ANDREW GREENE: Australia is backing the US led attack on Iran, but there are limits to the support

Within hours of US and Israeli missiles striking at the heart of Iran’s regime, Australia was one of the first allies in the Western world to swiftly back the Trump administration’s controversial military intervention.

“We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security,” the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Defence Minister jointly declared on Saturday evening.

Australia has historically not just supported modern US led conflicts, it’s also taken part in them.

But this time there is little appetite from the government to provide more than rhetorical backing.

Nevertheless, the speed at which the Albanese government endorsed Washington’s ‘Operation Epic Fury’, launched without UN or Congressional approval, surprised even some American officials.

Although the Australian government says it took no part in the US-led operation, and was given no advance warning of the strikes, it was hardly ever going to loudly criticise its longstanding ally and AUKUS partner.

Saturday’s fast-moving events also starkly underlined how despite what political leaders may pretend, the old 20th-century notion of a “rules-based global order’ has now well and truly been supplanted by a world where military “might is right”.

Right now, Australia’s military looks far from mighty, with the defence budget stretched as Australia pours billions into the ambitious AUKUS submarine project that is still years away from the scheduled delivery of nuclear-powered submarines.

On Sunday, Anthony Albanese declared that he hoped there would be a “swift resolution” of hostilities and accused Iran of “escalation” and “aggression” in its initial retaliation.

“Australia always supports diplomatic action where possible and we hope that the actions that have been taken lead to a swift resolution,” the Prime Minister said.

Mr Albanese and others in his government are carefully sticking to only backing the strikes in the context of ending Iran’s nuclear program and its “threat to global peace and security” but not enthusiastically endorsing possible regime change in Tehran.

“Ayatollah Khamenei was responsible for the regime’s ballistic missile and nuclear program, support for armed proxies and its brutal acts of violence and intimidation against its own people,” he said.

“This claimed countless lives in Iran, but also internationally. He is responsible for orchestrating attacks on Australian soil. His passing will not be mourned.”

While Australia’s Defence Force maintains a small presence in the Middle East, which is only likely to be used for possible evacuation missions, the joint US military facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs continues to provide crucial support to operations against Iran.

Zineb Riboua, a research fellow with Hudson Institute’s Centre for Peace and Security in the Middle East, believes the US attack on Iran is part of a wider play, to remove the Islamic Republic from the China equation, depriving Beijing of pawns in a Taiwan contingency.

“Every dollar the United States spends defending Red Sea shipping lanes is a dollar unavailable for submarine production, Pacific basing, or Taiwan contingency planning,” she writes.

“Every carrier group stationed in the Gulf of Aden is a carrier group absent from the Western Pacific. Iran’s proxies, armed with Iranian weapons and supported by Iranian intelligence, function as a mechanism of American strategic attrition, and the costs fall entirely on Washington while Beijing accumulates strategic gains.”

Four years after former Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea were forming a “new arc of autocracy” to reshape the world order, at least two of those nations are now bogged down in conflict.

Donald Trump has demonstrated he also has little respect for the old ‘rules-based order’, but Australian officials remain determined to stay on side with the unorthodox President and remain anxious over what he will do if Beijing soon decides to move against Taiwan.