Tony Blair: US Should Make Sure Iran Never Gets Nuclear Weapons

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Former U.K. Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair described Iran as the “origin of the instability in the Middle East” in a wide-ranging interview with Newsweek.

Blair, whose decision to use British armed forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq—as well as his perceived closeness to President George W. Bush— attracted criticism at home and abroad, said that the key to stability in the region was to ensure religious tolerance prevailed over Islamism. He said part of this was ensuring Iran is never allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.

He blamed Iran for attempting to export its revolution through proxies such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of which have been heavily targeted by Israel since the attacks of October 7, 2023, the bloodiest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust.

Blair, who is now Roman Catholic, became leader of the British Labour Party in 1994 and was prime minister from 1997 to 2007. After the Iraq War he was accused by critics of misleading the U.K. Parliament when no weapons of mass destruction were found. However, Sir John Chilcot, who led a public inquiry into the government’s handling of the war, later told a parliamentary committee: “I absolve him [Blair] from a personal and demonstrable decision to deceive parliament or the public—to state falsehoods, knowing them to be false.”

Blair’s time in office also included passing the Good Friday Agreement, a landmark in the Northern Ireland peace process, and humanitarian interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo.

After leaving office, he was special envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East—an organization to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process comprising the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia—until 2015. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bush in 2009.

In 2016, he founded the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, a nonprofit organization to fight what he described as the growth of authoritarian populism across the world. His latest book, On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century, is a manual for today’s leaders based on his experiences in politics.

Newsweek Global Editor in Chief Nancy Cooper, VP, Digital Publishing Christopher Roberts and Content Director Barney Henderson spoke with him in London. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

Your book is in a very unusual format. One reviewer described it as like The Prince, but without the malice. Why did you decide to write it?

Because the thing about being a political leader is that everyone thinks it’s just about politics, but actually, when you get into government, you realize, you know, maybe winning government was about being the great communicator, but being in government you’ve got to be a great chief executive. And there’s a whole skillset that is attributable to the profession in the same way that you would have a skillset attributable to any profession. But we don’t look at politics like that. And so, you know, I learned lessons from governing on the job, as it were, and afterwards in the work we now do in roughly over 40 countries, worldwide, and I thought ‘it’s absurd’. There’s no guide for leaders when these are the things that I know that they will want to have answers to and the things that will be troubling them when they reach this position of extraordinary power. Because where else in life would you put someone in a job of enormous importance with actually zero qualifications. We would never do that in your job or running a company, or, you know, you wouldn’t if Manchester United decided to change their coach, you wouldn’t just go into the stands and say, give me the most enthusiastic fan to put in charge.

You’ve said that you would have stayed in power if you could have done, but also that you didn’t enjoy a lot of your time in power, and only sort of, perhaps, two or three moments really stand out. Don’t you prefer your life now?

I prefer my life now in the sense that it’s much less stressful, and recently, as the institute’s grown, yeah, I think I feel much more professionally fulfilled, and I think we can build this into a really, really big organization which will last. So I think now I’m in the right place, but it’s, you know, you’ve got to be honest with yourself, you don’t have the same power that you have when you’re actually in power. So yeah..

Would you go back if you could?

I never waste time thinking about that, because I don’t think it’s ever possible…. [I] really haven’t thought about it enough as an actual thing, because it’s not an actual thing. And my wife always says to me, ‘you might think of going back until you remember what it was actually like’.

You’ve recently said that peace in the Middle East is possible. Do you still believe that?

Yes… When I went back to Israel a couple of weeks ago, it was my 271st visit, I think we worked out, since leaving office to Israel. We have an office in Israel. We have offices in the Middle East. I go there very, very often. I’ve been in this thing for 25 years or more. I think you’ve got to look at it in two different ways: the immediate crises, Gaza, Lebanon, so on, Iran; and then you’ve got to look at it to take a step back and ask, “What’s the big picture in the Middle East?” Because what that big, big picture represents is the answer to the question of whether there’s hope in the Middle East or not.

