London -- The only thing worse than being Britain's enemy is being Britain's friend. For decades a pillar of the Western alliance, the U.K. is becoming an unreliable ally. The foundation of the British-American alliance isn't sentiment but security cooperation. The unraveling of Britain's postimperial strategies for managing the domestic front while maintaining its international status is damaging that cooperation and harming American interests.
On Oct. 4, the Pentagon withdrew its B-1 bombers from RAF Fairford, the main U.S. air base for strikes on Iran, to American soil, citing security concerns about an Iranian-led plot to attack the base. The withdrawal, which was so precipitate that some of the bombers took off before airborne refueling was fully arranged, came a week after British counterterrorism police arrested five black-clad men near the base in the early hours of Sept. 27. The men had driven three vehicles toward the base, and police later recovered "a quantity of petrol" from the cars. President Trump said the threat linked to Iran was the reason for removing the aircraft. Yet the "Fairford Five" were released on bail a day later.
Meanwhile, Britain's Labour government stalled on corroborating its ally's assertions while Labour held its annual conference and rallied to a new prime minister, Andy Burnham. On Sept. 24, three days before the Fairford arrests, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband posed shaking hands with Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, in a meeting at the United Nations General Assembly. Mr. Miliband, who earlier in the month had announced sanctions on Jewish-owned businesses in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), avoided meeting any Israeli officials.
In the Oct. 8 by-election for ex-Prime Minister Keir Starmer's London seat, Labour's Somali-born candidate is challenged by a Green Party candidate running on a "pro-Palestine" platform. In his conference speech on the morning after the Fairford arrests, Mr. Miliband denounced Israel at length and told Labour delegates that "you were right" to be "outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people." He devoted three sentences to Iran, none of them mentioning terrorism or domestic subversion.
No mention of the intelligence tipoffs that preceded the Fairford arrests, or that Iran had declared RAF Fairford a "legitimate target." No mention of the more than "20 potentially lethal Iranian-backed plots against people in the U.K." that MI5 described in July. No mention of the arrest earlier in September of two Iranian men who allegedly planned to detonate a chlorine bomb at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester, site of a jihadist attack in 2025.
Only on Sept. 30, after Labour's conference and after Secretary of State Marco Rubio cited the hand of a "foreign actor," did Mr. Burnham admit to "strong indications" that Iran "played a part" in the incident. It is impossible not to conclude that Labour played down a major security incident for domestic political reasons, that Iran sees Britain as weak -- and that the U.S. does too. Mr. Miliband did it again on Sept. 30 by euphemizing the hijacking of an airliner flying between Dubai and Tel Aviv by a British-educated Omani as an "incident."
As to how a key American ally allowed Iran, the world's leading sponsor of terrorism, to establish operations on British soil, consider another case that broke on the night of the Fairford arrests. The Sunday Times of London reported that a bodyguard to the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh obtained "asylum" and citizenship in Britain from the previous Conservative government, then planned Hamas attacks on Jewish sites in Germany and Austria to celebrate the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacres. A court order initially anonymized "Mr. X" for 100 years. The order was later amended, but he remains protected from identification in the U.K. while separate proceedings are under way.
This story reeks of sub-Le Carre spycraft gone wrong and the use of the courts to hush it up. The reality behind the James Bond myth is that postimperial Britain boosted its status by making itself useful to the U.S. The noble legacy of hosting Europe's dissident liberals, the ignoble imperial game of divide-and-rule, and the trade-offs of Cold War cat-and-mouse declined into an amoral willingness to cultivate terrorist funders such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and even to host the West's enemies. French intelligence services nicknamed Britain's capital "Londonistan" decades ago.
First a policy runs out of utility. Then its institutional momentum runs out of control. Britain is now a key European hub for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Muslim Brotherhood. If Britain continues its diplomatic and economic assault, Israel may reconsider the intelligence-sharing that has previously spared British citizens from the fatal consequences of British government policies. The British and Israelis should be working together as American allies against common threats. Instead, Britain's strategic exhaustion and cynical compensations are disrupting America's global strategy at a critical moment and making America and, it appears, American bases and personnel less secure.
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Mr. Green is a columnist for WSJ Opinion's Free Expression.
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