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Nearly two decades after entering Parliament and 16 years after stepping down as Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband has landed one of the UK’s most senior government posts: new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has named him the country’s next foreign secretary. Once the early favorite to take the chancellor role, the appointment marks a major career milestone for the veteran Labour politician, who brings a deeply documented record of progressive international positions to the role.

In his first remarks after accepting the post, Miliband framed the appointment through the lens of his family history, noting his parents arrived in the UK as Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. “To them, Britain was both a sanctuary and a beacon of hope in the global fight against fascism,” he said. “I will carry my parents’ faith in that spirit of Britain to my role representing our country.” Outlining his core priorities, Miliband warned the world is currently facing higher levels of instability and more severe threats to international law and democratic norms than at any point since the end of World War II. He pledged to prioritize rebuilding and strengthening partnerships with the European Union, deepen collaboration with core multilateral bodies including NATO and the United Nations, and expand working ties with Global South nations. Miliband also laid out key policy commitments: the UK will remain steadfast in its support for Ukraine against Russia’s illegal invasion, work toward de-escalating conflict in Iran and secure the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and pursue a lasting, sustainable two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

While Miliband has never served in a senior foreign policy role before, he has been a vocal, unapologetic voice on international issues for nearly 20 years, with a series of high-stakes votes and public positions that have shaped his reputation as a cautious critic of unplanned Western military intervention. The outlet Middle East Eye has examined his track record, which stretches back to the early 2000s, to contextualize the new foreign secretary’s likely approach to global affairs.

Miliband entered the House of Commons as MP for Doncaster North in 2005, two years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, meaning he never cast a vote on the 2003 decision. When he rose to become Labour leader in 2010, defeating his older brother David Miliband — a proponent of the Iraq war who served as foreign secretary under Gordon Brown — Ed used his clear opposition to the conflict to distance his leadership from predecessors Tony Blair and Brown. In his debut speech to the Labour Party conference as leader, Miliband said the Iraq war had caused a “fundamental loss of trust” in the party. “I criticise nobody faced with making the toughest of decisions and I honour our troops who fought and died there, but I do believe that we were wrong. Wrong to take Britain to war,” he told the gathering. The moment caused deep rifts in the Parliamentary Labour Party: David Miliband, who supported the invasion, was caught on camera scolding senior Labour figure Harriet Harman for applauding the speech, and other senior party figures including Andy Burnham, who also voted for the war, refused to join the applause. Later, the landmark 2016 Chilcot Inquiry into the conflict confirmed that Blair’s decision to join the US invasion, based on claims that Saddam Hussein held weapons of mass destruction, rested on “flawed intelligence” and that the 2003 invasion was a key contributing factor to the eventual rise of the Islamic State group.

The defining foreign policy moment of Miliband’s Labour leadership came in 2013, when then-Prime Minister David Cameron sought parliamentary approval for British military strikes against the Bashar al-Assad regime following Assad’s chemical weapons attack on civilian populations during the Syrian civil war. Miliband rallied nearly all of his Labour MPs to oppose the motion, joined by rebel Conservative and Liberal Democrat lawmakers, handing Cameron’s government an unprecedented defeat on a major foreign policy question. At the time, the Obama administration in the US was preparing to launch its own military intervention to enforce a declared “red line” on chemical weapons use, but ultimately pulled back from action. US officials later confirmed the UK parliamentary vote derailed Washington’s intervention plans.

Assad’s brutal regime finally collapsed in December 2024 following a rapid offensive by opposition forces. When asked shortly after the fall of Assad whether he regretted his 2013 position, Miliband made clear he stood by his decision. “No. First of all, I very much welcome the fall of President Assad, who is a brutal dictator,” he said. “The decision I was confronted with, though, in 2013 was whether we did a bombing of President Assad without any clear plan for British military engagement, where it would lead and what it would mean. And I believe then, and I do now, that one of the most important lessons of the Iraq war is we shouldn’t go into military intervention without a clear plan, including an exit strategy.” Still, some high-profile British foreign policy commentators have argued his role in the 2013 Syria vote disqualifies him from the top foreign affairs role. Writing for The Telegraph, chief foreign affairs commentator David Blair argued Miliband’s role in that outcome should have convinced Burnham to pass him over for the post.