And the big picture, in my view, is all to do with whether the countries in the Middle East can evolve their societies towards societies of religious tolerance, where belief in God is between you and God, and you don’t turn politics into a religion into a political ideology. And secondly, whether you have modern, connected economies in which your young people believe they’re part of the modern world economically, and those that require rule-based economies that are vibrant and where people of enterprise can form enterprises and do well and, you know, all over the Middle East that battle is going on. It’s a battle between… I always say to people; we’ve got to distinguish between Islam and Islamism. You know, Islam is the religion. Islamism is the turning of the religion into a political ideology which will necessarily be totalitarian, exclusivist and basically economically backward. So that’s the choice of the Middle East, and you can see these competing visions going on all the time.

Now, I personally believe that the human spirit will ultimately propel the Middle East towards modernization, but that’s the question, and is there anything the West can do to push that in the direction? You support the modernizers. That’s what we should be doing. And be very clear that about the influence of Iran, which is the representation of one part of that…. People think that because Iran is the Islamic Republic of Iran, but it’s here, and the Muslim Brotherhood is Sunni…. They’re never going to work together, but they will work together against the West.

You write in your book about the paralysis of the United Nations as a result of the growing alliance between China and Russia. What’s the future of the U.N. and how can it become influential again?

That’s a really good question. I mean, I opposed trying to isolate China or disengage from China because I think China’s got every right to be a big global power and to exercise influence economically and politically on the world stage. The problem is it has—I don’t quite understand why—decided to be in this alliance with Russia, with Iran, North Korea. It’s a club that shouldn’t have a long waiting list. But you’ve got to say it, it is a thing today. And what that means is that United Nations… you’ve got two permanent members that are going to be pretty much in opposition to the other three.

Now, I think in the end, the reason why you can’t and shouldn’t isolate China is because they have the right to exercise influence, and because there are issues—climate change, global health stability, the economy, actually controlling some of the behavior of the other members of the club—in which we need China. But it’s hard to see how the United Nations functions in that with that political confrontation. You’ve also got to keep an open mind about China, because China, since the People’s Republic of China was created, they’ve gone through many iterations. It’s not been one straight line from 1949 to today. On the contrary,they’ve gone through periods of, you know, where the Communist party wanted to control everything. You went through the Cultural Revolution. They went through opening up.

They’re now in a situation where I, if I was a Chinese leader, I’d still find it a little uncertain what our strategy was for the future, because, in the end, China’s a strong civilization; very, very talented people. Does it really profit them to be, you know, isolated from the West? I can’t see it myself. And therefore, I think what’s important from the western perspective is to keep lines of communication open and also to try and see the world through Chinese eyes. Because I think there’s always a risk with the West that we see everything through Western eyes.

You just mentioned Russia. I’m curious to know how you found dealing with Vladimir Putin personally. How should the West approach that issue now?

Well, with Putin, I would say…I don’t know whether he was always like he is now—and we didn’t spot it—or he changed. I mean, I tend to think that he changed. The Putin that I first met was very open, very much wanting to create ties with the West. We used to meet in St. Petersburg, which is the Western-facing part of Russia. And you know, the conversation then was all about Russia’s place in the world as a modernizing force. And…people even used to talk at one point about, is it possible for Russia to join the European Union?

We used to invite Russia to NATO meetings. The G7 was the G8. It was still the G8 by the time I left office, by the way. So the idea that the West kind of…pushed Russia away or tried to isolate them, it’s just not true. On the contrary, we were always thinking of ways that we could bind Russia to us—but in the end, he opted against the modernization of his economy and in favor of nationalism, which is what people default to when they find economic change too hard. And, you know, the recreation of the Russian Empire, which is not, it’s not possible to do. And you know, I will say to people here, Ukraine could have decided to go with Russia. So if I was Putin, I’d be asking why did they decide not to.

And that’s economic, in your view?

