On 3 April, Benjamin Netanyahu stood before the cameras and made a claim that would have bewildered most industrial analysts a generation ago. Israeli airstrikes, he said, had destroyed seventy per cent of Iran’s steel production capacity. Not its centrifuges. Not its missile silos. Its steel plants. The Mobarakeh complex outside Isfahan and the Khuzestan facility near Ahvaz, two of Iran’s largest industrial sites, had been pounded into silence. The flare stacks went dark. The blast furnaces cooled. And Netanyahu was explicit about why: steel, he said, is the raw material for the weapons used against us. Missiles, drones, ships. The money machine that funds the Revolutionary Guards’ war of terror.

It was a remarkable moment. A prime minister framing steelmaking not as an economic indicator but as a military target. Not as tonnes per annum but as warheads per quarter.

Barely four months later, on the other side of the world, the Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Act received Royal Assent and Keir Starmer’s government took British Steel into public ownership. The Scunthorpe works, the United Kingdom’s last remaining primary steelmaking site, was wrested from its Chinese owner Jingye Group on national security grounds. Two thousand seven hundred jobs were saved. A sovereign industrial capability was rescued from extinction.

The two events, separated by geography and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)