On Israeli-Palestinian affairs, Miliband has a long-held, consistent stance of supporting Israel’s right to exist while backing Palestinian statehood and calling out excessive civilian harm during military operations. In 2014, amid Israel’s 50-day ground invasion of Gaza that killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, most of them civilians, Miliband labeled Israel’s actions “unacceptable and unjustifiable,” and called on Cameron’s Conservative government to take a stronger public stance against the offensive. While he unequivocally condemned Hamas’s rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, he said the violence could not excuse the mass civilian death toll, and called for an immediate ceasefire. That same year, he rallied all Labour MPs to vote in a symbolic parliamentary motion supporting British recognition of a Palestinian state. A year later, he told the Jewish Chronicle he considered himself a “strong friend of Israel” and opposed boycotts of the country, noting that “friends will disagree from time to time but it doesn’t in any way change my deep belief that we should seek to restart the negotiations, that we should have no tolerance with those who question the legitimacy of the state of Israel.” Most recently, when Keir Starmer was prime minister last year, British media reports identified Miliband as one of the leading cabinet voices pushing the government to formally recognize Palestinian statehood, a step the UK ultimately took in September 2025.

Miliband has also been a vocal critic of US President Donald Trump, a stance that will shape his new role as the UK’s top diplomat. Shortly after Trump’s first election victory in 2016, Miliband told the BBC: “The idea that we have shared values with a racist, misogynistic self-confessed groper beggars belief.” A year later, he wrote on social media that Trump had “lowered the bar for idiocy.” When the US and Israel launched military action against Iran in late February 2026, Miliband was among the most prominent senior Labour figures opposing any UK military involvement in the conflict. Reports at the time confirmed Miliband, alongside Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper, strongly pushed against British participation, with a source telling the Spectator Miliband “fundamentally doesn’t like Trump, and he doesn’t like this Iran thing.” Starmer ultimately chose not to join the military action, a decision that created a major public rift between the former prime minister and Trump.

The report comes from Middle East Eye, an independent outlet specializing in coverage of the Middle East and North Africa region.

As the first phase of a US-mediated truce framework between Lebanon and Israel kicks off in southern Lebanon, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun has arrived in Washington for a landmark meeting with US President Donald Trump — a diplomatic trip widely billed as the most consequential of his young presidency.

This White House summit marks the first visit by a sitting Lebanese head of state to the US presidential residence in nearly 20 years. It comes more than a decade after the highest-level previous meeting between a Lebanese leader and a US president, when then-Prime Minister Saad Hariri hosted talks with Barack Obama in 2011. Ahead of his Tuesday sit-down with Trump, Aoun held an initial working meeting with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday, where Rubio reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to upholding the June trilateral framework agreement and backing Lebanon’s push to deliver lasting security and improved livelihoods to its citizens.

Aoun’s trip comes on the heels of six rounds of US-mediated direct negotiations between Beirut and Jerusalem aimed at ending their ongoing conflict. The fifth round, held in Washington, produced the foundational framework agreement on June 26, while the sixth and most recent round of talks concluded last week in Rome.

For the Lebanese presidency, this visit is far more than a routine diplomatic gesture. Sources close to Baabda Palace told Middle East Eye that Lebanese officials spent months working to secure the high-profile meeting, framing it as a critical opportunity to bolster Aoun’s domestic political standing and demonstrate that the direct negotiation process can deliver tangible progress.

Per those close to Aoun, his core argument is that diplomacy can deliver outcomes that years of open conflict have failed to achieve: a permanent end to hostilities, the safe return of displaced Lebanese residents to their southern homes, the full deployment of the Lebanese armed forces across the border region, and a full Israeli pullback from occupied southern Lebanese territory — a step the framework text refers to as “redeployment” rather than an explicit withdrawal.