And political. Why do they want to be part of Europe? Because people want to be part of that prosperity in Europe, despite all the problems. We look at Poland today, but look at Poland and Ukraine at the end of the Cold War, 1992 I think at that time, they would have been roughly equal, and GDP, they had roughly when you look at it today, but it’s now a successful modern country, right? Because they’re part of the European Union. And okay, the politics may be difficult, and they have all sorts of political crises from time to time. But, you know, the people are free… You’ve got a whole new young generation in Ukraine that are, you know, they want to be connected to the world, and therefore, yes, it’s economic, but it’s also political, and that’s why the idea that you could ever stop them doing that by force and remove a democratically elected president… And you know, the people would then say, ‘Okay, well, we’re happy to be back in the Russian Empire under the Putin system of government’. I mean, I don’t know how anyone could ever have thought that they would accept that.

Can Ukraine win?

Well, it depends on what winning means. The most important thing is that the conflict ends in a way that doesn’t reward Russian aggression. The important thing is for the West to give Ukraine every support in order to bring about an agreement. I mean, it won’t end like the First World War or the Second World War, right? And once you understand that, there’s going to be some form of agreement, but it’s important Ukraine’s in a strong negotiating position and that’s why we have to support them.

In the presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris said the U.S. wants Ukraine to win. And former President Trump did not say that. Is he wrong?

I think it depends what happens…. I can’t believe that any American president would want Russia to come out of this feeling it had gained a victory. Because, by the way, that would have big implications for how China feels about American power. So, let’s see. I mean, I don’t know. And if you’re about to ask me a slew of questions about who I want to win, and what I think about the American election, save the trouble because I really don’t want to get into it. Who knows?

And it’s the job of the British prime minister, even a former British prime minister, to work with whoever comes out on top in the election…. What I’ve learned over time with American presidents is to judge them about what they do, not by their election campaign.

In your book, you talk about the failure of centrist politics to take strong positions on immigration and some culture war issues, and that contributed to the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency. Do you think, therefore, that the Obama administration could have been stronger on immigration, and are we witnessing the same thing this time around with the Biden and Harris administration?

I mean, I don’t know enough about the details of the policy in the US, but in general terms, I think there are two issues that centrist politicians need to deal with. One is because centrism should never be the splitting of the difference between left and right. It’s not, it’s not what it’s about. And actually, centrism, I don’t like the term, but I can’t think of an easier shorthand. It’s really… a sort of post ideological in the sense of post left and right. I think left right means a lot more to party activists than it really does to the public anymore, because I think most people want solutions to problems and don’t really believe that that arises from a sort of leftist ideology around the state or a rightist ideology around the market. So you’ve got to deal with immigration, because it’s a big problem for people. So any politician running for office in the West has got to have a strong policy on immigration. What does strong mean? It means that you have in place a system of controlling immigration. The majority of people will support immigration with controls. What they won’t support is an uncontrolled system. That means that whether people get into your country and stay there or not is an accident of their own determination to come in, rather than a deliberate policy of government that you should be here. And I think you know, okay, some people are anti immigrant, some people are racist, but I don’t think they’re a majority in any Western country, and I think it’s a big mistake for people on the progressive or liberal side of politics to kind of conflate anxiety about a lack of control with racism, because the two things are different, completely different. One is a perfectly understandable anxiety about uncontrolled entry into your country. The other is obviously, you know, wrong, but if you don’t have rules, you get prejudices. That’s what I always say to people, that’s why you’ve got to have strong positions on it.

And does that mean moving further to the right on immigration?

Well, I don’t regard it as moving further to the rights like. When I was always campaigning for Labour to be the party of law and order, I said, ‘What’s right wing about saying that poor communities that suffer most from drug dealers and crime gangs, that they should be protected against it?’ I don’t think it’s a right wing move. I think it’s just a sensible thing. I mean, you need to have control in immigration otherwise, by the way, it’s not fair on the people who want to migrate lawfully. If the system’s so porous, you can migrate unlawfully, it’s got a whole set of consequences that are bad, including fueling anti immigrant sentiment when really it should be fueling anti chaos sentiment.

Can I ask, have you met Donald Trump? And what’s your take on him?

I worked with the US administration, his administration, on the Abraham Accords, which was a huge thing and really important. And, you know, I found it a perfectly good working relationship.

