Donald Trump’s Iran war is forcing Australia, allies to shoulder the burden of securing the Strait of Hormuz

Macho and cocky, the Trump administration has been cock-a-hoop since its snatch-and-grab raid of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro in January.

The US President himself has been punch drunk ever since, proposing to invade Greenland, administered by NATO ally Denmark and then disparaging the contribution of allied troops who fought the US’s war in Afghanistan.

The Trump administration has spent most of its time berating allies for being freeloaders and urged them to take on more “burden sharing”.

For all his distasteful methods, there is much Mr Trump diagnoses correctly. This column has regularly agreed that allies, especially the Australian Government, should not wait for an Oval Office roasting to raise their defence spending and take on their fair share.

But approaching 14 months of the Trump administration, it must be acknowledged that the burden-sharing has been going both ways.

As it is now allies who are expected to prop up President Trump’s decision to start a war with Iran, even though his objectives and reasons are hazy and contradictory at best.

“You never like to say too ⁠early you won. We won,” Mr Trump told supporters at a rally in Hebron, Kentucky, last Wednesday. “In the first hour, it was over.”

But on the weekend, he resorted to begging allies, and China, to bail him out in the Strait of Hormuz, the vital passageway through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil supplies are shipped to the rest of the world.

“We have already destroyed 100 per cent of Iran’s Military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close-range missile somewhere along, or in, this Waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are,” Mr Trump posted on Truth Social on Saturday.

“Hopefully, China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint, will send ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has been totally decapitated.”

Several hours later, he was back at it, simultaneously claiming he had totally won, yet still needed external help.

“The United States of America has beaten and completely decimated Iran, both Militarily, Economically, and in every other way, but 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,” he said.

But just last weekend, Mr Trump was brashly telling the UK’s Keir Starmer, who opposed the initial strikes, that he didn’t need Britain’s help, following reports the UK had placed its aircraft carriers on a more rapid form of standby.

“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!”

Mr Trump’s Iran “excursion,” as the President keeps calling it, is placing enormous strain on political leaders who have spent his entire presidency dancing on the thinnest of tightropes in trying to manage their Trump-loathing publics and their duty as the custodians of their security alliance.

The veteran Labor pollster John Utting’s research shows that 55 per cent opposed the attacks and just about the same number wanted no Australian military support to the Gulf.

So far, Australia has committed a reconnaissance aircraft on behalf of the UAE. The Wedgetail had been previously deployed to the allied effort in Ukraine (a war illegally started by Russia’s Vladimir Putin in 2022, to which Australians overwhelmingly support contributing).

Mr Utting’s sample is small, just 500 respondents, but women and younger voters were overwhelmingly the biggest opponents. Only a majority of LNP voters supported it.

“This speaks to the political calculation that we as an American ally have to make, and obviously presents a conundrum for our political leaders. But they’ve calculated that the costs of any political payback in Australia are worth paying for the long-term relationship with the US,” Mr Utting told The Nightly.

In the UK, Survation says more Britons oppose the US and Israeli campaign, although at 43 per cent, they are not in the majority. Mr Trump’s net favourability in the UK ranges between minus 70 and 75 per cent.

The ensuing energy price shock caused by Iran’s completely foreseeable closure of the Strait of Hormuz will no doubt affect these metrics further.

Mr Trump has given no compelling reason for pursuing regime change now, when the threat of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon was no more acute two weeks ago than it was two months prior and was supposedly obliterated anyway by the President’s strikes in April last year.

And his administration’s macho tone and their mock video game reels, likening real life, death and war to a Wii sports game, are shameful.

“We will stop at nothing to win. War is hell. War is chaos,” Pete Hegseth, the former Fox-personality-turned-Secretary-of-War, said.

With this tone, it is hard for any leader to tell their public that this military campaign is one they should risk their lives for, particularly after Mr Trump’s ingratitude for those killed in Afghanistan.

But despite all the attacks on allies, the insults against dead veterans and the continuous threat of unjustified trade tariffs, which were even proposed alongside a now-abandoned takeover of Greenland, they will respond, as they should.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who Mr Trump has savaged as “no Winston Churchill,” spoke to the President on Sunday night about the “importance of reopening the Strait of Hormuz to end the disruption to global shipping,” which is driving up costs worldwide.

And Mr Starmer made sure to extend his condolences for America’s war dead.

The UK has said it is open to any option to contribute but stressed countering drone capabilities rather than warships, which are in short supply — the Royal Navy only dispatched its first warship to the eastern Mediterranean last week. The war in Iran has once again exposed the UK’s hollowed-out forces that is the fault of decades of under-investment.

For Mr Trump’s critics, failure in Iran would be vindication. But they should be wishing otherwise. The potential removal of the tyrannical, oppressive Iranian regime remains a noble goal, as the tragic return of the majority of the Iranian soccer players who had been given asylum in Australia underlines. This is a regime that will never let its citizens, and especially not its women, live, play, sing and experience joy freely.

One glimmer of a concession came from Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who told CBS that Iran’s nuclear facilities were irretrievable and could stay that way.

“Of course, you know there is the possibility to retrieve them. If one day we come to the conclusion to do that, it would be under the supervision of the agency. But for the time being, we have no program. We have no plan to recover them from under the rubbles,” he said.

On top of the Ayatollah’s death, and that is a passing no one should mourn, this is the sort of concession the US is looking for but remains locked in a battle of wills with Tehran for now.

The Institute for the Study of War described the trajectory of the war as “relatively positive”, with significant missile and drone capabilities taken out, but said more time was needed.

“But the campaign remains incomplete, and it is too soon to forecast its outcome. Declaring it an operational failure is unquestionably premature,” the ISW said.

If regime change is indeed what Trump and Israel are pursuing, that requires a longer-term strategic patience and complex diplomacy that would be allergic to Mr Trump’s preference for short, sharp, surgical operations like last year’s in Iran and against Venezuela.

“The regime forces are not modest in size; they are a million men with weapons who have shown a willingness to kill their own citizens of them in the January demonstrations alone, so this is a formidable regime capability,” former CIA director and retired US General David Petraeus told the CSIS think tank.

“Force does not necessarily translate into political success, particularly if there isn’t sufficient planning for the aftermath,” Megan O’Sullivan, who served as George W. Bush’s “war tsar” during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, told US television show This Week.

America’s allies are right to fear that this conflict won’t end in weeks, as Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright sought to reassure would be the case.

And although they won’t, they have every reason to ask their predatory ally for a refund for the tariffs that Trump has gleefully and unjustifiably imposed on countries like Australia and the UK if they are required to contribute military force to unlock the Strait of Hormuz and prevent ordinary voters suffering through a third inflation shock after Covid and the Ukraine war.

And perhaps the next time a MAGAite starts spouting “burden sharing,” they can be reminded that the costs of alliances can be two-way.