Australia’s carefully calibrated but confusing diplomacy has struggled to cope with the political and strategic consequences of the US-Israeli war with Iran.

The government’s problems in explaining its commitment to President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s war on Iran derives essentially from confusion about Australian roles and responsibilities in a Trump charged turbulent world.

It suggests the tight scripts and careful semantics employed by the Albanese government, which have successfully stabilised relations with China and allowed Australia to avoid attracting Trump’s ire, have genuine limitations in a crisis of the sort now unfolding in the Middle East.

Because of domestic concerns about how his support for the war in Iran might play out at home, Albanese employs the diplomacy of dipping his toe in the water. He knows he must be in, somehow, but wants to preserve the charade that Australia is not there for the same reasons as the Americans or the Israelis.

The approach however reveals a deeper lack of conviction when it comes to thinking about how to deal with Trump and what comes after.

Instead, it reels off statement after statement from which it is near impossible to discern what the position is. There is breezy talk of ‘collective security’.

But Australia’s foreign policy is beginning to resemble a stagger across a high wire, where the government veers from one side to the other hoping no one will notice.

Over the course of the past few weeks the prime minister and his senior national security ministers, Penny Wong and Richard Marles, have asserted the following positions, often at one and the same time. Namely, that:

• Australia supports the US/Israeli strikes but will not comment on whether they are consistent with international law;
• Australian military personnel, while aboard a US nuclear powered submarine that sank an Iranian warship as it was returning from military exercises with India, were stood down during the offensive operation;
• Australia has now committed limited logistical support and personnel to assist in the defence of the Gulf States, but is nevertheless not a protagonist in the conflict;
• such a request – in shades of how Australia manufactured its entry into the Vietnam war – involved a direct one from the United Arab, Emirates but coincided with a similar request from Washington; and
• the contribution of this military support should not be seen as an escalation in the conflict.

The excruciating contortion in public explanation of the Australian position and commitment suggests an understandable discomfort with the possible unintended consequences that may flow from the war – not just in the strategic coordinates of the Middle East but in the socio-economic crisis that might arise from emptying Australian petrol bowsers.

But they also give rise to new questions, as yet unexplained, as to what, precisely constitute Australian obligations to the Gulf States. Some media analysts refer to these countries as Australia’s ‘allies’, yet there is no military treaty Australia shares with them. The same is true of Israel: it is not, contrary to some breathless commentary, a formal Australian ‘ally’.

And unwittingly the sinking of an Iranian vessel by a US submarine carrying Australian personnel has shown what lies in store should Washington need Australia’s AUKUS submarines for a conflict with China.

Clearly the pull of US alliance maintenance is too strong for Albanese to resist, as it was with AUKUS. Labor’s speed in supporting the war seemed to carry no genuine thought or concern, or none that has been expressed publicly anyway, about the possible dire consequences for a conflict with no discernible end game.

Those consequences include an emboldened Iranian leadership that may tend to be more authoritarian than its predecessor and more determined to revive its badly wounded regional proxies.

What alternative path might the government have taken from the outset?

In legal and moral terms, it could have taken its stand on the UN Charter, and asserted that it would not support a war that did not have the blessing of the United Nations.

This was the position that Labor leader Simon Crean took in arguing against Australia’s commitment to the Iraq war in 2003.

Or, it could have publicly said that Australia is joining its alliance partners in a war it thinks is worth waging to prevent Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon; that on the question of legality it acknowledges that it does not comply with international law but that Australia judges it is still worth doing. It could, too, have made the argument about how the conflict shows the need for submarines to protect our sources of oil from unreasonable and undeclared war in the future.

We are left instead with the impression that for all the talk of focusing Australian strategic priorities on Asia, the reflexive niche deployment to a US-led action in the Middle East proves once more irresistible. ‘Australia will be there’, so the old clarion call goes, only this time the words are dribbled, not declared.

The comparison with the Howard government in 2003 is stark. While the result was disastrous in terms of its creation of ISIS and broader regional instability, not to mention the contribution the US and allied decision made to international anarchy, nevertheless no voter could be in any doubt that Howard believed in what he was doing.

But what, in the end, is this action in Iran saying to China? Not that Xi Jinping needs to be told, but the agenda for his forthcoming summit with Trump will have looming overhead the precedents of US action, twice in Iran and once in Venezuela.

The message? Big powers can do whatever they want.

Republished from AFR 15 March 2026