It was a painful wake-up call for Britain. When, last month, the United States and Israel launched an air assault against Iran, it wasn’t long before French President Emmanuel Macron announced he would be sending a powerful armada to the Eastern Mediterranean. The justification for the impressive deployment, which involves about half of France’s entire surface fleet and the country’s sole aircraft carrier, the magnificent Charles de Gaulle, was a series of Iranian drone attacks against EU member state Cyprus. Yet it wasn’t really Cyprus itself that was attacked, but the sovereign British territory of RAF Akrotiri. Nevertheless, even as Paris dispatched a potent naval force, Starmer’s Britain announced only the deployment of HMS Dragon, a Type 45 class destroyer — to add insult to injury, the British vessel malfunctioned en route to Cyprus. What is happening with the once-feared Royal Navy?
