Trump the unilateralist becomes Trump the multilateralist – for now

Luckily for the Albanese government – but also as a reward for their steadfast pursuit of a perfect, early 2000s-style small military sometime in the late 2040s – Australia’s military cupboard is bare, so any security mission in the waters of the Gulf is something for others.

Since the US and Israel started the Iran war, we have been bombarded with messaging from President Trump and his Pentagon head Pete Hegseth about how well it is going.

Last Monday, President Trump said: “I think the war is very complete, pretty much”, followed by: “If you look, they have nothing left. There’s nothing left in a military sense.”

As the Iranians struck shipping in the Persian Gulf, off the coast of Oman and in the Strait of Hormuz, paralysing a key global energy route, President Trump ridiculed people concerned about oil supply and pricing. His reaction was: “Short term oil prices, which will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over, are a very small price to pay for USA and the world. Safety and peace. ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY!”

Dismissing the idea that the UK’s Keir Starmer might send one or both of the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers to the Gulf, President Trump said: “That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer – But we will remember. We don’t need people that join wars after we’ve already won!”

Meanwhile, over at the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth has been revelling in the destruction that the US and Israeli militaries are inflicting inside Iran. Four days into the war, he told us: “I hope all the folks watching understand what ‘uncontested airspace’ and ‘complete control’ means.”

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And last Friday, the Secretary of War crowed that: “Iran has no air defences. Iran has no air force. Iran has no navy. Their missiles, their missile launchers and drones being destroyed or shot out of the sky … And as the world is seeing, they are exercising sheer desperation in the Straits of Hormuz, something we’re dealing with, we have been dealing with it and don’t need to worry about it.”

We’ve been watching an exultant American administration celebrating American – and Israeli – power and dismissing the risks of a continuing or expanding war. The contempt for other partners and allies was palpable, as Prime Minister Starmer experienced directly.

But now that oil supplies are disrupted all over the planet and gas prices are climbing, even in energy-independent America, things have changed quite suddenly. And the trouble has only just begun – because the petrol, diesel and jet fuel on sale in economies like Australia’s left the Persian Gulf before the war started and the flow stopped.

It turns out that the war being “very complete” isn’t true. It also turns out that the rest of us DO have to worry about the Strait of Hormuz being closed because it is directly affecting everyone on the planet and those effects will get much worse. So we are all fools, it seems.

And most embarrassing of all for the Trump administration, not only is it clear that whatever enormous damage has been caused to the Iranian military, they are still capable of damaging ships in the Gulf and oil facilities in the broader region. Air and naval dominance has enormous gaps – as we knew from the Afghanistan war and saw again more recently in the US Navy’s inconclusive battle against the Houthis, who had closed the Red Sea to shipping.

The US Navy is not going to send its warships through the Strait of Hormuz to escort oil tankers until it is confident that the Iranians can’t lay mines or launch missiles and drones at them. Even sending in the Marines can’t guarantee this. And the US Navy is far more capable than its European or Indo Pacific partners’ navies. Australia’s, like the UK’s, is broken at present with limited options even if their governments were keen participants.

An American Arleigh Burke destroyer on fire in the strait would be an enormously powerful symbol about the war and its progress, whatever kill stats Pete Hegseth provides. And the deaths of American sailors would only increase the American public’s dislike for the war.

As the sober-minded head of the US military, Dan Caine, observed on Friday: “The only thing preventing commercial traffic and flow through the strait right now … is Iran. They are the belligerents here, holding the strait closed.” No doubt many forensic postwar accounts will show this was foreseeable – and almost certainly foreseen – by US military planners and intelligence analysts. It’s just that those planners and analysts weren’t taken seriously by the key US decision makers.

So, what is the new position of the US government? President Trump has turned on a dime. As he said about another issue in the war: “I can change my mind in seconds.”

Without any shred of humility about having created a global problem out of a clear blue sky, this Saturday he has said: “The countries of the world that receive oil through the Hormuz Strait must take care of that passage, and we will help – A LOT! This should have always been a team effort, and now it will be.”

Trump the unilateralist has become Trump the multilateralist – for now.

He’s even expressed the hope that China, France, Japan – and the United Kingdom (!) – will send warships to the strait.

We now have the new Trump doctrine, revised version: “I break it. The rest of you fix it.”

This will probably be accompanied by President Trump berating other leaders for not responding fast enough and doing enough to clean up the mess he so imperiously created and celebrated. A war that America’s partners and allies greeted with wary ambivalence, for good reason, is now expanding and sucking many others into it.

In its four years in power, the Albanese government has put itself in the fortunate position where spending $59 billion a year on our military is delivering no real capability in our Navy to answer any call to Canberra from the White House or the Pentagon.

The ageing, retiring Anzac frigates are themselves vulnerable to Iranian weapons and would add little to the security of commercial ships transiting the Gulf. The three Hobart Class air warfare destroyers are far more capable, but one is in a years-long refit and upgrade and the other two rely on a ready flow of expensive US-made missiles and interceptors that the US Navy gets first dibs on. The ships also lack cost-effective, high-volume counter-drone systems beyond their Phalanx rapid-fire cannon for close-range defence.

It’s probably a relief to ministers and to senior Defence officials that Australia’s military cupboard is so bare, as the American and Israeli war in the Gulf is starting to generate enough gravitational pull to suck even unwilling partners in further.

The bigger picture, though, is one of now obvious American political and leadership incompetence, so Australian military weakness and dependency matter more.

It’s hard to even think you could make up the directions, decisions, wishful self-deception and whiplashing contradictions spinning out of Washington like a Catherine wheel in the last couple of weeks.

At what point does the behaviour of our major security partner cause a deep rethink of Australia’s decades-old security assumptions and plans, which were all based on American competence?

And at what point do our plans to slowly equip our military with more US – and UK – sourced systems, relying on ready supplies of US weapons that are already in short supply, look sufficiently silly that we change them?

It is past time to shift to buying cost-effective Australian-made systems, combined with co-production with partners like Japan, South Korea and even France. (In contrast to the UK, France is able to deploy eight frigates and an aircraft carrier to the region, as we watch a lonely Royal Navy ship, HMS Dragon, sail towards Cyprus).

With an incompetent political leadership in Washington, and weakened, troubled militaries in the UK and Australia, Australian security needs fresh thinking more than it does more AUKUS cheerleading.

Michael Shoebridge is a founder and director of Strategic Analysis Australia. This article has been republished with the author’s permission.