Under the terms of the agreement, the Lebanese army will deploy to “pilot zones” that Israel has evacuated, with the military taking over responsibility for disarming Hezbollah fighters in the area. On Monday, US State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott confirmed that initial pilot operations had officially launched in three southern Lebanese villages: Froun, Srifa and Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh. The operations are being overseen by the newly created US-led Military Coordination Group for Lebanon. Shortly after the US announcement, the Lebanese army confirmed its units had begun moving into Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh following coordinated planning through the new oversight body. The military issued a public advisory urging civilian residents to avoid returning to the area until security is fully stabilized, and to follow all guidance from deployed troops.

A senior Lebanese military official noted that security conditions vary across the three pilot zones. Froun and Srifa have never held a permanent physical Israeli troop presence, and the Lebanese army already maintains forward deployments there, though the areas still fall under Israeli military oversight and control. In contrast, Israeli forces still hold a physical presence in parts of Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh, with the Lebanese army’s full deployment tied to ongoing incremental coordination through the US-led group.

A senior Lebanese official briefed on Aoun’s Washington talks told Middle East Eye that US negotiators have shown receptiveness to Lebanon’s core demand: that visible, concrete steps from Israel are required to frame the framework as a mutual achievement for Lebanon, rather than a list of one-sided obligations for Beirut. During his meeting with Trump, Aoun is expected to urge the US president to leverage Washington’s extensive diplomatic and military influence over Israel to ensure full, timely implementation of the agreed pilot zone deployment.

Yet Lebanese officials harbor lingering concerns that Israel will seek to slow implementation of the pilot program, adopting a gradual “wait-and-see” approach: it will first withdraw from Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh, assess the Lebanese army’s success in removing Hezbollah infrastructure, and only then decide whether to proceed with redeployment from the remaining two zones. This staggered approach has deepened skepticism in Beirut that Israel intends to use the framework as a path to full withdrawal, or if it will instead leverage the process to test the Lebanese army’s capabilities, increase pressure on Hezbollah, and justify a permanent long-term military presence in what Israeli officials have framed as a necessary border security zone.

The US-brokered framework has already deepened sharp domestic political divides within Lebanon. Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem has openly rejected the agreement, framing it as an unconditional surrender of Lebanese sovereignty and opposing any requirement that ties Israeli withdrawal to Hezbollah’s disarmament. Other cross-party critics have pointed to the absence of the term “withdrawal” in the official agreement text and the lack of binding enforcement mechanisms to guarantee Israel complies with its obligations. Many Lebanese political figures have also criticized the deal for placing enforcement authority almost entirely in the hands of Washington — Israel’s closest and most powerful military and diplomatic ally. Prominent Druze leader Walid Jumblatt has further criticized the framework for failing to explicitly reference the 1949 Armistice Agreement, which Jumblatt argues remains the foundational legal basis for Lebanese-Israeli relations and is enshrined in Lebanon’s constitutional and government policy frameworks.

Supporters of the agreement, however, push back that the framework formalizes Lebanon’s sovereign authority over its entire territory and creates a critical first stepping stone to restoring full state control across the south. Aoun’s domestic political base argues that even with heavy political costs, direct negotiations are the only viable available path to end the conflict and restore state authority to the border region.

Aoun’s opponents, meanwhile, warn that the negotiation process will ultimately force unfavorable Israeli terms on Lebanon, erode the country’s legal and diplomatic bargaining power, and push the Lebanese army into a violent direct confrontation with Hezbollah. One Lebanese source briefed on the closed-door negotiations warned that the core risk of the current framework is that Israel will use any delay, minor friction, or incomplete Lebanese deployment as evidence that Beirut cannot uphold its end of the agreement. That outcome would allow Israel to claim that continued occupation of southern Lebanese territory is justified until the Lebanese state can prove it is capable of exercising full sovereign control and preventing Hezbollah from reestablishing its military presence in the border region.

