Trump’s big 12 days: transforms NATO, pulverises Iran, disdains Albanese
The US President has imposed himself on the global strategic order to greater effect in a shorter period than any American leader since Ronald Reagan. Anthony Albanese is lucky Trump doesn’t seem to know who he is.
Donald Trump has transformed the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation as surely as he has transformed the Iranian nuclear weapons program. The US-Israel versus Iran conflict was 12 days that shook the world. And the shaking isn’t over yet. This is a pivot point in modern history.
Archimedes said he could move the world with a lever. Trump moves the world with unpredictable but decisive actions, scatological language, immense willpower, ferocious temper and the awesome authority of the American military. And, though it may seem to defy some Trump instincts, in this case with the intimate co-operation of an ally, Israel.
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Dan Caine conducted a Pentagon press conference in which they detailed just what the B-2 bombers did when they dropped their bunker-buster bombs, the Massive Ordnance Penetrators. This included sets of six bombs on Fordow, most going down ventilation shafts and causing massive explosions underground, the biggest explosions in fact of any non-nuclear weapon.
The MOPs were designed specifically to destroy Fordow, and US military engineers have been refining their attack plans for nearly 15 years. It’s all but inconceivable that whatever was in the Fordow facilities, where Iran enriched uranium to near weapons quality, wasn’t devastated.
Trump’s transformation of NATO may be as consequential as his strike against Iran’s nuclear program. All NATO members except Spain committed to raising their military budgets to 5 per cent of GDP (including 1.5 per cent for military infrastructure, cyber, intelligence and the like). That’s the biggest step forward in Western resolve in decades.
Trump is not successful everywhere. One part of the world is impervious to the realities Trump’s addressing. That’s Australia, lotus-eater land, with a government seemingly forever away on a long weekend.
NATO is muscling up, but while Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles, antipodean Clausewitzes both, may not be able to get an appointment with Trump or even a phone call with his hairdresser, they know so much better than those foolish NATO dummies.
Australia proudly proclaims its Know-Nothing strategic policy. The Albanese government will keep defence spending at just 2 per cent of GDP, rising gently across nearly a decade to 2.3 per cent. In that same period Britain, with its much bigger economy and defence force, goes to 3.5 per cent. What would those Whitehall Yes Minister types know about security?
Albanese on Friday morning recommitted to his manifestly inadequate defence budget, telling a press conference: “We continue to invest in whatever capabilities Australia needs – will continue to do that.”
That’s manifestly untrue. Sir Angus Houston, who conducted the Defence Strategic Review Albanese commissioned, Peter Dean who wrote it and former Department of Defence chief Dennis Richardson, whom Albanese commissioned to do an inquiry on submarines, have all said the nation must go to 3 per cent of GDP to achieve even its basic defence capability aims. They, along with countless other analysts, are not doing this at America’s behest.
Many capabilities mandated in the DSR itself have been shelved by the Albanese government because it can’t control its budget. The Trump administration is right to ask why its taxpayers and service personnel should defend Australia if Australia won’t defend itself. Trump got a sensible reply from NATO. From Albanese, the reply is nonsense.
Albanese is lucky Trump seems not to know who he is. Trump has threatened Spain, which has promised to go beyond the 2 per cent level (which Australia now spends) with trade penalties for being a security free-rider. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, when asked about Australia, said: “If our allies and friends in Europe can do it, I think our allies and friends in the Asia-Pacific can do it as well.”
For Albanese to defy the logic of his own DSR, the logic of all the people he appointed to provide policy guidance, the logic of every analyst and former soldier who takes defence seriously, and the logic of the Trump administration eyeballing freeloading allies, he must believe that Australia enjoys a vastly more benign security environment than all the NATO partners, or that NATO’s strategic analysis is fundamentally wrong. Joe Hockey is right to argue that Australia under Albanese is slipping from a tier one US ally to a tier three ally, a massive loss for Australian security.
What a pity Albanese wasn’t at The Hague to persuade them all of their folly. Surely NATO nations too could cut their defence budgets in half and spend all the remaining pitiful budgets on a project designed to produce a submarine fleet in the 2050s. Of course the present prime ministerial anonymity is a uniquely impotent position for Australia. But an encounter between the Giant Will and the Giant Void could be unbecoming, to put it mildly.
