Are we already, without realising it, in the foothills of a new world war? A cold war, to be sure, but still a global conflict.
The conflicts between Israel and Iran, Russia and Ukraine, and potentially China and Taiwan, are closely related. In attacking Iran’s nuclear programs, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is acting primarily to protect Israel’s security. However, when he says he’s also defending America and other nations he’s telling the truth.
An Iran with nuclear weapons transforms the global geo-strategic environment.
Nuclear weapons are roaring back to the centre of geo-strategic equations. One of the most important developments of our time is the new alliance between China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. They are not a formal alliance, they have all kinds of mutual suspicions and paranoias. But they’re acting with as much effectiveness as an alliance as is the Western alliance led by the US.
North Korea sent 10,000 troops to fight for Russia. Moscow supplies Pyongyang with military hi-tech. Iran sells drones and missiles to Russia and has an increasingly intimate relationship with Beijing. Russia joins with China in shielding Iran at the UN.
Beijing supplies Moscow with countless dual-use technologies – items that can be used militarily and for non-military purposes – and continues such an extensive economic relationship with Russia that it has played a big part in making Western sanctions against Moscow ineffective.
China has enough sway with members of the global south that it neutralises most Western sanctions efforts.
Western sanctions have impeded Russia and they’ve kept Iran much poorer than it would otherwise be, but they haven’t been powerful enough to change Moscow or Tehran’s essential strategy and behaviour.
Not only is the West challenged militarily in a way it hasn’t been since World War II, it’s challenged as a determining force in the global economy. Iran’s aggression all over the Middle East, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Beijing’s occupation of islands and vast areas of the South China Sea plus its military assertiveness in northeast Asia all represent a twin failure.
This is, one, failure by the global institutions of the so-called international rules-based order to keep the peace or meaningfully enforce any norms at all. And, two, it’s also a failure of Western deterrence.
This in turn is a failure of Western liberalism. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Tehran’s ayatollahs have not been successfully deterred. Three of the four of the authoritarian axis – China, Russia and North Korea – possess nuclear weapons. Iran is desperately trying to acquire them.
Whatever the pieties of liberal internationalism may hold, nuclear weapons do make a state much safer. If Ukraine had managed to hold on to its nuclear weapons after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it would never have been invaded by Russia.
Taiwan once had a nuclear weapons program. If it possessed nuclear weapons today, it would not be in danger of invasion by Beijing. Australia signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970 but didn’t ratify it until 1973. Australia first decided to acquire F-111 fighter bomber aircraft in the early 1960s. We ordered them with nuclear triggers, as there was an active discussion in Australia back then about acquiring nuclear weapons.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown that a nation with nuclear weapons cannot really sustain decisive military defeat. Russia had no right to invade any part of Ukraine and the Western powers, especially the US and Britain, and Russia itself as well, had made solemn security promises to Ukraine back in 1994. But Moscow made it clear that if Ukraine looked like taking back even Crimea by force it would consider using nuclear weapons to destroy Ukraine militarily.
Ukraine has no nuclear weapons of its own and no military alliance with a nuclear weapons state. Any deterrent posture the West has put together was not enough to stop Putin, having swallowed Crimea, from trying to invade the rest of Ukraine.
Western liberalism and Western deterrence also have not stopped Iran from setting up global terror networks, conducting extraterritorial assassinations, repeatedly threatening to wipe Israel off the map and generating murderous anti-Semitic proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah. If Iran would do all that without possessing nuclear weapons, what would it do with nuclear weapons?
Israel, like India, decided its own strategic environment was so threatening that it would acquire nuclear weapons. Unlike Beijing and Pyongyang, it has never proliferated nuclear technology. For Israel, nukes are an Armageddon backstop that may not work against non-state actors. An Iran with nuclear weapons would be undeterrable in most circumstances. There also would be the danger that given its extremist Islamist ideology it might share some of this technology with one of its anti-Israel proxies.
In this global conflict, it’s the height of paradox and unpredictability that the West is led by Donald Trump. Trump is both better and worse than the liberal internationalists he replaced.
Ultimately, Trump didn’t try to stop Israel from hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities. His predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, had done just that.
So that’s a significant plus for Trump in restoring Western deterrence and preventing the axis of authoritarians adding a new nuclear weapons power. On the other hand, a significant negative for Trump is the way he constantly trash-talks alliances and more or less relentlessly casts doubt on US strategic commitments to allies.
This is critical in the nuclear field. Every US ally that does not possess nuclear weapons of its own – such as Australia – relies on extended US nuclear deterrence. Nuclear weapons states know if they launch a nuclear strike on us, the US will retaliate.
But Trump has made that retaliation much less certain. Also, the growth of missile technology means that virtually all nuclear weapons states have, or soon enough will have, the ability to strike the US with nuclear weapons. So would the US risk Los Angeles to save Sydney, or Berlin, or Tokyo? The bedrock of the alliance system is thus under threat.
An equally grotesque development is the way some of the MAGA right have turned against US allies, even allies such as Israel, which has never asked the US to do its fighting for it.
Commentator Tucker Carlson, the source now of increasingly weird and unhinged rants on strategic issues, has recently turned against Israel, just as a significant minority of MAGA fanatics irrationally hates Ukraine.
It’s one thing to want to avoid any new US military commitments abroad.
But to demonise any support for allies who are willing to do all their own fighting and need nothing more than weapons and, at most, some economic support, is a dark turn of civilisational self-loathing by some of the MAGA crowd that mirrors the far left at its worst.
In this situation we need moral and political leadership.
We don’t get that in Washington, or Canberra, so we’ll have to soldier on without it.
Islamic Republic’s ayatollahs are weaker than ever
The regime’s imperial projects have done nothing for Iran’s people. They have brought only devastation. Untold billions were spent over decades to empower terrorist proxies.
It’s first Australians’ turn to speak out for our Jewish allies
As a proud Australian woman, I leave Jerusalem, at a time of war, determined to defend Israel against the hate, threats and lies and defend its right to exist and flourish.