What an attentive friend America is, steadying a disorderly world and making it safer for Australians everywhere.

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Imagine if dependable ol' Uncle Sam was, instead, flighty, self-obsessed, and given to sudden, explosive violence. Were that true, he might carelessly put a hundred thousand of our nationals directly in harm's way without so much as a phone call.

He might imperil our economy and undermine global security through ill-considered acts of aggression that breach international law.

He might even touch off an unpredictable regional melee while articulating no clear mission objectives of his own - at least none that his cabinet can agree on.

Imagine further that, contrary to Mark Carney's rosy picture of Australia as "a self-possessed and confident nation", in practice, we would make no criticism of American recklessness and express no qualms over principles trashed, processes ignored, or strategic risk assessments not undertaken.

Harsh? Unfair, even? All of these things - including the Canadian Prime Minister's transparently gushing complement - occurred in the last eight days.

It is barely a week since the first rumours of unexplained explosions in Tehran emerged.

Reports soon referenced an Israeli operation, and then we learned that the US was also involved. Another hour or two passed and a characteristically weird Donald Trump video appeared, the President wearing a silly hat and woodenly declaring the US was at war.

But what was this? A new foreign entanglement? Where were its legal grounds and where was the public case to Congress, the American people, Western allies?

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Initially, Trump justified "Operation Epic Fury" as the urgent removal of a threat posed by the Iranian regime. This was further layered with rhetoric about Iran's suddenly well-advanced nuclear program - the same program Trump had "completely and totally obliterated" a mere eight months ago.

In succeeding days, his administration would variously claim that Iran's enrichment capacity was as close as a week away from deployable while at other times, Trump has failed to mention nukes at all.

Ditto regime change. Sometimes it was the core purpose, other times absent. He first called on Iranians to rise up and take their country back, but later said he would play a personal role in selecting a replacement for the Ayatollah. In another interview, he acknowledged that one possibility was the replacement of Khamenei with somebody just as bad.

The sense of louche dilettantes making life-and-death calls suggested a better name: epic weightlessness.

This is not to impugn the military execution. This, in its initial phase, was meticulous and its results astonishing. Decapitation of the Iranian regime was clinical - testament to the extraordinary sophistication and unrivalled expertise of Pentagon, CIA and Mossad officers.

Clearly, these agencies are revelling in the fact that for the first time since perhaps World War II, they have obtained green lights for daring operations that past presidents would have blocked. The recent Maduro kidnapping is an example.

But the bigger strategic picture - the absent statecraft and the unseen international ramifications are another thing entirely. Right now, these serious geo-strategic considerations are in the hands of distinctly unserious people.

By Tuesday, a weary Secretary of State Marco Rubio detailed how the narrow legal conditions for a pre-emptive attack on another country had been met.

In a novel deployment of cascading self-defence pretexts, he explained that America had been forced to pre-emptively attack Iran because Israel was about to do so. That, Rubio stated, would inevitably have brought retaliatory strikes against US bases in the region.

Put this another way and you can see its doughnut logic: 'our strategic subordinate was about to freelance, and we knew what that meant for our security, so we had to join the attack as an act of self-defence'.

Apparently, insisting that Benjamin Netanyahu hold back Israel's massive fusillade of missiles, was not considered. Telling.

While Rubio's rationale seemed to have been vindicated by Iran's hail of missiles toward US facilities, his exasperated reasoning had an even bigger flaw.

It positioned Trump as Benjamin Netanyahu's junior. Mystifyingly, America's most senior diplomat hadn't thought that bit through, even though it was the first thing occurring to anyone listening.

"We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first ... so if anything, I might have forced Israel's hand," Trump said the next day. Rubio recanted.

Note Trump's words though. "It was my opinion ..." No intelligence supplied, military advice, no satellite images of missiles being moved or fuelled or other assets being positioned. Just the twitching nostril hairs of a real-estate developer telling him a deal was phoney.

Did it have to be this way? This might be a good moment to recall Carney's clarion call for the exercise of collective middle power diplomacy. Where would America stand right now if every allied country had openly questioned the legal basis of this war?

An agreed statement from European governments, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and others would at least have preserved our integrity.

After all, you know the rules-based-order is over 'not' when one country flouts it, but when others say nothing. It's not the breach that kills it, it is the acceptance.

Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.

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