Speaking of which, it’s unbecoming for Trump to campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize. But Trump’s almost always unbecoming. He’s also often very effective. Sometimes he says crazy things (taking Greenland by force, making Canada the 51st state). Other times he speaks critical truths bluntly. At his best, as with Iran and NATO, Trump’s better than any recent president. At his worst, as when he humiliated Ukraine’s President and temporarily cut off all aid to Ukraine, he’s worse than any recent president.
Since World War II, there have not been many more consequential periods of presidential activity than Trump’s efforts now. Israel’s Operation Rising Lion hit Iran, especially its nuclear project, all over the place and was a stunning military and intelligence success.
Trump’s Operation Midnight Hammer transformed into kinetic reality what had previously existed only as presidential rhetoric – akin to the war on drugs – Iran must never have a nuclear weapon.
Trump has imposed himself on the global strategic order to greater effect in a shorter period than any president since Ronald Reagan. NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte claims Trump’s activism going back to his election in 2016 has already resulted in, cumulatively, NATO spending $US1 trillion ($1.5 trillion) more on defence.
Before the NATO meeting, Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities into the stone age and likely hastened the end of the ayatollahs’ regime. Right from the start, he backed Israel in its preceding military operation.
The US Middle East military command, CENTCOM, works hand in glove with Israeli Defence Forces. Israel is a formidable, independent, military power. Trump authorised Israel’s actions in advance and provided US military assets to help intercept incoming missiles from Iran.
Then Trump clobbered the Iranian facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, using weapons, Massive Ordnance Penetrators, on Fordow and Natanz, that only the Americans possess. He quickly insisted on an Israel-Iran ceasefire. The Iranians complied because they were suffering daily military humiliation and the loss of an ever increasing inventory of military and state facilities.
A couple of Iranian missiles were fired against Israel after the ceasefire took place. There was such confusion in Iran by then, these may even have been on a kind of automatic timer. One was intercepted, one landed harmlessly. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was determined to re-create the new post October 7 doctrine that he has established with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel will no longer tolerate small breaches of ceasefires. It reacts decisively if attacked. There was a ceasefire with Hamas, after all, when the October 7 terror atrocities took place.
So Netanyahu launched 50 planes to hit Iran. Trump was furious. What are you doing ruining my beautiful ceasefire? He famously declared, on camera: “They (Israel and Iran) have been fighting so long they don’t know what the f--k they’re doing.” It was monstrously unfair to equate, momentarily, Israel with Iran.
In any event, Trump had a frank and character-building phone call with Netanyahu and convinced him to call back the planes, which were minutes from delivering their payload. They struck a single Iranian radar instead. They had to refuel on the way back because they’d never before flown to Iran and come back still full.
Trump’s achievements go well beyond all this. He reinforced American deterrence globally. Trump’s predecessor as president, Joe Biden, said the right things about alliances and deterrence but projected such dithering weakness, and demonstrated in the withdrawal from Kabul such epic administration incompetence, that he undermined American credibility, whatever his words were.
Trump, by contrast, frequently says a lot of wrong things about alliances. Even going to this NATO summit, Trump, when asked whether he endorsed article five of the NATO treaty, which obliges member states to come to each other’s aid if one is attacked, replied confusingly that it depended on how you interpreted article five.
But Trump showed in Iran he would back an ally when he thought it was in America’s interests and the ally was making a genuine effort itself.
This is disastrous in its implications for Australia because we are making almost no effort at all on defence. Trump showed he would take such action even when it involved serious risk, both military risk and political risk.
Though Iran and China could hardly be more different, and Trump could not intervene effectively in northeast Asia with a single uncontested bombing raid in one night, Trump’s military decisiveness and his effective transformation of NATO help to give Beijing serious cause for concern. Hmmm. May not be so smart after all to think the Americans won’t take action.
Trump’s actions also have important implications for American politics. In this, he somewhat resembles Bob Hawke. Trump leads a movement, MAGA, which instinctively doesn’t like foreign military engagements. It’s not exactly isolationist. Certainly the American people aren’t isolationist. Most Americans, and most Republicans, sensibly, and in the baddest way, don’t want Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. But they’re very wary of foreign entanglements and forever wars.
They certainly want US allies, which rely on America for their own security, as Australia does, to pay more for their own defence. Trump has again changed American politics.
Having a fight with CNN and The New York Times over how they interpret the Iran attacks only helps Trump. He’s educating and socialising his own MAGA movement into accepting that occasionally Washington must intervene militarily overseas in its own interests, in the interests of its allies, even of humanity.