Is there a hope still for a two-state solution, and is that the right goal?

I think it is the right goal, but you’ve got to be realistic about why it hasn’t happened. I mean, it won’t happen unless the politics of both sides are in a position which is conducive to it.

So if they’re living side by side and they’re in conflict with each other, then there are only two solutions. One is that they make peace, which is what we managed to bring about in Northern Ireland. Or the second is that the stronger one will police the weaker one; they’ll sit on the weaker one. Until what? Forever? Well, that’s the point. It doesn’t work forever, and that’s why I was one of the very few people going around the Middle East in these last years before October 7, saying, “I promise you, we’re not going to better manage this situation. We’ve got to solve it.”

And people would say to me, I mean, I had this conversation with many of the leaders in the region, they’d say to me, “Look, don’t talk to us about this Palestinian issue anymore. It’s too difficult, and we’ve got other things to do.” And I would say, “No, it’s really important, because ultimately it’s not the cause of the problems in the region. This is a mistake, but it is used by people who want to cause problems in the region to cause even more problems.”

And it will only be resolved if the Israelis feel that the people living side by side with them culturally accept them, and do they at the moment? No, there’s a huge breach between the two. The Israelis don’t trust the Palestinians. The Palestinians don’t trust the Israelis. So you’ve got a situation where the Palestinians feel deprived and humiliated and angry, and the Israelis feel these people want to destroy us, right?

So…we’d have these endless negotiations that would be about the precise running of the boundary…. All of these things [would] become easier to resolve if you created an environment in which people feel there’s actual acceptance of the other, but if you don’t have that environment then you’re never going to make these agreements stick.

With Northern Ireland, what happened was we got the unionist to accept, ultimately, that the price of the union was to treat people fairly, right?… So that was a big concession from unionism, [and] a big concession from Republicans and nationalists was that Northern Ireland should remain part of the U.K. unless a majority of people in Northern Ireland decided they wanted to shift, right? So these two things and then the absence of violence, because we agreed…we were going to negotiate around this with…a permanent ceasefire. Then, of course, the atmosphere became much better…. I say to people, it’s not impossible to have an agreement.

Actually, most people in the international community at least think the two-state solution is the right one. So there’s an agreed goal. So the question is, how do you produce the environment in which both sides think it’s possible, and for the Middle East? What is the answer, if any, [is] we’re just going to have to start with Gaza, because you need to stop the war in Gaza and the only way of stopping it is to agree that the Israelis shouldn’t run Gaza and Hamas shouldn’t run Gaza.

The United States certainly agrees. But I don’t see the parties involved agreeing. Well, the parties involved there, I think, would agree it actually, but you have to then say, what’s the next step?

But one next step you would like to see the West take, or the parties involved take, [is to] get a plan for the day after in Gaza of who would run it, and, yeah, get the hostages released. And…get back to a situation where, I mean, I’m a strong supporter of Israel, but it doesn’t mean to say I don’t, can’t see that the situation for people in Gaza is desperate and unlawful. So you’ve got to bring it to an end.

Do you think the U.S. has to throw their weight around to push Israel?

Yeah, it’s not just a question of pushing Israel, though. You’ve got to have a plan that both sides think is fair…. After that, you can start to think how you construct the right formula for it.

But…America’s always got the weight to do these things if it wants to…. What’s strange to me is that America has this curious, sort of, lack of confidence in itself…. I think America has reemerged in the past few years, is easily the strongest country in the world, [it’s] just the question of how it uses that strength. It’s got the biggest military by far, and best, it’s got the most resilient economy. It’s the world’s largest oil producer, the world’s largest gas producer and it’s got all of the major technology companies.

It’s a really strong country. Nobody comes near it.

I am sure there is a way through. There’s got to be a way through, because otherwise you’ll just leave Gaza as in a state of: if you don’t have an alternative plan—and it’s not the Israelis, it’s not Hamas—it is going to be complete anarchy and that will be a very bad thing.

Do you think Israel’s degrading of Iranian proxies is going to take us closer to that goal?

