Alliance deference, not Trumpism: Understanding Labor's Iran position and how to change it
Trump’s decision, encouraged by Netanyahu and Republican hawks1, to attack Iran has triggered both an economic crisis and a sharp intensification of the pressures on historic US alliances, including the Australian-US alliance. Australia, like many longtime US allies, has expressed formal support for the actions of the US and Israel while resisting being drawn into a greater role in the conflict, particularly in relation to attempts to force open the Strait of Hormuz. These actions have drawn justified criticism from progressive forces, with John Quiggin arguing that they constitute a capitulation to Trumpism. This piece argues that Quiggin’s framing, while understandable, misidentifies what is actually happening and therefore points toward the wrong political response. Australia’s foreign policy response, like those of many other countries, is caught between a reflexive orientation conditioned by decades of identifying Australian interests as inherently intertwined with those of US capital, and a growing recognition that Trump’s actions serve primarily his own personal and factional interests with zero consideration of the interests of allies. Understanding that contradiction clearly is the precondition for building the kind of political pressure that could actually move the Albanese government toward a fundamentally different and more independent foreign policy course.
Is the ALP Trumpist?
Quiggin’s argument deserves to be taken seriously. He is right that the decision by Albanese and Wong to protect AUKUS (the Australia-United Kingdom-United States security pact) is central to their calculations. I would go further and argue that AUKUS is itself an expression of a deeper commitment to preserving the historic US-Australian alliance. AUKUS was premised on a US strategic commitment to the Indo-Pacific that the Iran war has now exposed as contingent at best. The removal of THAAD air defences from South Korea to support Middle East operations, and the diversion of US strategic attention and resources to a conflict that serves no Indo-Pacific purpose, has left the submarines-for-alliance-loyalty bargain without the strategic foundation it assumed. That the government continues to see this alliance as in Australia’s national interest is itself a sign of how deeply the institutional logic has taken hold. But it is precisely that motivation, taken together with the Australian Labor Party (ALP)’s domestic policy agenda and its public statements condemning the adoption of Trumpist policies by others, that makes the Trumpism label difficult to sustain. The mislabelling matters, and not just analytically. It makes it harder to understand why the ALP is supporting Trump’s aggression, and it makes it significantly harder to engage with those ALP members, both rank-and-file and in parliament, who are uncomfortable with or actively opposed to the war. A frame that is easily read as implacably hostile to the party as a whole shuts down the very conversations that could shift its position.
This characterisation of Australia as having joined the war is not unique to Quiggin. It is common to the Greens and sections of the far-left. The Greens argue that the Albanese government is ‘slowly dragging Australia into another US war’, pointing to rhetorical support for US actions and the deployment of the Wedgetail and missiles to Gulf states. For Socialist Alternative, whose paper Red Flag argues that the Labor government is ‘complicit in - a partner with - far-right gangsterism and war crimes’ and calls for breaking the US alliance entirely, the conclusion is starker. Both positions rest on a complicity argument that conflates distinct forms of involvement, rhetorical support, defensive military aid, and potential base usage, and treats them as equivalent steps toward the same destination. The government’s own statement on military assistance is unambiguous: ‘We are not taking offensive action against Iran and we have been clear that we are not deploying Australian troops on the ground in Iran.’ Whatever one thinks of Australia’s overall posture, that distinction matters, both analytically and politically.
It is worth being clear that Labor Against War’s own position is forthright. They are under no illusions about the government’s conduct and say so publicly, with patron Doug Cameron publicly condemning the government’s conduct in the strongest terms. The distinction is not about the strength of opposition to the war but about the political conclusion drawn from it. Labor Against War opposes the war while remaining inside the party and working to change it, which is precisely the organisational form that makes broad coalition building possible. Asking ALP members to instead accept that their party is structurally no different from the Coalition as a precondition for solidarity forecloses that possibility before it begins.
