when Trump came forward and said, you know, this isn't our problem, we don't we don't need this straight at all. That's up to you. You know, like they are at such a distance that if this keeps going around in circles, they could just leave them to it, couldn't they?

SPEAKER_02 5:32

I suppose they could. Every single administration in the US has tried to leave the Middle East. There are other concerns beyond the kind of global policeman role that Trump is trying to claim instigated his interest in Iran. Those include things like Iran's reach, especially with instability, it's quite far. And of course, Iran has been a party to destabilizing techniques in the US and in Britain and certainly across Europe. So that's the first is that Iran is in fact actively trying to destabilize other regimes. The second, of course, is that the US was not the global policeman in the Gulf. It was the protector of this security in order for it to extract what it needed from these alliances, especially amongst Gulf powers. And Israel is, of course, a longstanding and important partner within the Middle East more broadly for the US, not just because they have extremely similar perspectives on the world and their need to control unstable actors within it, but also it's an important domestic governing component, despite the fact that the Democratic Party just wants to throw both Israel and, in association, the Jewish population under their own metaphorical bust, but we'll leave that alone for now. The important thing here, I think, is that both the US and Israel are now considered very indispensable, but also unreliable to their Gulf partners or Gulf neighbors. And the indispensability is a really key issue, which is that if this war did anything, it it really solidified two things happening within the Gulf more broadly. One is that the Gulf needs to look around for different partners to secure its security. China can't do it at the moment, it doesn't have the means to do it. So China is not the answer right now. But the US, while it may be going along with the US as the immediate short-term answer, it is also not the long-term answer. The second is that they have been held hostage by their geography and by Iran's use of that geography in the strait. And so another conclusion is that there's going to be a shift in their economic relationships around that geography. So it will hasten the move towards alternative means of getting out their energy and sustaining their energy markets that do not involve the strait. That's not going to happen immediately, obviously, but it certainly is going to happen in the shorter to medium term.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

Is anybody leaving this in a stronger position? I was reading some coverage this morning, so Acclaid's recorded 2,000 strike events in the 114 days that this has been going on so far. And so would people think that having been on the receiving end of that many strike events by powers like the states and Israel, that Iran would come out of this with more cards?

SPEAKER_02 8:15

So there have been groups of strikes 2,000 plus into Iran, right, rather than just out of Iran, because that those were also pretty prolific. There has certainly been some damage to the Iranian system, but it is by far much stronger now than it was in the beginning of this. So let me go over what I think is basically happening here, which is that they have a lot of money and they have a lot of time, which is exactly what they needed, right? They have a more extreme IRGC. They have a population that has been, as you mentioned, both bombed from the outside, but also really, really repressed from the inside. And they needed the tremendous amount of money that's about to come their way to repair their networks, especially their kind of command networks, which, you know, we mentioned during the very brief actual conflict phase, had become quite decentralized in order to survive. They need to rebuild their air defenses, which of course have been exhausted and in some cases destroyed. They need to replenish their drones and missiles, which that money will allow them to do. They need to reconstitute their supply chains, which that money will allow them to do. And they need to, of course, start again on repressing their own populations and especially from having, as they have throughout the entire hundred plus days, punishing detractors and punishing anybody that they deem to be against the regime, which of course are many. And what they get for involving themselves in this deal for which they gave nothing is sanctions relief, oil sales. They get bribes. UAE has paid them somewhere between 20 and 30 billion just to be able to move out of the strait. There's some reconstitution and reconstruction financing, and there's unfrozen assets. I mean, this has been bloody brilliant very long. I think everybody involved should be deeply ashamed of themselves. I'm really worried about how much disorder this is going to buy.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

Yeah, to to kind of boost them up in that way. I think that was one of the first things occurred to me when when it the notification pinged up on the weekend that the strait was closed again. And this was after there was a a really strong attempt towards the end of last week to do a, you know, we've made some real, real progress here. This memorandum is, you know, and and to try and make the the PR sound quite cool about the current situation. And just like that, it was it was the straits closed again. And I and for me, that was a big kind of hang on a minute, we're still in charge here. Look what we can do.