In short, Aoun’s Washington visit carries stakes that stretch far beyond the symbolic value of a White House photo opportunity. If Trump uses US leverage to press Israel for full, timely implementation of the pilot zones and commits to a clear timeline for full withdrawal, Aoun will return to Beirut with tangible proof that his high-stakes diplomatic bet has paid off. But if the implementation process stalls, or if Israel reframes the pilot zones as an open-ended test of the Lebanese army’s willingness to confront Hezbollah, the visit will only deepen the dangerous domestic political faultlines Aoun is seeking to manage.

For Lebanon, this diplomatic push could mark the first step toward a negotiated end to years of conflict. But it could also set the country on an unavoidable collision course between Israeli security demands, US diplomatic pressure, Hezbollah’s non-negotiable red lines, and the already stretched institutional capacity of Lebanon’s fragile government.

Against the backdrop of a resurgent military conflict between the United States and Iran, a senior far-right Israeli cabinet official has publicly framed the ongoing fighting as an optimal strategic outcome for his country – so long as Israeli forces do not have to join the battle themselves. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, laid out this controversial position in public remarks delivered Tuesday at the annual Katif Conference for National Responsibility, a gathering dedicated to advancing the reestablishment of illegal Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip. The comments were first carried by Israel’s public Kan News outlet.

Smotrich, a longstanding hardliner who has repeatedly called for full Israeli reoccupation of Gaza, the imposition of permanent military rule, the establishment of civilian settlements, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian populations from the enclave, emphasized that Israel has no pressing need to enter the direct fighting. “Israel has no interest in joining the campaign – the current situation is the best for us,” he told attendees. The minister went on to clarify that while Israel prefers to sit out the direct conflict, the ultimate strategic goal for Jerusalem remains the full collapse of the Iranian government – an objective he argued the United States does not necessarily share.

“[We] must remember that the ultimate goal of Israel, and not necessarily the United States, is to undermine and weaken the regime in Iran – to the point of overthrowing it,” Smotrich said. He added that collapsing Iran’s economy is the most efficient path to achieving that end, pointing to crippling domestic economic data as evidence that pressure is already working. “Currently, inflation in Iran is at 85 percent, food inflation of over 134 percent in a total of four months, and the Iranian rial is trading at an exchange rate of 1.9 million to the dollar – and it’s going up,” he noted. Reiterating his core position, Smotrich stressed that Israel should avoid direct entry to the war, saying that “the current situation is good for us, and there’s no point in pushing ourselves inward.”

The current cycle of violence traces back to February 28, when Israel and the U.S. launched coordinated strikes on Iranian targets after Israeli lobbying pushed Washington to agree to open hostilities. Tehran responded with retaliatory attacks on U.S. military installations across the Middle East, and after a brief pause in major fighting, hostilities reignited earlier this month. To date, Israel has not deployed its own military forces in the direct conflict.

In mid-June, Washington and Tehran reached a 14-point memorandum of understanding to end active military operations and launch 60 days of diplomatic negotiations. But Israeli officials immediately came out against the deal, pushing to keep the military campaign alive, and have since sought to derail the agreement by continuing Israeli attacks on Lebanon – a violation of the deal’s very first condition, which required a halt to all cross-border hostilities.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance recently confirmed these covert efforts by Israeli officials to drag Washington away from diplomacy and into deeper conflict with Iran, speaking in an interview on the Joe Rogan podcast. “You have seen this very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign to try to derail the negotiation and try to derail the deal,” Vance said.

While Smotrich and other Israeli officials now frame the renewed fighting as beneficial to Israel, the United States is bearing the full human and financial cost of the conflict. As of the latest updates, 17 U.S. military personnel have been killed in the fighting, at least 420 more have been wounded, and one service member remains missing in action.