The roots of alliance deference
To understand why the ALP is where it is, it is necessary to understand the structural history of Australian foreign policy. For the early period of Australia’s history, both before and after federation, Australia saw its interests as tied to the British Empire, understanding itself as an extension of that empire in the Asia Pacific, with a corresponding claim to dominate what it regarded as its regional backyard. With the outbreak of the Pacific War, a sharp tension emerged between the ALP leadership and the British government over the deployment of Australian troops. The Curtin government’s clash with Churchill over the redeployment of Australian troops, culminating in Churchill secretly ordering troopships diverted to Burma before Curtin forced their return to Australia, which crystallised the shift. Curtin’s explicit turn to America, announced in his New Year’s message of December 1941, marked the beginning of the bipartisan institutional commitment to the US alliance that has shaped Australian foreign policy ever since. With the war’s end, this orientation deepened, culminating in the signing of the Australia, New Zealand and United States (ANZUS) Treaty in 1951. From that point, Australia’s vision of its relationship with Britain was effectively transposed onto the US, with bipartisan political and business support developing for the alliance as central not just to Australia’s defence but to its national interests more broadly. For the past seventy-five years, Australia’s political and economic elite has seen enthusiastic backing of US military action as integral to those interests. It is in this context that Albanese and Wong’s statements on Iran need to be understood.
Things have changed, however. Australia is no longer as enthusiastic about reflexive support for US military action as it once was. Prime Minister Albanese said Australia backed the US ‘acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security’. While Senator Penny Wong simultaneously refused to comment on the legality of the attacks, saying she would “leave it for the United States and Israel to speak of the legal basis.” This position has drawn justified criticism from opponents of the war, including Doug Cameron, patron of Labor Against War: “Albanese’s backing of Israeli and US attacks on Iran shows that we are completely devoid of acting independently… There was a time when Labor pursued peace not war. That time is long gone. Leadership needed, not sycophantic capitulation to militarism.” But it is also worth considering how sharply the Albanese government’s response contrasts with Australia’s approach to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when Australia not only committed troops but Howard played an active role in the international campaign to legitimise and build the case for war. Albanese’s own explanation for the difference was telling: ‘Australia wasn’t consulted before this action was undertaken.’ When Australia rebuffed US requests to send vessels or troops to help secure the Strait of Hormuz, Trump singled it out publicly, saying he was ‘surprised’ by Australia and that he would ‘never forget’ which nations offered assistance. The current government’s comparative reticence is partly explained by the Trump administration’s contempt for allied consultation, there is no dossier, no coalition building, no shared justification to offer cover, but the hesitancy is itself telling.
This ambivalence is not limited to Australia. Other historic allies, Canada, Japan, and European countries, with the notable exception of Spain, have all been measured in their response. A joint statement by French President Macron, German Chancellor Merz and UK Prime Minister Starmer was explicit: ‘We did not participate in these strikes’, while urging Iran to seek a negotiated solution, neither condemning the attacks nor committing forces in support of Trump’s unstated and ever-shifting objectives. There is also a very real fear, for any country that speaks out, of triggering retaliatory action by Trump, as seen in the ongoing and ever-changing tariff threats deployed since March 2025. At the same time, there is a growing, if still cautious, recognition across many North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries that the old alliance framework has fundamentally changed, and that more independent foreign policy orientations are necessary. That recognition has not yet surfaced publicly in Australia, but the current conflict provides an opening to push that discussion, particularly by challenging the foundational assumption that has sustained the US-Australian alliance: that backing the US is automatically in the interests of Australian business. As the economic disruption being caused by the war makes increasingly clear, that assumption no longer holds.
It is important to be clear that the Albanese government’s decision to back the war does not reflect moral failure or cowardice on the part of Albanese and his ministers. If anything, there is a kind of strength in their position, they are supporting something they clearly have reservations about because they believe it is what the national interest requires. Real political leaders often have to do hard things and face criticism for them; that is part of what leadership means. But the relevant question is not whether they are willing to do difficult things, it is whether the calculation that makes this the difficult but necessary course is still correct. This matters enormously for how any campaign against the war should be oriented. Its objective cannot simply be to build moral pressure against the government’s position. It must also work to change the political and strategic calculus, to make the case that opposing the war serves both Australia’s values and its concrete interests. That is a case the Australian media, with its uncritical reporting of the Trump administration’s actions and its complaints about insufficient Australian support, has conspicuously failed to make.
Why is Trump doing this?