The parallel with Hawke is this. Hawke led a Labor Party that had last been in government under the disastrous Gough Whitlam, who nearly destroyed the US alliance, and ended up dominated by the anti-American left. When Hawke won in 1983, Labor ranks were extremely wary of the US alliance. Hawke embraced the alliance while delivering buckets of good Labor policy. He transformed Labor’s internal political culture.
This transformation lasted nearly 30 years but is unravelling now as the Albanese government lacks strategic direction, its internal culture aimless and hollow on security.
Trump is doing for MAGA what Hawke did for Labor. Trump commands his base but he didn’t invent the base. The base in a sense invented him, or rather the base called out for him. Trump may do many bad things or many good things in the rest of his presidency. He’s utterly unpredictable.
But in Operation Midnight Hammer, and in the transformation of NATO, Trump is delivering the MAGA base something it thought no longer existed – successful American strategic policy.
So let’s briefly consider, one by one, the likely fallout from these past two weeks for Iran, Israel and the US.
Iran has been dealt savage blows. Though it will be months before all the intelligence is in and all the calculations made, there’s no real doubt about this. A very early US Defence Intelligence Agency assessment was tendentiously leaked. It said the effect of the US strikes could be relatively minor (or indeed severe), it didn’t yet have the evidence and it had very low confidence in the provisional alternatives it outlined.
The best explanation of this report and its leaking is that, as Trump alleges and often wildly exaggerates, there are a lot of people in the American security establishment who are deeply anti-Trump and who hate the idea of his claiming any success.
Others cling to the notion that Barack Obama’s discredited deal with Iran is the proper solution and should never have been repudiated by Trump in his first term.
But International Atomic Energy Agency director Rafael Grossi says Iran’s facilities are no longer operational. CIA director John Ratcliffe says credible intelligence indicates severe damage to Iran’s facilities. The IAEA says Iran before and after the US strikes is totally different. Israeli intelligence assessments confirm this view. Of course, fuller assessments will take time.
Ehud Yaari, Israel’s pre-eminent strategic analyst, tells Inquirer that change in Iran is less likely to come from popular rebellion than from disagreements within the ruling elites. He suggests that in the last days of the war effective decision-making passed out of the hands of supreme leader Ali Khamenei and into the hands of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.
They weren’t trying to depose Khamenei but to sideline him. Says Yaari: “At every point from October 7 Khamenei took the wrong decision.” Iran massively overplayed its hand. Its regime is now severely weakened. Much analysis has been provided about what a popular revolt in Iran would look like. But that’s not the centre of gravity, nor what’s likely to change Iranian behaviour, Yaari argues.
Instead, that will come from divisions within the elite: “Iran now requires a major, major decision, whether it now sends a lot of good money after bad.” Trying to resuscitate its nuclear program, which was always headed towards weapons, trying to re-create all its proxy forces, means once more impoverishing ordinary Iranians.
Yossi Kuperwasser, head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, puts it to Inquirer in even starker terms: “I think they (the Iranian regime) are under huge pressure now. All the big questions arise. The reformists will ask the ayatollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps: what happened to all our investments, what happened to our air defences, to the crown jewels of our nuclear program, to our proxy forces – Hezbollah didn’t fire a shot. What happened to all our money that went to building those projects, billions and billions and billions of dollars, where has that all gone?”
Iran is weaker than it has been for many decades. It’s still just barely possible it has kept some 60 per cent enriched uranium and, in some new secret facility, could fashion a crude nuclear device. That wouldn’t give it nuclear deterrence, just a one-off shot at national suicide.
Israel and the US will watch intensely. If Iran is discovered in any activity that looks like it’s building a bomb, it will be struck again. The only real danger is that US attention may wander, but CENTCOM will remain focused.
For Israel, this has been two weeks of unalloyed triumph. The morale of the society is sky high. So is the unity. Netanyahu doesn’t yet seem to be recovering in the polls but the whole Israeli nation supports what was done in Iran.
For America, here is successful geo-strategic policy and military intervention. Trump will internalise everything about this success. Trump loves success. MAGA itself is changed. This has been a very good few weeks for the Western alliance.
The Albanese government, and therefore Australia, on the other hand, looks as though it can neither comprehend nor affect any of the strategic dynamics that swirl around the world, and that certainly swirl around Australia.
More Coverage
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout