For all of our sakes, let’s hope that Donald Trump’s Operation Epic Fury doesn’t turn into Operation Epic Fail.

It could still go either way.

And although I’ve written here before that hope is not a strategy, the rapid disintegration of the global order means there’s little else to lean on in this moment.

Last year, in an interview with the New York Times, Donald Trump said the only constraint to his power as US president was: “My own morality, my own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

He added: “I don’t need international law.”

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Today, we’re living that quote from the “apex opportunist”, as the Liberal MP and SAS veteran Andrew Hastie rightly describes Trump, who aims to hoover up global oil supplies (via first Venezuela and now Iran) as much as anything else.

Hastie also says anyone who thinks the global rules-based order still exists is in “fantasyland”.

The attacks on Iran are a vindication of the Canadian prime minister’s viral Davos speech, where Mark Carney rightly declared: “Nostalgia is not a strategy … Stop invoking a rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised.”

We can hardly expect to influence the behaviour of others – China in relation to Taiwan, for example – when the world’s biggest democracy is taking a “might is right” stance.

It’s clear any means of accountability or consistent application of international law is lost. We are in territory not seen this side of the second world war, when structures were built and processes implemented via the 1945 UN charter to mitigate the risk of another global conflict.

We are now seeing just how fragile those systems are.

When I was a foreign correspondent, I witnessed the fragility of societal systems first-hand. Amid disasters, law and order rapidly broke down, and looters emerged as power lines fell and communications were cut. We are seeing this breakdown now on a macro scale, in the global order, with the boundaries broken and the lines of trust breached.

In this, governments such as Australia’s sit precariously as middle powers, aware of the potential need for a big protector like the United States but at risk of following them into a spreading disaster. Carney is right to suggest that such powers should close ranks. What other option is there?

The US has largely had its way so far, but we’re already seeing mission creep, without an exit strategy, if there is a strategy at all.

The potential for unintended consequences is real.

We’re still dealing with the American folly in imposing regime change in Iraq as we grapple with what to do with the Australian families linked to Islamic State fighters detained in Syria. Afghanistan, amid economic collapse, is back in Taliban control.

In 2003, the then Labor opposition leader, Simon Crean, declared the Iraq war to be “illegal, unnecessary and unjust” when the Howard government joined the US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.

History, of course, has since shown that war was based on a false premise – to dismantle weapons of mass destruction that were never found.

As recently as 2023, the current defence minister, Richard Marles, said he would “definitely support the position that Simon Crean as our Labor leader took then”.

He added: “The terms on which we engage in armed conflict end up being as significant a set of decisions as any government can make.”

As yet, the government has been careful to point out that Australia is not a party to the US-Israel war on Iran, however, the rapid support shown by Anthony Albanese for actions that do not adhere to international law stands in stark contrast to the principles demonstrated by Labor two decades ago.

“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 said, in a joint statement with Marles and the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong.

The above statement is not unreasonable and evidently carefully crafted.

The behaviour of the Iranian regime towards its own people – and others – is indefensible.

As Stanford Law’s Allen Weiner, an expert in international law, said of Trump’s justification for the attack: “There is a strong moral valence to the president’s remarks; he referred to the Iranian regime as a ‘vicious group of very hard, terrible people’. The president also cited a number of historical grievances against Iran, going back to the 1979 Tehran embassy hostage-taking and Iran’s support for anti-American militias during the post-2003 American occupation of and subsequent military presence in Iraq.”

However, Weiner goes on to explain that international law is explicitly crafted to outlaw exactly this kind of “just in case” attack.

“My judgment is that the attack was quite clearly illegal,” he said.

A general danger, Weiner said, or the possibility that Iran may at some point in the future acquire nuclear weapons, was not enough without an explicit threat.

And, as is the way these days, political pragmatism is the guiding principle.

The prime minister, probably better than most, understands his invidious position well.

Because while Crean stood on principle amid early anti-war sentiment in 2003, once fighting started, the Iraq war then became publicly popular until it wasn’t. Crean lost the leadership in a hostile media and political environment for a range of reasons, among them the Howard government’s ability to paint him as a weak or “unpatriotic” leader.

This is the domestic epic fail Albanese is seeking to avoid.

Zoe Daniel is a three-time ABC foreign correspondent and the former independent member for Goldstein

Zoe Daniel is a three-time ABC foreign correspondent and the former independent member for Goldstein

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