SPEAKER_02 10:41

Yeah, of course they can. But like it's worth remembering what it was impossible for the US to do, right? So could the US go in and have another bombing campaign? It certainly could, but that was not enough in order to suppress and remove these elements within Iran. So the US is kind of saying, listen, this is what we had in mind. It didn't work out. So what do they have in mind, of course? Let's go over that. They were going to decapitate, which they successfully did. They took out several very key members of the IRGC. It was going to support or offer air control or whatever it is, so that the population in Iran could rise up. No one mentioned that to them before, which was a little bit of a problem. The Kurds were going to come in, as well as the Azaris and potentially other people from uh the south. That was neither coordinated nor likely. And effectively, then they were going to be able to somehow drop in, or as we've learned in subsequent weeks after the bombing, Ahmadinejad was going to potentially take on that role. But none of it was planned. And that's what I think is the most glaring problem here, which is that Iran is not some major military power that the US government cannot take on. But if you go in there literally strategyless and you're depending on Israel, who have their own objective and their own abilities and their own drawbacks, you're not going to be able to achieve that goal of a regime that has been entirely set up to survive. And they didn't. And now they're left with this total mess. But they weren't able to bring the Saudis in, or in fact, they weren't able to rely on the Gulf powers. They weren't able to keep the strait open. They weren't able to coordinate against the IRGC. They weren't able to bring Europe in. In fact, they spend most of their time insulting them. There was effectively like this influence of Iran on other countries that they weren't able to mitigate. And they couldn't get the Gulf to stop paying to not be hit. And they couldn't protect either their missile levels or anybody else.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

At this point, it feels like the crux of it is coming down to this situation between Israel and Lebanon. As you were saying, like that was a problem before, it will be a problem into the future. We're dealing with a terror organization there. And that to be playing such a role in whatever negotiations are happening now, again, that was happening pre-the state's involvement as well, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_02 13:01

It was. And I think it's really important to note here that what people are not saying is that Iran is determined that this terror organization that has created terrible problems, both in Lebanon and beyond, should be protected. That's one of their key attributes. And the US is claiming that that's an okay component of this deal. What they don't need to say, of course, is that, you know, Hamas will also get some of this money and potentially the Houthis will get this money. They can't say that because they literally are just, they're so eager to back out of what they put themselves in that they won't say it.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

No, but there won't be anyone who would believe otherwise, surely.

SPEAKER_02 13:40

I don't think that well, I think that what's important here is like, what's the main conversation been? It's about how awful Israel has been not to allow this to go through. That's the administration's main line at the moment. Iran's main line is like, we'll still do whatever we want, whenever we want. We just want that cash. And everybody else is kind of, I think, still in a relatively stunned silence about this. Israel has claimed that they have not been asked to retreat and they are allowed to respond to violence upon their population and their territory, but they've been asked to not effectively create strategies to further engage themselves within Southern Lebanon. And of course, like that's too vague for anybody to actually do anything with. But the issue here is that it's almost like a mood swing is determining the geopolitics of the Gulf from somebody who's not going to actually bear the costs of it. And the Gulf, again, is finding that they have to engage with the US, but the US is being so rogue in its approach that they simply are trying to find alternative means to figure out this deal can happen here and what do we need to do? Do we need to pay off Iran in the short term? How quickly can we organize alternative ways to engage? There's all sorts of things that Gulf can be doing. It could be setting up a cross-country air defense unit. It could be looking at really, really defensive maritime security. It could be figuring out what kind of insurance do we need and what kind of scenarios are we likely to face in the next 12 months, which I'm sure that some of those things are being done right now. But it's not because this deal is so great that they feel like they can get on with it. There's a lot of contingency plans that need to happen.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

Do you think that this weekend Trump is going to be a little bit more distracted moving forward because the presidential candidate that that he was backing in Colombia has been successful, which is a pretty huge shift, isn't it, for the country over there?

SPEAKER_02 15:33

Latin America, I don't mean to dismiss their presidential campaigns, but they're always like these purity contests between how far left and how far right and what kind of variation of that did you get. What I would say is that what's happening in Latin America more broadly, I will include, of course, like the Caribbean, etc., is a testament to how fundamentally Marco Rubio was determined to change the trajectory of that continent. And Marco Rubio has been a stunning success in that. A literal stunning success. But I was watching a video of JD Vance this weekend. And of course, like this competition between Rubio and Vance is like a big thing at the moment. And uh Vance was really trying to give the impression that he's not responsible for this terrible Iran deal, right? Like this was a real team effort. And he was like, you know, I love working with Marco. This involved Marco, this has been designed with Marco, but Vance can't take any sort of credit for whatever you might consider the successes, quote unquote, of what's happening in Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia. That is where Marco Rubio was clearly very, very determined that he was going to use his position, change the fortunes of that region, and he has.

