You can almost hear the clenched teeth as Australia’s odious excuse for a foreign minister is at last dragged, kicking and screaming, before the cameras to admit that, ‘Fiiiine… we support Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. If we have to.’
Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong says the Albanese government supports the US decision to strike nuclear facilities in Iran, the enunciation of support coming almost 24 hours after the US operation.
The government, in the hours after the attack, urged “de-escalation, dialogue and diplomacy”, and did not explicitly back the US strikes.
But on Monday, Senator Wong said she backed the attack. “We support action to prevent Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon,” she told Channel 9. “And that is what this is. So the answer – the answer is yes.”
As for her pathetic boss, PM Anthony Albanese has stonily avoided making public appearances all week. Still sulking after being repeatedly snubbed by President Trump, neither Albanese nor Wong addressed the nation on Sunday. Instead, they issued a ‘statement’ via an unnamed public service lackey.
But Wong and Albanese’s sour grapes is all part and parcel of the left’s refusal to give President Trump any foreign policy kudos whatsoever. Mostly, it seems, because they’d have to admit that he just keeps proving them wrong.
Donald Trump’s decision overnight to bomb Iran’s nuclear weapons programme is an almost textbook case in the effectiveness and virtue of strength. While we wait to learn just how much damage has been done to the Islamic Republic’s uranium enrichment facility in Fordow, its sister plant in Natanz, and the nuclear technology and uranium storage site in Isfahan, it seems likely that, at a minimum, Tehran’s plot to get its hands on nuclear weapons has been severely disrupted. The prospect of a nuclear-armed fundamentalist Shia state that proclaims ‘Death to America’, bankrolls terrorism against the West, and has designs to dominate the Middle East was a scenario too grave for any further delay. Trump has done what his predecessors ought to have done but for various reasons, not all of them excusable, did not.
At some point, US and European foreign policy elites are going to have to reckon with the fact that Trump keeps succeeding where they have repeatedly failed, and does so by disregarding the assertions they state with unshakeable certainty.
I mean, how can anyone look at the last century or so of European history and conclude, ‘Ah, these are the people we should take foreign policy advice from!’ Firstly, there’s Europe repeatedly plunging the globe into World War. Then there’s its post-war legacy of enabling tyrants – France harboured the Ayatollah Khomeini and French intellectuals celebrated his ascension to power – and promulgating the worst ideas in history. As General Montgomery pointed out, all the worst calamities of the 20th century – Communism, Fascism and Nazism – came from Europe. All were only defeated from outside Europe.
As for the post-Cold War ‘rules-based international order’, how’d that work out for us?
Strength works. It works even if the United Nations condemns it, the European Union wrings its hands, and the British foreign office pleads for restraint. It works despite what the academics say, what the NGOs demand, and what the journalists pronounce. It works whether the anti-American left howls, the isolationist right seethes, or Tucker Carlson cackles at the very thought. Strength works and, for some reason, leaders and policymakers have decided to allow Donald Trump to be the man who teaches the world that lesson once more.
Trump may not be ‘presidential’, but he gets the job done.
It was Trump who recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital while brokering normalisation agreements between Israel and Arab states, a remarkable feat of balance and balls. It was Trump who tore up Barack Obama’s naive and dangerous Iran deal and took out terror chief Qasem Soleimani. It was Trump who declared Communist China’s systematic destruction of the Uyghurs a genocide and who convinced India and Pakistan to back down from their recent stand-off. Now it appears to be Trump who has prevented the rise of a nuclear Iran.
The left can never forgive him for any of it.
Most of all, they can never forgive him for succeeding where their golden idols have failed, every time. The left splutter that Trump is an idiot: so, what does that say when he consistently proves their expert class wrong?
That’s what they can never forgive.
