Not our war, not our problem.

For weeks now, that has been Europe’s increasingly confident position on the conflict in Iran: that it didn’t ask for this ill-judged fight, can hardly be expected to join in when it has no idea what war crimes Donald Trump might be contemplating next, and certainly isn’t obliged to extricate him from his own wilfully deep hole. For Keir Starmer in particular, staying out of the war and letting slip his exasperation has been that rarest of prizes: a chance to do what the Labour party desperately wants to do, but which also happens to be both the right thing and the popular one. However, the trouble with “not our war, not our problem” is that, as of this weekend, only half of it remains true.

It’s still not our war: Downing Street has ruled out sending warships to join Trump’s new naval blockade of Iran, which aims to play the Iranians at their own game by preventing them shipping their own oil out to market unless they also allow free passage through the strait of Hormuz to everyone else. But the president’s decision once again to escalate rather than negotiate when thwarted turns this into everyone’s problem, whether we like it or not.

With oil prices rising and stocks falling as soon as markets reopened after the weekend, Monday’s long-planned IMF meeting in Washington had morphed into a crisis summit before Rachel Reeves even got off the plane. With hopes fading of an early end to this conflict, global growth forecasts are already being gloomily revised down in expectation of a prolonged energy shock, regardless of the possibility of Trump changing his mind at any moment. This downgrade would bring potentially apocalyptic consequences for the poorest countries (where the United Nations warns of “development in reverse”) and the threat of political instability in richer ones. Living standards were supposed to rise this year in Britain, offering........

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