Well, the origin of the instability in the Middle East is in the activity of Iran. There’s no doubt in my mind about that at all. And the Iranian people are not our problem. Again, Iran is a huge civilization and it’s got some wonderfully talented people. A lot of them have found their way to America and here [in the U.K.] and are doing great things…. But, you know, they believe in exporting this revolution, and they use these proxies to do it…. Lebanon needs to be liberated from Hezbollah.

I mean, you know, we need a way through, and that’s why it’s really important, if we can, to revive the Saudi-Israel-American deal, because that would give people confidence that Iranian powers can be pushed back against hard, which is what you need to do. Because in the end, what are they trying to do? You want to destroy Israel. Well, that’s never going to happen. So you’re going to create a situation where you’re in constant conflict over that.

I mean, this is what alarms me when I see bits of the progressive left in the West allying themselves with people who claim to be pro-Palestinian but are actually heavily influenced by Islamist ideology when…there’s nothing progressive about that ideology at all. It’s completely backward. Yeah, suppresses women…[and says that] you should have legal systems governed by religious law. I mean, it’s…who wants to live like that?

How dangerous do you think it is for Iran to get nuclear weapons?

It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t. And what should the U.S. or Israel do? Well, without going into the details, which are pretty obvious, it should make sure that doesn’t happen. If you end up with an Iran with a nuclear weapon, it’ll be a very, very dangerous situation for the world and you’ll spark a nuclear arms race right across the region. That’s for sure.

Do you think the Royal family, should apologize for slavery, not just say it was a terrible thing? Do you think that King Charles will?

I think with all of these arguments, you can go back over history, and you end up in a completely absurd position. I mean, I’ve no idea what Winston Churchill’s views are on transgender, right? I don’t suppose he was ever asked, and he probably never thought about it, but who knows. But supposing it was found that he had, let’s say, not entirely modern views on this, which is quite possible. Does that mean he’s he was a bad guy? If the Commonwealth countries, many of them want the British to apologize, of course slavery was a horrible thing. It should never have happened. Of course, we were wrong. But should the king say that? Well, it’s up to him… What are people trying to prove here? I mean, of course he thinks it’s wrong.

And of course, when you look back in history, you say, well, those things were terrible. And you know, to be fair, though, people at the time said it was terrible, and in the end, the activities of Wilberforce and others managed to bring about change. But what does it really profit anyone to go back over these things? I mean, I think… the most important thing we can do for countries that have been marked by colonialism is to help them now, which we do and we should do more of and my institute works in a lot of these countries, and the single most important thing is not to go back over, you know, what happened in the 19th century, but to help them reap the benefits of particularly the technology revolution of the 21st century.

We noticed in your book, you don’t mention George W Bush, which seems odd?

I mentioned him a lot in my autobiography, and, you know, I had a very strong relationship with him – both the friendship and respect for him. I just haven’t mentioned him because he’s not particularly relevant to the subjects I was talking about, which are about, you know, government and often government in the developing world.

Are you still in touch with him?

Yeah, no, sure, of course, absolutely. And I had strong relationship with President Clinton and with him, and then I worked with President Obama, as I say, I worked a bit with President Trump.

What does the media get wrong about you, and has that changed over the years?

How long have you got?

I’ve been through various incarnations. I was Bambi at one stage, and Stalin at another, I believe.

And a poodle? We know what the media said, but we don’t know what we got wrong.

I mean, I think the thing that they usually get wrong about most politicians is that, despite appearances, you know, you do actually come in to try and make the world better, most politicians do. But it’s a hard job. And one of the things that I think is really important for people to understand, because there’s much less deference towards politicians today. You know, in the old days when, when my dad was active in the Conservative Party, back in the 50s and 60s, you know, people treated politicians with a certain respect, and okay, things were still difficult, but today, that doesn’t happen. And I think what it means is that people forget how hard it is to govern. You know, it’s a very difficult job. I often say this to business people who say to me, well, government should do this and that, I say, well, you should go and try. You’d find it a lot harder than you think. And so I just think it’s important that there isn’t created around politics, a sense that it’s all just about personal advantage. Because most people, if they rise to the very top in politics, most people could have done something else, and probably be near the top of that too. So they’ve chosen politics, and usually they choose it because they believe in it, not always, but in my experience.

Young people are very disaffected, we find, and despairing, not just of politics and war, but climate and other things. Do you have anything to say to them about being hopeful about the future. Are they right to be as depressed and scared as they are?

Yeah, two things to say. First of all, you know, a lot of the pessimism in the West is because we’re in the West which has got challenges we have got to overcome. But in the work my institute does, many countries in the world which are many, many times poorer than our country, people are quite optimistic. And if you take a step back, over the last 30 years, the world’s lifted more people out of poverty than ever before. Life expectancy in Africa is going up, not down. Deaths from killer diseases are down. If you go to talk to the new middle class in China or India, well, they think life’s going quite well. So the first thing I say to young people is, don’t look at all this through Western eyes. But secondly, if you don’t like something, get involved. But it’s like on climate change, the decisions are difficult, you know, and that’s why one of the problems in modern politics is that a lot of debates refracted through these NGOs and campaign groups is always to tell you, it’s a simple solution. It’s like, just stop oil or something. We’re all just going to stop it. I mean, if you want solutions, get involved and get into the detail. And you know you’ll you’ll find it both much more exciting and more rewarding, but also more challenging.

Newsweek Reader Questions

The first question from Sigrid Klaus: do you think Ukraine can win this war, or can there be a peace deal?

The truth is, they can win in the sense that Russian aggression is not rewarded. And yes, I think there can be a peace deal that’s got to be won in the end.

Goodness Nwokolo has asked a related question, which, again, we’ve touched on briefly, but would like to know, what should the US, UK, EU, NATO and other multilateral organizations, including the UN be doing in the long run to tame Russia?

I think to make it clear that it can’t succeed, that you’ve got to create a situation in which neither this Russian president nor any successor Russian president thinks he’s going to gain anything by the type of aggression that President Putin has taken against Ukraine. So that’s the most important thing, and that’s why you need a strong alliance. It’s why today, the transatlantic alliance between America and Europe remains extremely important and should be powerful.

I’ve got a question from Ava Etemadzadeh, who is an Iranian British woman, and she says she’s very concerned about the current situation in the Middle East, particularly the escalation over the past year. In your opinion, what does the international community need to do to ensure that this escalation and tensions are addressed?

Well, I think, as I say, to solve the immediate problems, particularly in respect of Gaza, but then to again, make Iran understand that its attempt to exercise power, either on its own or with proxies against the countries in the region will be pushed back against hard.

Andrew Fullbrok asks: what’s your biggest regret from your time in office?

I always say, you know, it’s for me to know and others to find out. But I mean, you know, in the book, I’m very open about post 9/11 and you know the belief that I think turned out to be much harder than we ever imagined to put democracy in place, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. And in domestic policy, the reform agenda, I would have probably started earlier and gone further. But, you know, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking and looking back over the past, because you can’t alter it.

And a final question from Ian Bellis, who says that he really enjoyed your book. What piece or two of advice or information on leadership is the most universal, I guess, sort of addressing, you know, your book is a sort of direct manual for leaders, but it’s also can be applied to other walks of life.

Yeah, it can. I mean, I think the most important thing is to have a very clear direction and build a good team. I mean, I think those are the two things that you need. You need to know exactly where you’re trying to get to, where you’re going. And people often come into positions of leadership, and they, they kind of just, they’re managing their lives and the problems, but they don’t have a very clear idea of what they really want to do. So you’ve got to have that clarity. And that’s true whether you’re running a company, a football team, or a community center, frankly, as well as a country and then, you know, building the right team is, I mean, the team of people is always vital. I mean, it’s, as I say in the book, it’s sort of so obvious you barely need to say it, that it’s all about the people, but it is all about the people. And often you forget that.

Update, 10/23/24, 11:45 a.m. ET: This article was updated with additional context, including that Sir John Chilcot absolved Blair of a “personal and demonstrable decision to deceive parliament or the public.”