Comment

Paul Bongiorno
The time for peace

Anthony Albanese could not miss the message Donald Trump was sending to allies and foes alike when he lumped together America’s closest Middle Eastern ally, Israel, and Iran for blunt condemnation: cross or embarrass the United States president on the world stage at your peril.

Trump dispensed with diplomatic niceties to lash out at the warring countries for daring to ignore his brokered ceasefire after the US bombed Iranian nuclear enrichment sites at Israel’s beckoning.

In one vulgar outburst, after saying he was not happy with Israel, he undermined the Netanyahu government’s credibility in the way it aggressively defends itself.

“You know what, we basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” he told reporters, adding, “Do you understand that?”

The Australian prime minister certainly understands that. He knows that dealing with this US president requires a deftness neither the opposition nor sections of the Australian media acknowledge, beyond prostrating ourselves at the feet of our powerful strategic ally.

The opposition was quick to accuse Albanese of being “too slow, too silent and too passive” when at the weekend he didn’t unquestioningly support America’s extraordinary stealth-bombing mission against Iran. The sortie was done without United Nations Security Council approval and international law experts such as Donald Rothwell have said it was as illegal as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The running was left to the acting shadow minister for foreign affairs, no less: Andrew Hastie. His criticism sounded somewhat hollow after he went on the ABC’s Insiders to argue that Australia is not a “vassal state” of the US and we need a “mature discussion” about our relationship with the country.

That maturity apparently doesn’t extend to allowing the government time to assess what Trump was up to and what else he may have planned. This is still the approach of the New Zealand government, whose foreign affairs minister, Winston Peters, was midweek still waiting to ascertain all the facts, before endorsing the bombing raids.

In what government insiders admit was a time-buying exercise, Albanese’s press office used its special WhatsApp chat group to issue an anodyne statement in the name of a spokesperson for the Australian government.

The statement noted “Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program has been a threat to international peace and security” and reiterated Trump’s view that “now is the time for peace”.

Albanese explained his early non-appearance over the dramatic developments in terms of acting in “an orderly, coherent way” and pointed to his often-stated view in recent days that “Iran should not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon”.

Perhaps Albanese’s reluctance to immediately respond was coloured by his experience of being an outspoken critic of George W. Bush’s planned invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Labor’s caucus was split on support until the UN Security Council, on the vetoes of France and Russia, refused to sanction the invasion. The Labor leader at the time, Simon Crean, opposed the Howard government’s participation in the “coalition of the willing” with Tony Blair’s Britain and the United States.

There is a big difference in 2025, however: unlike then prime minister John Howard, Albanese has not quietly assembled Australian troops on Iran’s border ready to strike.

“We are not planning to bomb anyone this time,” was the reaction of an Albanese colleague who says it’s not hard to discern the prime minister’s game plan in dealing with Trump. It amounts to trying not to get in the president’s way and avoiding being noticed in any negative sense. It does not involve being an instant cheerleader, as his conservative opponents are urging.

Even in a situation like the current one, Australia’s reservations are not expressed in explicit criticism of the president. Albanese has been assiduous in refusing to comment on every outrage or surprise the mercurial Trump springs on the world since his return to the White House.

By last Sunday night, however, there was a realisation that the media management could have been better handled and someone should have gone out to state the government’s position. On Monday morning Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong blitzed the media.

Wong’s message was twofold: “Yes, we support action” to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and “we continue to call for dialogue and diplomacy”.

At a midmorning news conference with Wong, Albanese repeated five times that the bombing was a “unilateral action taken by the United States”. While claiming his government’s transparency, the prime minister refused to canvass the idea that Pine Gap or any Australian facility played any communications or other role in the American operation.

Both Albanese and Wong refused to answer directly questions on the legality of it all and what the attacks do for the “rules-based order”, which everyone acknowledges is particularly relevant for a middle-order power such as Australia.

As former Labor foreign affairs adviser Allan Behm wrote in Guardian Australia, these rules were established in the UN Charter “after the appalling genocides and slaughter of the second world war” and to prevent a repeat. Labor’s own Herbert Vere “Doc” Evatt played a seminal role in the establishment of the charter, which subsequent Labor and Liberal governments have too often paid only lip-service.

It was left to Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles on his way to the NATO summit to mount something of a case for the legitimacy of the US attacks.

Marles attempted to apply sections of the UN Charter that allow for military action for the restoration or maintenance of international peace and security (chapter 7) or the right of collective self-defence (article 51).

Marles said Iran’s nuclear ballistic missile program was a threat “to the peace and stability of not only the Middle East, but the world”. He said Iran had the opportunity to come to the negotiating table, but it didn’t. This ignores Israel’s pre-emptive strikes that cut across Trump’s diplomatic efforts.

Even so, in broader geopolitical terms it dovetails with Albanese’s argument that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program facilitates its ability to produce a nuclear weapon, and no one wants to see this proliferation. Trump claims his B-2 bombers have “obliterated” that ability, but a preliminary classified report leaked to The New York Times suggests that the country’s nuclear program has been set back by only a few months.

While Trump’s own supporters fear he may be dragging the US into another “forever war”, many Australians will be consoled by the fact that Albanese gives every indication he has no appetite to join any American “unilateral action” down the track.

The Murdoch media and the opposition may be appalled that this weakens the alliance, but their judgement is hardly in tune with mainstream Australians, as the recent election demonstrated. The prime minister is confident his response to the events in the Middle East is closer to where the centre of Australian politics is, especially with regard to Trump.

There was a stark admission of this reality at the National Press Club on Wednesday when Opposition Leader Sussan Ley donned the sackcloth and ashes of a medieval penitent to claim, “We didn’t just lose. We got smashed. Totally smashed.”

Ley said she respects the election outcome “with humility”. “We accept it with contrition,” she says. “And we must learn from it with conviction.”

Ley stated her commitment to traditional Liberal Party values with “aspiration” at the forefront, but on the critical issues of energy and emissions reduction could only present a blank page. It is one thing to be “open and inclusive”, but surely a leader needs to come to the table with some key policy prescriptions capable of convincing colleagues and voters they are for the nation’s benefit.

At the weekend, Hastie, touted as a future leader by many in the party, trailed his coat in this regard, with a thoughtful challenge for Australia to better define its sovereignty and what “freedom of action” the nation has in the US alliance. There is something of a competition going on between Hastie and Senator Dave Sharma to be noticed speaking forcefully outside their shadow portfolio areas.

Albanese says he’s happy for the Liberals to fight each other and for the Liberals to fight the Nationals. He says his job is to deliver on commitments and meet new challenges. Among them is lifting productivity and providing certainty in an uncertain world.

Much of this task falls on the shoulders of the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, who is busily laying the ground for his productivity round table and raising expectations that he is prepared to revisit wide-ranging tax reform hitherto sidelined by political considerations.

A senior Labor veteran of the tax wars is wary. He says the push by business to make the tax system less progressive as the key to productivity is “rubbish”. Chalmers is hoping the old battleline will give way to a realisation that the “global economy is a dangerous place right now”, and that’s why everyone needs to share the overriding economic goal of “making the Australian economy more resilient”.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 28, 2025 as "The time for peace".

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