A veteran British politician who has served as a cabinet minister, spent time in prison for perjury, and subsequently became an ordained priest and prison chaplain brought a distinctive perspective to the Iran campaign debate on Chicago’s Morning Answer, offering a measured assessment that neither dismisses American military accomplishments nor shares the administration’s confidence that a clear and lasting victory is within easy reach.
Jonathan Aitken, author, broadcaster, former Conservative member of Parliament and cabinet minister, and now part-time Church of England prison chaplain, joined Dan Proft to respond to some of the more critical assessments of the campaign circulating in British and American media, including a New Yorker piece by David Remnick calling the conflict a strategic failure and moral calamity, and Aitken’s own Spectator column describing the zigzags of Trump’s strategic pronouncements as making no sense from day to day and characterizing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as having become the comical Ali of the conflict.
Aitken said his background in the Gulf region, spanning decades as a government minister, parliamentarian, and journalist with close knowledge of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, informs a view that the outcome of the conflict remains genuinely uncertain. He said the most honest assessment he can offer is that we simply do not know, and that Trump keeps claiming greater victories than have actually occurred, though he acknowledged that America could still be in a winning position. He drew on his experience as a war correspondent in Vietnam, where American firepower was widely assumed to guarantee victory and the North Vietnamese ultimately prevailed through willpower and the ability to simply survive long enough for American resolve to erode. The danger of a similar dynamic playing out in the Gulf, he said, is real and should not be dismissed, because an adversary wins if it merely survives.
On the blockade announced over the weekend, Aitken said his concern is not American naval capability but the practical decision-making of international shipping companies. As a former defense minister with direct knowledge of the strait’s vulnerability to small mines and fast patrol boats firing anti-ship missiles, he said the relevant question is not whether the American Navy can patrol the waterway but whether ship captains and their insurance underwriters will consider it safe enough to transit. The presence of American destroyers and battleships does not automatically convince a captain carrying a hundred thousand tons of crude oil that the passage is acceptable risk, and until that commercial confidence is restored, the strait will remain functionally closed regardless of what the military situation on the water technically allows.
The nation he identified as the most important and underappreciated variable in resolving the strait question is Oman. He praised Sultan Haitham, the relatively new ruler who came to power in 2020, for maintaining what he called a Swiss-type neutrality that has kept the country credible to both sides while it develops extraordinary strategic infrastructure on its Indian Ocean coastline. Two new major ports, Duqm and Salalah, are being built and linked by rail to oil pipelines from Abu Dhabi and the broader Gulf system, creating an alternative routing for Gulf oil exports that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz entirely. Aitken said his advice to American listeners is to watch Oman closely, because its moderate and wise leadership could prove to be the key to both safe passage of oil out of the Middle East and a broader de-escalation framework that neither pure military pressure nor direct US-Iran diplomacy can achieve alone.
On Britain’s refusal to allow American aircraft to use British bases in the region during the Iran campaign, Aitken was blunt in his criticism of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, calling the posture completely wrong in terms of the history and obligations of the Anglo-American alliance. He said Britain should have been America’s first and most reliable partner in this effort and that Starmer has proved a complete wet fish in providing the kind of backing the relationship demands and the historical partnership has always provided. He said Trump is entirely right to be skeptical and critical of NATO allies who have failed to pull their weight, and that this includes France and others with a long history of unreliability, though he does not believe the current friction represents the end of the alliance, which he expects to be rebuilt and strengthened under future leadership.
Aitken closed by sharing something of his own remarkable life story in response to Proft’s question about his path from cabinet minister to prisoner to priest. He described rising high enough in British politics to be tipped as a future prime minister, then destroying his career through a libel case against a German newspaper in which he lied under oath, was convicted of perjury, and served seven months in prison. After his release he returned to Oxford to study theology for three years, was ordained as a Church of England priest, and has spent the years since working as a prison chaplain, going regularly into British prisons because he found very few clergy willing to do so. Now eighty-three years old, he continues to serve both as a chaplain and as an occasional commentator on public affairs. He said the combination may seem strange but reflects a sincere effort to serve both God and country, and mentioned that his spiritual journey was significantly shaped by his long friendship and collaboration with the late Chuck Colson, the Watergate figure turned evangelical Christian prison minister, with whose international ministry Aitken served on the board of directors for many years.