Independent cost trackers have already documented staggering financial burdens for American taxpayers and households. The Iran War Cost Tracker estimated that by June 16, the conflict had cost U.S. taxpayers more than $100 billion. Separate data from Brown University’s Iran War Energy Cost Tracker shows that American households have paid an additional $71 billion in inflated fuel costs, equal to roughly $544 per household. With hostilities having resumed since that data was collected, analysts expect these total costs to rise significantly in the coming weeks.

Upon Donald Trump’s return to the White House, a core campaign pledge resonated deeply with a war-weary American electorate: he would end the era of open-ended “forever wars” that had drained the nation’s blood, treasure and political capital after the traumatic decades-long interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. For a fleeting window in mid-June, that promise appeared to be within reach, when Washington and Tehran signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) that appeared to open a path away from the catastrophic military confrontation that had loomed over the Middle East for months. Global markets stabilized, regional tensions cooled, and cautious optimism spread that the two long-time adversaries had stepped back from the brink of full-scale conflict.

That hopeful outlook faded far faster than many observers expected, a collapse that was as predictable as it was swift. US military strikes against Iranian targets have resumed, and Iran has responded in kind against American positions and its regional allies across the Persian Gulf. Most alarmingly, Iran’s Houthi proxy movement in Yemen has publicly threatened to shut down the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, a critical Red Sea chokepoint that has emerged as a key alternative transit route for Gulf oil exports, particularly those originating in Saudi Arabia.

Even as it ramps up military pressure, Washington continues to call for a return to the negotiating table. But this back-and-forth of escalation and diplomacy is not just the failure of a single peace push—it exposes a deeper, more enduring reality: the US-Iran confrontation has evolved into a modern “grey zone conflict”, where diplomacy acts as a tool to manage perpetual low-to-medium intensity war, rather than a mechanism to end it.

When American voters and policymakers discuss forever wars, the large-scale invasions and open-ended occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan immediately come to mind. Those conflicts followed a familiar 20th-century script: full-scale troop deployments, prolonged territorial occupation, and costly attempts at national reconstruction that stretched across decades, leaving hundreds of thousands dead and trillions of dollars wasted. The staggering human, economic and political costs of those campaigns eventually made them unsustainable, fueling the widespread public demand for an end to forever wars that helped bring Trump back to office.

The current confrontation with Iran follows a fundamentally different playbook. There is no serious discussion of a full-scale ground invasion or long-term territorial occupation, and no mainstream US policymaker is pushing for direct regime change in Tehran. Instead, this new form of conflict is fought through a persistent cycle of alternating low-intensity attacks and diplomatic outreach: air strikes on key targets, covert cyber operations, sweeping economic sanctions, maritime standoffs, intelligence gathering, and proxy warfare waged through allied armed groups across the region. Each round of military escalation is followed by calls for diplomacy, which then collapses into renewed confrontation, with every episode framed as an isolated crisis rather than a chapter in a far longer strategic standoff.

Viewed as a sequence of disconnected events, these back-and-forths can seem chaotic. But when examined collectively, they represent just the latest phase of a strategic rivalry that dates back to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a conflict that has gradually evolved over four and a half decades from sanctions and covert proxy activity to increasingly direct military confrontation. The rapid unraveling of the June MoU is often blamed on simple diplomatic missteps or deep-rooted mutual mistrust, but those factors do not fully explain how quickly the agreement collapsed.

In reality, the core provisions of the MoU themselves became flashpoints for new dispute almost immediately after it was signed. The original agreement rested on unmet expectations that regional hostilities would subside, but Israel has continued its large-scale military operations in Lebanon, creating new tensions. Washington initially signaled it would ease economic pressure on Tehran, including relaxing restrictions on Iranian oil exports and moving to unfreeze billions in frozen Iranian assets held abroad. But instead of rolling back sanctions, the US has since expanded punitive economic measures, a move that Tehran views as a clear breach of both the letter and spirit of the June agreement. From Washington’s perspective, however, the new sanctions are a justified response to what it labels continued destabilizing Iranian activity across the region.

The dispute over maritime security in the Strait of Hormuz illustrates how even carefully negotiated agreement terms can quickly devolve into renewed confrontation. Article 5 of the MoU committed Iran to guarantee safe passage for commercial shipping through the strategic waterway, and commercial traffic did initially increase in the weeks after the deal was signed. But tensions flared when Oman, working in coordination with the International Maritime Organization and backed by US logistical and political support, established a temporary alternative shipping corridor closer to the Omani coast.

Tehran immediately condemned the new corridor as a violation of the agreed framework, arguing it undermined Iran’s recognized authority to manage safe passage through the strait. Washington rejected this criticism, maintaining that additional security measures were necessary to protect international commercial shipping from attack. Competing interpretations of the agreement quickly turned into another flashpoint for escalation, eroding what little trust the MoU had built.

Beyond diplomatic disagreements, the character of the conflict itself is shifting in dangerous new directions. What began as limited strikes against exclusively military infrastructure has increasingly expanded to target civilian-critical facilities, including key energy infrastructure and desalination plants that supply fresh water to millions of people across the Gulf. Critical transport infrastructure, including major bridges, has also been struck. This shift has sparked fierce debate among military analysts, who question whether operational objectives are expanding beyond limited coercive signaling—using small-scale military force to pressure Iran into policy changes—to broader, more ambitious military aims. It has also raised serious legal questions about whether some attacks violate international humanitarian law, and could even be classified as war crimes in certain circumstances.

While this expansion of US air strikes does not mean an imminent full-scale ground invasion of Iran is on the horizon, it does reflect a steadily widening conflict whose humanitarian and economic costs increasingly fall on civilian populations on both sides of the Gulf.

The root of the perpetual standoff lies in a simple, unresolvable incompatibility of core strategic goals between the main parties to the conflict. The US remains committed to constraining Iran’s nuclear program and its expanding regional military and political influence, while Tehran views those exact same capabilities as non-negotiable pillars of its national security and deterrence posture. For its part, Israel views any strengthening of Iran’s strategic position as an existential security threat that it cannot accept. These competing goals cannot be reconciled, no matter how skilled the negotiating parties are. The June MoU succeeded in temporarily reducing tensions, but it did nothing to address the fundamental structural divides that drive the decades-long conflict.

This reality reshapes how we should understand the current crisis. Most public debate centers on whether the latest escalation will spiral into a full-scale regional war, a risk that cannot be entirely ruled out. But a far more likely, and far less discussed, scenario is already unfolding: the US and Iran are settling into a prolonged cycle of calibrated, low-intensity confrontation that will persist for far longer than most current forecasts anticipate.

Ironically, the president who ran on a pledge to end America’s forever wars may now go down in history as the leader who oversaw the emergence of a new, more insidious form of forever war. This new type of conflict has no clear formal declaration, no definitive end point, and alternates between quiet lulls that remove it from global headlines and sudden bursts of violence that reignite fears of full-scale war. The greatest long-term danger is not a repeat of the Iraq or Afghanistan invasions; it is the gradual normalization of an enduring conflict that reemerges again and again in new forms, because the fundamental political conditions required for a lasting peace have never been addressed.

This new permanent standoff represents a new normal for a US foreign policy establishment that still retains deep-seated militarist instincts, maintains a massive global military infrastructure and footprint, and prioritizes maintaining US global primacy at a time when global power is shifting toward a more multipolar international order.

As Iran’s parliament speaker and lead negotiator in ongoing diplomatic talks with the United States, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf stands at the most critical political crossroads of his decades-long career in military and public service. A lifelong conservative and former senior commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Ghalibaf is currently navigating a high-stakes balancing act: pushing to pull the Islamic Republic out of its deep confrontation with Washington through diplomatic negotiation, while fending off scathing attacks from hardline factions that accuse him of surrendering Iran’s core strategic leverage.