Part of the difficulty that politicians globally, particularly in the US, are having in formulating a consistent response to the war is that Trump’s actions are not as sharp a break with the historical behaviour of the US as they might appear. The US has always insisted on its right to intervene, including militarily, in other countries to defend its interests. This was sometimes conducted within the framework of the international rules-based system, but not always. The willingness to act outside that framework became more explicit in the wake of the September 11 attacks, when neoconservatives within and around the Bush administration pushed the case for unilateral US action outside international institutions, albeit with some residual deference to allies and multilateral processes. Trump, who built his political brand in part on attacking the neocon foreign policy tradition, has now embraced its core logic, embracing the use of military force to achieve long-term strategic transformation in the Middle East. As one former Republican congressman and House Armed Services Committee member observed, Trump has ‘adopted the same logic’ as the Bush administration’s Iraq invasion, becoming in practice the very thing he once derided. The Trump administration has dropped even the residual deference to allies and multilateral processes. It is substantially more open about its contempt for international law and institutions, which has been a source of tension even within Trump’s own coalition, particularly its isolationist wing. In this sense Trump is not an aberration but a mask-off moment, the same imperial presumption, stripped of its legitimating framework.
Another sharp change is that in the post-war period while the US acted in its own interests, it was conscious of protecting unity with other capitalist countries, it would at times give deference to the interests of other countries. This is entirely gone, and now the key driver is not even US interests, but Trump’s business interests and their entwinement with sections of capital both in the US and globally, particularly in the Middle East. Which makes the behaviour far more difficult to predict and understand, particularly in the context of the history of US interventionism.
Perhaps most critically for Australia, Trump’s foreign policy has no stable strategic objective, and the conduct of the war has made this impossible to ignore. The stated justification was preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. But the destruction of Iran’s conventional air force and navy has no logical connection to that objective, those capabilities are irrelevant to a nuclear programme. The incoherence goes further: when Secretary of State Rubio listed the destruction of Iran’s air force as a war aim, the Times of Israel noted that Iran’s air force had never posed a significant threat, and the objective had not appeared in the White House’s own talking points to Republican lawmakers. US officials cannot agree on what the war is for. More starkly still, Trump has stated explicitly that his ‘preference would be to take the oil’, threatening to seize Iran’s main oil export hub at Kharg Island. It is plunder in the most literal sense, and it is recognised as such by most of the world. As Al Jazeera noted, the Trump administration has unveiled no clear goal behind its military campaign, the oil seizure ambition being the clearest window into what the war is actually for.
The evolution of the war’s conduct has demolished the pretence that the original justification was genuine, leaving countries that expressed support for action against Iranian nuclear ambitions now implicitly endorsing objectives they never signed on to. This is not accidental. It is the predictable consequence of a war launched without strategic coherence. Politico reported that within the administration there were very few vocal backers of the strike beyond Senator Lindsey Graham, who had spent months lobbying Trump on the golf course and in private meetings. Graham’s own dismissal of the ‘Pottery Barn rule’, the principle that you own what you break, captures the approach precisely: destroy the existing order with no plan or responsibility for what follows. More dangerous still for those who have sought to manage the relationship through demonstrated loyalty, Trump has shown repeatedly that no degree of deference provides protection from punishment on a whim, as Canada, the EU and multiple other allies have discovered. The traditional logic of alliance management assumed that accepting costs and constraints would deliver predictable benefits in return. That calculability is now gone. Australia is being asked to pay all the costs of deference with none of the reliable benefits.
This also explains why Spain has been so prominent in its open hostility to Trump’s actions, going as far as refusing to allow US KC-135 tanker aircraft to use Spanish bases for Operation Epic Fury, forcing the Pentagon to relocate them to Germany and France. Spain’s foreign minister was explicit: ‘Unilateral military actions outside the United Nations Charter, outside any collective action, have no clear objective. Europe must defend international law, de-escalation, and negotiation.’ The Spanish left and centre-left never had to make the same kind of accommodation to US alliance logic that social democratic parties in Australia, Britain and Germany did in the postwar period. There’s no Spanish equivalent of the ALP’s deep institutional entrenchment in ANZUS, no Atlanticist wing of the labour movement with the same structural weight. So Pedro Sánchez can be consistently sharp about Gaza, about the Iran war, about Trump, in ways that Starmer or Albanese simply cannot without fracturing their own parties.
