Early Sunday morning, authorities foiled an apparent terror attack on a British airbase hosting American bombers. Investigations into the identity and motives of five men taken into custody are ongoing, but the most likely outcome is some connection to the Iranian regime or some Iran-backed Islamist militia. “Every phone, bank record, and rental receipt will be run through British and American intelligence, and if the trail leads to Tehran, it will be found,” said former Trump White House official Morgan Murphy.

The men were first spotted by a local farmer in the village of Whelford. Driving home from a party at approximately 12:45 a.m. Sunday morning, she was surprised to encounter three white vans blocking her way through the hedgerows on a single-file country lane. The vans appeared to be painted with a fake company’s logo and fake telephone number. As she turned around, she noticed “a group of Middle Eastern-looking young guys running off through the trees,” some of whom wore “masks or balaclavas.”

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, left the scene before calling the police. No one at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) police answered, she told British media, so she called the local police, and Gloucestershire officers arrested the young men within half an hour.

“What the plotters reckoned without,” proposed a British national security advisor-turned media pundit, “is the extremely vigilant and public-spirited nature of the people of this small Gloucestershire village.”

In so many words, this is declaration that one of a nation’s best assets against foreign terrorists is a patriotic citizenry that alerts authorities to threats — an asset currently declining in America and throughout the West.

The woman also warned fellow members of a local WhatsApp group to lock their doors. “I mean, you don’t see masked men running around at half one in the morning in the countryside near a secure air base and not have concerns,” she said.

In other news, there are still idyllic corners of the world where villagers do not usually lock their doors at night. Sadly, Sunday’s events may remove the village of Whelford from that list.

British media reports that authorities approached the vans with a remote-controlled robot, a move suggesting they feared the presence of explosives, although authorities did not confirm the use of such a robot. Authorities also evacuated the entire village of Whelford, population 85, at 7 a.m., to establish a 400-meter perimeter around the site — yet another move suggesting the presence of explosives.

Authorities arrested five men in all, all between the ages of 23 to 25, all citizens of the U.K., and all with home addresses far to the east in London. Sure enough, the men were first charged with explosive-related offenses and later with attempted terrorism.

Former U.S. terrorism official Andrew Badger called the threat “significant and noted that the presence of so many people and vehicles suggested “a very complex, highly orchestrated operation.”

“This isn’t just some type of amateur ‘lone-wolf’ operation,” he explained. “Fairford is also where the U.S. houses its strategic bombers for Europe as well as the rest of the world.” Currently, at least a dozen American B-1 bombers are stationed at Fairford Airbase, which is one of the few European military bases with a runway long enough for heavy bombers.

As just one possible plan of attack, Badger suggested the terrorists could have detonated one van filled with explosives at the front gate, clearing the way for the other two vans to drive through the wreckage and wreak havoc deeper in the airbase, potentially targeting the costly American aircraft.

Although a local first noticed the terrorists, it seems that intelligence gathering did lead authorities to expect them. “We had them under view for a long time,” President Trump answered reporters’ questions about the incident, “and we got them.”

In the days before the incident, locals noticed heavy equipment parked in front of entrances to the airbase and extra roadblocks manned by American soldiers. “By Friday, they had sent all their civilian staff home, and then because this is a small village, we started noticing people who weren’t local and the suspicion was they were plain clothes police of some kind,” one local said. “We all knew something unusual was going on.”

“There are reports that RAF [Royal Air Force base] Fairford was put onto what’s called the Delta alert, which is the highest state of security alert within the military base system,” Badger explained, “basically that ‘an imminent terrorist attack is inbound.’”

Longstanding American use of RAF Fairford for basing heavy bombers became controversial this year when the U.K. government briefly refused to allow the U.S. to launch bombing missions against Iran from its territory; it later revised this to allow the U.S. to run “defensive” missions.

However, the Iranian regime leapt at this craven display of British spinelessness and warned the U.K. this summer that allowing the missions made them an Iranian target. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warned, “Any base used to launch attacks on Iranian territory is a legitimate target for our forces.” The U.K. identified a series of small-scale anti-Semitic attacks it traced back to the IRGC, but the targeting of a military base shows significant escalation.

At this point (less than 48 hours since the arrests), the Iranian connection is not certain, at least not from the lack of publicly available information about the attackers. For its part, the Iranian Embassy in London issued a denial that “categorically rejects and strongly condemns the recent unfounded and malicious speculations published by some British individuals and media outlets attempting to link Iran to arrest of five suspects in the vicinity of RAF Fairford base.”

“If conclusive evidence proves Iran is behind an attempted attack on U.S. forces,” said Murphy, “the American president will ultimately decide how Tehran pays.”

The timing of the attacks is coincidental. It comes as the Iranian regime refused yet another peace proposal that would require it to surrender its nuclear weapons program. “We are fully prepared for the war to resume,” boasted Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. “We stand firm in the face of any new aggression, even if it comes to a doomsday war. But at the same time we stand ready for diplomacy. It is up to President Trump to choose.”

For now, President Trump is satisfied to continue his policy of economic strangulation. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent estimated that Iran can sell about 15 million barrels of oil, which it shipped out before America imposed its naval blockade. After that, “They will have nothing to trade for anything, probably within the next two weeks. They are going to make their final deliveries of oil to China, and then they will have nothing,” he said.

However, the hardline IRGC still controls the nation with a grip that can insulate it somewhat from the widespread economic devastation. “Persian Iran is under the control of Sunni Arabs right now with the [Islamic] Revolutionary Guard Corps,” former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann said at the “Pray Vote Stand Summit. “So, you have basically 90 million people in Iran, and they’re kind of captives in an open air prison. … The [Islamic] Revolutionary Guard Corps could care less about them.”

The IRGC is banking on its own oil-constriction strategy to inflict a political price on President Trump in the November midterms. “Iran, as we all know, has impacted the Strait of Hormuz, which a very large percentage of global oil supplies transit,” Bachmann added. “At the same time … Saudi Arabia built a secondary option for distribution of global oil. That was the East-West Pipeline. That was bombed recently by Iraqi militia, again under Iran’s thumb.” Then, “last weekend, the Houthis … they took over an island, Perim Island, that’s in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. And so, that’s the oil that transits up through the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal.”

Thus, both the U.S. and the IRGC are trying desperately to “run out the clock” on the other’s supply of oil. For President Trump, the stakes include U.S. gas prices and his own political fortunes. For the IRGC, the stakes are the very funds to keep their repressive machine in business.

Other nations are less interested in the high stakes of the conflict. On Monday, British police released the five men arrested for terrorism and explosives charges on bail.

Vicki Evans, a spokeswoman for the U.K.’s Counter Terrorism Police (CTP) hastened to counsel the public against “speculation” about the men and their motives. “I am very aware of the levels of speculation about the motivation behind this incident, and the geopolitical questions that are being raised,” she said. “However, I ask that, at this time, Counter Terrorism Policing are given the space to work carefully and clearly.”

At the risk of sounding facetious, it’s good to see British authorities are concentrating on the real threat: it would never do for an actual instance of Islamist terrorism to inspire possible thoughts of racial prejudice.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military is taking the heightened threat seriously, raising the threat level at other air bases in the U.K., such as RAF Lakenheath. “We are going to see elevated security protocols across Europe, across the U.K., and across the entire world,” Badger said, “for any U.S. installation.” Great Britain may let suspected terrorists walk free, but the U.S. still recognizes that, alongside Israel, it is the foremost target of Islamist extremists’ global war against the West.