SPEAKER_00 16:45

So looking more closely within Colombia, do you think that this far-right oil billionaire, and there's actually quite a lot of headlines that that look about connections with him and and drug trafficking and you know the kind of corrupt, complex backgrounds, his approach to violence will do anything for the country? Because it that seems to be quite different to the the previous approach and and also maybe speaks to why the president was backing him in the first place. It's very Trump to to say, you know, we're gonna be hard on crime, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 17:15

Well, I think that there's been a rash of these more far right, more more populist leaders across Latin America who claim like it just needs an incredibly strong hand of the state in order to stamp out this violence, of which they are also implicated in, right, in at different stages. Because it seems to me like everybody has now accepted that it's impossible to keep your hands clean and do well within Central and South America without engaging in these state-like entities, which are entirely focused on their own political economy, which is illegal largely in every way. But I would say that there are some successes with a crackdown approach. Is it El Salvador with Fukabu? We're seeing the limitations of that, I think, which is that you have to incarcerate enormous numbers of young men. And of course, many people have said that incarceration in and of itself actually not radicalizes but entrenches this system even more because these cartels exist within the prisons, right? So I will say that I think everybody is extremely eager, but unaware of what the best solutions for the cartelization of Central and South America is. So you almost have to give people some credit for trying anything that might be effective because the AMLO perspective, which was before Scheinbaum in Mexico for this term, was a complete mess and in fact led to far more groups committing violence and a lot of territorial change, a lot of competition amongst the cartels. You've seen Ecuador kind of descend into a tremendous amount of violence during a period where there's been all sorts of different types of policy attempts to deal with it. You can't discount the role of a non-corrupt state in trying to secure both public security but also political security in the state. You can't discount it, even though it's been discounted in other arenas. But you also can't discount the fact that the cartels are an incredibly large, well-distributed, competitive, extremely violent, and wealthy kind of counter to any state.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

It's a horrible problem. And as part of the the shifts that we're seeing across Latin America, the Washington Post this morning have called it most aggressive US intervention in Central and South America in in decades. And I think that's calling question into like what the interest is in that area, generally speaking.

SPEAKER_02 19:38

I mean the interest is that they're next door and there are massive criminal organizations operating next door. Obviously, they are embedded within the US too. They're responsible for an enormous amount of crime and violence that happen, not just in the US, but of course across the continent itself. It's being engulfed by this violence. Totally engulfed. So if the US was going to have any sort of positive, productive role, not as, again, I'm not going back to this notion of the world's policeman, but just as a guarantor of hegemonic stability, they would have to, in some ways, try to address this very issue. Is that something that they can do at the same time as manage what they've started in the Middle East?

SPEAKER_00 20:16

Well, they're not managing that, so they might as well do that. Okay, fair enough. And the PR is going down lots better in in the the Central America side.

SPEAKER_02 20:23

Yeah, I mean, there's clearly the right side and the wrong side. And that is, of course, much murkier. But it's interesting, I think, the way in which the Middle East conflict is reported and what gets play, because I think that there's been a real pollution of the notion that there's people with a point about public security or even state sovereignty or political security and who gets to have it and who shouldn't have it. That's that's been all over the place in this conflict.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

Yeah, no, it absolutely has. And then close to home, we always give him a bit of a shout-out because I think it's quite entertaining to watch what's happening in the place that you and I live. But Keir Starmer has officially resigned. We heard that he was going to over the weekend, and then it looks like it's the first thing he did this morning. Um and then whilst we've been recording, Andy Burnham has said he will be running to step up as a replacement. I have been looking over the last few weeks at some of the shifts that that kind of recorded within the UK since the Starmer administration. And there's been spikes in protest activity, particularly around anti-migration, and those themes at the same time as you're hearing about more groups, more movements developing on the what they're calling the right of the argument that's leading people to the streets. The country isn't in the best position, I think it's been. I wouldn't want my worst enemy to have to take up that job now. But what do you see the next sort of phase of this being for the UK?

SPEAKER_02 21:53

What will Andy Vernon be if he gets the position? What is the number of the prime ministers within the last 10 years? Is it seven? Let there be No concern around whether or not he's going to pull this together. He has no money, right? Which is a huge problem in dealing with Britain at the moment. It was going in a slow decline and now it's in a rapid decline. But to your point there about the kind of public mood, which is sterile, I'll put it that way, right? The public mood is pretty bad. And one of the issues I think that's confronting everybody is that the time of the year being what it is, I don't believe any discussion about whether and how it leads to political violence or rioting or protest. But what I will say is this, which is that everybody is primed to go out on the street when there is an attack, and especially when there's an attack by somebody who is either here legally or here illegally. So when I say here legally, I often mean especially if it is somebody who happens to be some sort of a racial or ethnic minority who might be an asylum seeker and been, I'm not going to use that dumb British phrase, like granted leave to remain because it's contradictory, right? They be they've been granted asylum status, right? Are you also annoyed at these British like confounding phrases?