This is also why the hope, still present in much of the global political class, that things will return to normal after Trump, is misplaced. Mainstream foreign policy analysis supports this assessment. The Baker Institute at Rice University concluded in March 2026 that the post-World War II transatlantic alliance is ‘significantly fractured’ and that ‘mostly cordial transatlantic relations are phenomena of the past and may never be completely restored’, not a temporary disruption but a structural transformation whose damage is real and cumulative. The allies who are now quietly recalibrating their strategic orientations, in Canada, in Europe, are not overreacting. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney captured the moment precisely, observing that ‘a rupture in the world order has occurred’ and that ‘the middle powers must act together’, language that applies with equal force to Australia, even if it has not yet entered Australian political discourse. They are recognising that the framework within which their alliance relationships operated has fundamentally changed, and that waiting for restoration of the old normal is itself a strategic choice with real costs.
The damage Trump and Netanyahu’s actions are doing to the international rules-based order extends well beyond the immediate conflict. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was unambiguous: ‘The use of force by the United States and Israel against Iran undermine international peace and security’, calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities. The Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drew explicitly on that framework: the prohibition on unilateral military aggression, the inviolability of sovereign borders, the authority of international institutions. Australia was among the more vocal supporters of Ukraine on precisely those grounds. But it becomes very difficult to sustain that position while simultaneously refusing to engage with the legal basis of attacks on Iran that share the same fundamental character: unilateral military aggression against a sovereign state, outside any UN mandate, in defiance of international law. The charge of hypocrisy here is not merely rhetorical. It materially weakens the capacity to build international coalitions against aggressors, undermines the institutions through which that opposition is organised, and provides every government that wishes to act outside international law with a ready precedent. The Russian government, whose own conduct in Ukraine has attracted similar charges of violating international law, has nonetheless made exactly that argument about Western double standards. The US and Israel, with Australia’s silent acquiescence, are making it unanswerable.
The opportunity for change
This all means that there is an opportunity for a real change in Australia’s orientation toward the war. This is not simply important morally, but it could have very real consequences for the region and for Australia. For this to occur, we need to go beyond condemning the actions of the Australian government in supporting the war. We need to give real attention to building political pressure on the government.
A starting point is to recognise that Labor Against War represents something genuinely different from previous anti-war formations within the ALP. Historically, such formations have primarily served a recuperative function, channelling activist energy back into the party, softening external criticism, and ultimately containing rather than amplifying dissent. They became buffers between the social movement and the parliamentary leadership rather than transmission belts of pressure onto it. What makes this moment different is the difficulty of the position the government has put itself in, the war support lacks any credible domestic political rationale, runs against the economic interests of Australian business, and is tied to an alliance with an administration that most of the Labor base viscerally distrusts. That makes the usual task of the recuperative formation, finding a form of words that reconciles the membership to the leadership’s position, much harder to perform credibly.
This means that anti-war forces outside the ALP need to engage with Labor Against War positively and non-sectarianly. Not as a stepping stone to pulling ALP members away from their party, but as partners in a coalition that respects their political identity and works with them where they actually are. The sectarian framing that treats the ALP as no different from the Liberals cuts off exactly the coalition that is needed. It makes solidarity conditional on ALP members accepting a characterisation of their own party that they have good reasons to reject, and it misreads the actual situation. A party that is internally contested on this question, with branches passing motions and MPs from both left and right factions privately raising concerns with senior ministers including Wong, with Labor Against War planning to circulate motions to branches in NSW and Victoria ahead of Labor’s national conference in Adelaide in July, condemning the war as ‘an illegal act of aggression against a sovereign nation’ and drawing an explicit parallel with Labor’s opposition to the Iraq War in 2003. The goal is not to demand that people arrive at conclusions before they’ve had the experience that makes those conclusions meaningful, but to build the shared activity through which new understandings can develop organically.
The dissent extends beyond the ALP’s internal structures into the broader labour movement. A range of unions have passed motions or released statements opposing the war, including the Australian Education Union, the Victorian Branch of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, the South Australia and Northern Territory Branch of the Australian Services Union, the Maritime Union of Australia, and the National Tertiary Education Union. The breadth of this activity across manufacturing, education, services, maritime and tertiary sectors reflects genuine labour movement concern rather than a single politically aligned cluster.
