“No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars.” This, from the United States’ secretary of war, is the conflict to which Australia now finds itself bound.
It is a war rapidly spiralling out of anyone’s control, escalating in scope and geographic spread. It is one Australia – despite government sophistry – has already been dragged into.
This week has shown yet again how deadly it is to be America’s enemy, but also how very hard it is to be America’s friend.
Allies ‘kept in the dark’
“Everyone, among the traditional US allies, is discomforted by what has happened,” Dr Lachlan Strahan, a former Australian high commissioner and author of The Curious Diplomat, tells Guardian Australia as the conflict that started with US and Israeli strikes on Iran last weekend, darkened and spread, to new countries, new regions, new theatres.
“Because it’s very clear that Trump has gone into this without a well-defined strategy about where he’s going to end up.
“It is another unpredictable, egotistical, muscular policy, which he’s kind of dropped on everyone else. And I keep on thinking what Colin Powell used to say: ‘If you break it, you own it.’”
War is chaotic, dynamic, unpredictable. Restraining any conflict is difficult, this one nigh on impossible. Retaliatory strikes have spanned the Middle East. Already, Australia may be part of this war.
The Australian government – after initially refusing to comment – has confirmed three Australian service personnel are serving on board the US nuclear-powered submarine that fired upon, and sank, an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean off Sri Lanka.
There were up to 180 people on board the Iranian frigate Dena when it was struck by an American torpedo: 32 people were pulled alive from the water, 87 bodies have been recovered.
The government insists no Australian citizens have “participated in any offensive action”, but its personnel are part of the crew that sank an Iranian ship and killed Iranian sailors.
And the Australian people did not know, and for two days were not told.
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The war has claimed lives in Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, in other nations and at sea. US soldiers have been killed too.
But the impacts of this war extend far beyond the conflict itself; fuel prices, stock markets and global trade routes are all cataclysmically affected.
Even as the US rammed up the drumbeat of gunboat diplomacy off Iran’s coast, the US’s most steadfast allies – with the notable exception of Israel, which launched the attacks alongside the US – were “kept in the dark” about exactly what was being planned, Strahan says.
“We have, of course, no control over Trump. He doesn’t listen to allies.
“Instead, he starts beating up on some of them in public, as he has done with [the UK’s] Keir Starmer, and with Spain. So what does Australia do? We look at that and say, ‘we don’t like the regime in Iran, it’s clearly brutal and horrible.’ But behind the scenes Australia would also be thinking, ‘this is not the way to deal with it,’ including because of all of these very unpredictable second and third-order consequences.”
Australia has a narrow path to walk, finding a way to indicate opposition to – “or at least discomfort with” – US actions, without provoking Trump, Strahan says.
“Because his ire is notorious. So I’m sure in Canberra they’re asking: ‘how can we still stand up for things that we believe in, take positions which are not Trump’s, without just getting into a brawl with him, which we will lose because he’s so much more powerful.’
“That does mean, at times, punches are pulled. But it’s interesting that with the Middle East now looking messier and messier, more western leaders are beginning to say more clearly, as the Finns, the Swedes and the French have: ‘look, this is not right, legal or sensible.’”
The Aukus deal – under which Australia will buy excess nuclear-powered submarines from the US, beginning next decade – “also backs us into a corner”, Strahan says. The forecast $368bn deal will consume a vast portion of defence budgets for decades, and governments now feel too much time and money has been committed to backtrack or seek an alternative.
‘Sycophants and clowns’ around Trump
Since federation, Australia has looked to a “great and powerful friend” for security and succour, but Trump is a sui generis president, turning a once predictable ally into one that can no longer be relied upon, that no longer takes Australia into its confidence.
Strahan argues that even former presidents with whom Australia disagreed on significant policies “generally appointed competent cabinets with professionals who knew their jobs, who gave good advice”.
“It’s not apparent, really, that Trump listens to anyone, but even then, the people around him are a mixture of sycophants and clowns.”
Acres of newsprint have been dedicated in recent months to the demise of the “international rules-based order”. Always more complex, and more compromised, than a single order, and under which rules were regularly bent or broken by those strong enough to get away with it, the order nevertheless provided so-called middle power countries like Australia and Canada (whose prime minister this week argued in Canberra for cooperation as “strategic cousins”) with a dependable and beneficial international stability.
But the American-Israeli campaign against Iran, waged in the absence of imminent threat or Security Council imprimatur, reveals further a realist, Thucydidean world in which powerful countries act as they wish, the weak suffer as they must.
“What message does his current military campaign against Iran send to Xi and Putin?” Strahan asks.
“To Putin it is ‘keep going in Ukraine’. And Xi, is this saying to him, ‘Taiwan is a doable military operation’?”
Australia enmeshed with US military
Trump came to office the second time promising to be the “President of Peace”. He vowed to end the forever wars and not start new ones.
“I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars,” Trump said on election night.
He possesses a Nobel Peace prize – which he didn’t win, but was given by the actual recipient María Corina Machado – and which he chose to keep.
Trump’s Department of War released its US National Defense Strategy in January, vowing it would not be “distracted by interventionism, endless wars, regime change, and nation building”.
But in just more than 12 months in office, Trump has bombed eight countries.
Annette Brownlie from the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network argues Australia should condemn the “brutal escalation of an already illegal conflict”.
“Attacking Iran is not a path to peace or stability, but a recipe for wider regional conflict.
“The legality of military action is not determined by one’s approval or disapproval of another nation’s government. The Iranian people have the right to determine their own future free from foreign interference.”
Australia’s chance, however, to escape being dragged into the spiralling Middle East conflict may have passed. Australian personnel are crew members onboard a submarine that sank an Iranian frigate, killing scores. Iran’s foreign minister has vowed vengeance for what he describes as an “atrocity at sea”.
“Mark my words: the US will come to bitterly regret the precedent it has set.”
But the presence of Australian sailors and officers onboard a US nuclear-powered submarine is part of a far-longer integration of Australian defence within the American military machine.
Over years, Australia’s alliance with the US has seen it become increasingly enmeshed within the might of America’s massive military-industrial complex.
The government has committed $1.6bn to upgrade RAAF base Tindal in the Northern Territory to accommodate US nuclear weapons-capable bombers. Pine Gap’s role gathering intelligence continues to expand, and the presence of US troops stationed in Australia grows.
The Aukus submarine binds Australia to the US even further: dependent on the world’s largest navy selling its junior ally its excess nuclear-powered boats.
“Australia’s complicity through the Pine Gap surveillance base, which provides intelligence-gathering and targeting data for United States strikes and missile defence, makes a clear and independent stance from our government even more urgent,” Brownlie says.
She argues Australia has enmeshed itself with the US “structurally, materially and politically”.
“But as a nation, do we value our sovereignty, or do we just succumb to whatever pressure America applies?
“No matter how deep we have got ourselves into this alliance with the United States, I don’t think we should ever get to a point where we cannot say ‘no, this is the line in the sand: we will not facilitate this illegal war any further’.”