SPEAKER_00 23:07

Yeah, you know me. I spend most of my life looking at phrases that that people use in various contexts, and I will say, what does that mean? What does that mean? What is that because I can't stand alienating half of the world just by using these ridiculous phrases. And so yeah, that is one. If you actually pick it apart, it means nothing.

SPEAKER_02 23:25

There is an issue in Britain in that quite a number of very public, very disturbing crimes, very tragic crimes, have been committed by people who are not supposed to be here, right? Or they're supposed to be under the care of the institutions of the state, and the state has let them go. So whether it's an extremist organization or whether it's a mental health facility or whatever the case, they've let them go because they believed that their community was overrepresented within their remit. This is now being picked up not just by the far right, but by the center right to some degree, saying that anti-racism has pervaded British institutions and it's created public disorder. And it's hard to argue against that because there is, in fact, an increase in very public, very disturbing crimes that appear to have been under the control of state institutions, except they made a choice to let these people go into the community they committed these crimes. So that's really where the right is kind of capitalizing on these ever more frequent crimes, right? So that's that. The right is also which is typically regarded as Nigel Farage's reform. They're being now challenged from the further right, from this group called Restore. Now, Restore is in a position where they can take this much further and a much darker place than reform was willing to. And that's what I worry about in terms of these coming months. These things will happen again, terrible, but they will. And there will be an inability, both of the state, to absolve itself from its responsibility because it will likely again have them being involved, know that they're particularly violent actors, and still let them out on the street. It will also have trouble, as it did in Belfast, taking the people who are responsible for the violence, whether they're doing it out of correct information or out of a clear ideological rage or whatever the case, and stopping it. They are particularly bad at dealing with it, and they're particularly bad at getting involved at any stage of the process where they could have stopped it. And that's just a real sense that like nothing works, you know?

SPEAKER_00 25:31

Yeah, and it certainly opened the door up then for when there are those cases of like complete misinformation fallacy that happened, like with Southport, that was just someone that wasn't white, and it only took a couple of people to attribute that incorrectly, and it sparked a whole wave of movement in a different direction. But it's because the majority of the time when when those claims are made, it has been a a failure of the state, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 25:56

A really terrible situation, and then now the Henry Novak killing. The police acted on the information, the information was wrong, and then there was a sense that there's two-tier policing. So with with Keystommer leaving, you know, the claim of two-tier Cure, which was that there's one policing for, let's say, the British population, and there's another type of much more lenient policing for everybody else. That might go, but I mean, uh, there's been nothing but really terrible responses by the state about how to deal with these extremely serious, both breaches of public order, but also responses to people being very upset about these breaches of public order. The other thing I'll mention is that it's very different in the states, right? In the states, you have these enormous protest movements with the No Kings movement, etc., but those are considered to be huge and totally harmless. And they are useless as a result of being totally harmless, right? You've got thing alongs, you've got vegan barbecues, whatever it is, right, along with these things. And it they're just considered to be kind of ridiculous performances on the part of the left and far left against the administration, which has many serious issues that I think Americans more broadly want to see dealt with, but it's not being done through this medium.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

You're right to say that if Andy Byron were to step in, that would be number seven. So we've had David Cameron, Brexit. Brexit is 10 years old today, I think. Is it really? Yeah, yeah. Horrendous. So David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris, Liz, Rishi, who I love. Who you love. Yeah, I do love. You're so competent. Well, I think we need to wait, don't we, for people that we like to be after whoever goes in right now. Last whoever goes in right now is Superman. There's not much that can be done overnight. Okay, what's next this week? What are you looking out for?

SPEAKER_02 27:43

I'm particularly interested to see how this is all gonna shape up with regards to some movement in the horn. In particular, the US has put some travel sanctions on the TPLF members into the US. That's interesting, although I think that Egypt has kind of like shown its hand a little bit in the last week about its attempts to really rein in Ethiopia's larger ambitions because they're so upset about the GERD, which in fact has been excellent, but uh Egypt is trying to effectively surround Ethiopia and hedge it in. And of course, this little love sit-in between Al-Sisi and Trump at the G7 probably didn't help situations at all. So we'll see about how the politics of that is shaping up. I don't expect anything to happen this week, but it will be interesting. I think that everybody's initial reaction to this deal will be continually interesting to watch play out. Again, like this has a long tail. So I'll be curious about how and what can break it early because it's not being greeted with a lot of support. Well, I think that's it for this week, yes? I think so too.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

You've been listening to Conflicts of Interest with Professor Cleaner Raleigh, brought to you by ACLED, the world's leading source of political violence and protest data. Subscribe so you never miss an episode, and follow us on socials for updates in the meantime.