The Maritime Union’s position carries particular weight given that its members have a direct material stake in the conflict. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has immediate consequences for the shipping industry their members work in. The MUA’s longstanding affiliation with the International Transport Workers’ Federation connects this to a global labour concern: the ITF has designated the Strait of Hormuz a Warlike Operations Area, with around 1,000 ocean-going vessels stranded in the Gulf and seafarers, many from the Global South, unable to leave vessels or return home due to airspace closures. As ITF General Secretary Stephen Cotton stated: “The priority must be de-escalation, diplomacy and an end to the conflict. Until then, civilian seafarers should not be placed in the line of fire.”
Both affiliated and non-affiliated unions are moving on this question, which opens distinct but complementary tracks for building broader pressure: affiliated unions can bring direct weight to bear on the ALP through formal party structures, while non-affiliated unions can act without the constraint of that relationship, giving them more freedom to be publicly sharp in their demands.
Equally important is moving beyond sloganeering to serious thinking about what the Australian government could actually be doing to contribute to ending the conflict. ‘End the war’ expresses a sentiment but carries no pathway. The British and French convening of 35 countries, including Australia, to discuss the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz provides exactly the kind of concrete multilateral framework the piece has been pointing toward. Australia is at that table. The question is what it does with that seat.
The stated focus of the talks is freedom of navigation and the safety of trapped ships and seafarers. Those are legitimate concerns, as the ITF’s designation of the Strait as a Warlike Operations Area makes clear. But the discussion cannot be limited to the mechanics of reopening the waterway. Any serious effort to restore safe passage requires engaging with the reasons Iran closed it in the first place.
This is where Australia could make a distinctive contribution. Rather than simply signing on to a military escort operation, Australia should be pushing at these talks for the inclusion of genuine security guarantees to Iran as a precondition for any sustainable settlement. A purely military solution, sending naval escorts through a contested waterway without addressing Iran’s underlying security concerns, risks significant further escalation. It also rewards Trump’s approach by cleaning up the consequences of his war while leaving its causes unaddressed, and sets a precedent that unilateral military aggression by the US and Israel can be normalised by multilateral management of its fallout.
The 35-country talks represent something more promising than that if the participating nations choose to use them that way. The explicit exclusion of the US from the talks is itself significant, opening space for a genuinely multilateral diplomatic framework rather than an extension of US war aims. Australia should be using its seat at that table to push for the talks to address not just the symptom, the closed Strait, but the conditions that make Iran’s closure of it rational: the demonstrated unreliability of the US as a negotiating partner, the pattern of attacks during negotiations, and the need for binding multilateral guarantees that any settlement will not be unilaterally abandoned by a subsequent US administration.
Iran, negotiations, and the Hormuz leverage
Understanding why Iran would be irrational to settle without such guarantees requires taking its strategic position seriously. The Iranian government is understandably wary of settling the current war. Over the past two decades the US has proved itself to be a bad faith actor in relation to negotiations with Iran. Iran has repeatedly made concessions to reach a negotiated settlement with the US, only for a subsequent US administration to tear up a deal and renew aggression, most consequentially when the US unilaterally withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018, after which Iran’s nuclear breakout time collapsed from more than a year to one week or less, the direct consequence of a deal the US itself abandoned. The pattern repeated in the most recent round of talks: the Omani foreign minister, who had been mediating the negotiations, said he was ‘dismayed’ … ‘active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined’, telling the US directly that ‘this is not your war.’ On the day before Operation Epic Fury began, Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium and full International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verification, concessions that scholars of the global nuclear order have described as potentially as consequential as the original JCPOA. The US attacked anyway. As one analyst has noted, the consequences extend well beyond Iran: any future nuclear diplomacy involving Washington, including with North Korea, will now be marked by the demonstrated unreliability of the US as a good faith negotiator.
With Iran having successfully reduced Strait of Hormuz traffic by 95%, sending global fuel prices soaring, it has tangible leverage on the global economy. It is in the interest of the global economy, including Australia, for the Strait to be open and the safe passage of shipping to be guaranteed, but that will require real guarantees to Iran that its sovereignty will be respected.
It is important to be clear about what this argument is and is not. It is not a defence of the Iranian government or its human rights record. But the nature of the Iranian government is a question for the Iranian people to resolve, not for external military force to determine. This matters both as a matter of principle and as a matter of historical record, because the history of Western intervention in Iran is precisely a history of destroying Iranian democratic self-determination whenever it conflicted with Western interests.
The Islamic Republic itself exists as a direct consequence of that intervention. The CIA and MI6 organised overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953, a democratically elected Prime Minister whose crime was nationalising Iranian oil, was explicitly aimed, in the CIA’s own words, at bringing to power a government that would reach ‘an equitable oil settlement’. It destroyed a functioning democratic government and installed the Shah’s regime in its place. One that, as the Brookings Institution has noted, saw the costs of the coup manifest in stoking paranoia, enabling repression, and undermining the monarchy’s legitimacy in ways that made the 1979 revolution all but inevitable. Those Iranians who lived through that period, and their children, have a historically grounded understanding of what Western professions of concern for Iranian democracy actually mean in practice.
The cruel irony of the current situation is that military pressure and sanctions make genuine democratic development in Iran less rather than more likely. The Reuters account of Netanyahu’s final call with Trump confirms this dynamic directly. Netanyahu argued that killing Khamenei could trigger an uprising and usher in a new government, a view explicitly rejected by the CIA, which assessed that Khamenei would likely be replaced by an internal hardliner. That assessment has proven accurate: Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, considered even more harshly anti-American than his father, has been named the new supreme leader. The regime change logic has failed on its own terms, in addition to being illegitimate in principle. Military pressure and sanctions consolidate nationalist sentiment around the existing government, discredit internal opposition forces who can be painted as aligned with the aggressor, and destroy the economic and civil conditions within which democratic movements develop. An Iran that feels genuinely secure from external threat is one where the security state’s justification for repression is weakened, where internal political contestation becomes more possible. The path to a more democratic Iran runs through security and sovereignty, not through the military pressure that has consistently strengthened the hand of those Iranians who argue that the West can never be trusted.
Conclusion
The argument of this piece can be stated simply. The Albanese government’s support for the war on Iran is not Trumpism. It is the product of a deeply entrenched institutional logic, decades of bipartisan commitment to the US alliance as the foundation of Australian security and regional power, meeting a moment in which that logic has been overtaken by events. The assumptions that made alliance deference rational, from the point of view of the Australian ruling class, have collapsed: there is no stable US strategic objective, no reliable protection for loyal allies, no prospect of a return to the old normal, and no plausible argument that backing this war serves Australian economic or security interests. The question is whether political pressure can help Albanese and Wong to see that, and to act on it.
Building that pressure requires a different kind of politics from the denunciatory mode that tends to dominate anti-war activism. Denouncing Albanese and Wong as cowards or Trumpists is not only analytically wrong, it makes the coalition that is needed impossible to build. To move people, you have to understand what is holding them where they are. ALP members passing branch motions against the war, union activists moving resolutions, figures like Doug Cameron speaking out, these are people acting from within their own political tradition, not despite it. Engaging with them seriously, on their own terms, without demanding they repudiate their party as the price of solidarity, is both the ethically right approach and the strategically necessary one. New political conclusions develop through shared experience and patient engagement, not through prior ideological conditions.
The same discipline applies to the demands that coalitions makes. Slogans that express opposition without offering a pathway are not just strategically limited; they cede the argument about what is realistic and responsible to the very people whose position needs to be challenged. Serious thinking about what Australia could actually do, how it could use its diplomatic relationships, what multilateral frameworks exist, what genuine security guarantees for Iran would look like and why they are the precondition for any durable settlement, is not a retreat from principle. It is what principled politics looks like when it takes seriously the responsibility to change things rather than simply to condemn them.
The war on Iran is killing people, destabilising a region, and serving the narrowest possible interests. Australia is complicit in it. That is the moral reality, and it is urgent. But urgency is not served by a politics that performs opposition without building the conditions for change. The opportunity that this moment presents: the internal Labor dissent, the growing recognition across allied countries that the old framework has broken down, the economic pressure of the closed Strait of Hormuz, the sheer indefensibility of the war’s rationale, is real. Whether it is taken depends on whether those who oppose the war are willing to do the patient, serious, coalition-building work that turning an opportunity into a political shift actually requires.
[1] Reuters reporting revealed Netanyahu’s closing argument to Trump was specifically the opportunity to kill Khamenei and the possibility of regime change, while Politico reported that within the administration, there were very few vocal backers of the strike beyond Senator Lindsey Graham, who had lobbied Trump for months.