Category: Geopolitics & Security, Australian Foreign Policy, Middle East Analysis, Strategic Affairs, Defence & Intelligence

Satirical illustration of a chaotic war cabinet: an orange-tinted central figure gestures at a Middle East map while two suited advisers argue across a table strewn with classified folders. A pale isolated figure sits apart in shadow. A screen shows Tehran under attack. A Caribbean fishing boat is visible through the window.

Trump’s Team at War With Itself

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There is a peculiar kind of drama playing out inside the Trump Bunker of the Bizarre. Its theme? The accidental Armageddon. A government so witless it could not run a bath has launched the most ambitious US military operation in living memory — and nobody in Team Trump can agree on why, for how long, or what winning looks like. Urban Wronski reports in two parts.

Aerial view of a destroyed girls' school in southern Iran, rubble strewn across a courtyard, small backpacks visible among the debris, emergency workers standing back at dusk as smoke rises from the ruins.

Double Tap? Double Depravity

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As US and Israeli forces use double-tap airstrikes to kill survivors and first responders in Iran, Australia’s silence makes us complicit. Pine Gap is in the kill chain. Anthony Albanese had three hours to decide. He chose wrong.

Chess king in checkmate on dissolving board symbolising Trump Iran war strategic collapse with no endgame

Trump’s Iran Blunder

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Robert Reich knows Trump has no endgame for his Iran war. What he doesn’t see from inside the American story: the munitions arithmetic is catastrophic, the legal basis non-existent, and Canberra has made us part of it without asking a single question in Parliament.

Editorial illustration representing a small power directing a large military force — a metaphor for Israel's strategic influence over US military action against Iran in 2026.

The Tail That Wags the Dog: Israel’s War, America’s Blood

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Three American soldiers are dead. A girls’ primary school in Minab is rubble. The Strait of Hormuz is under threat. Regional war has arrived — exactly as every credible analyst, diplomat and international lawyer predicted. Urban Wronski on how Israel wagged the most powerful dog in the world into the most dangerous Middle Eastern conflagration since Iraq 2003.

Silhouetted figures in a darkened war room study maps and screens showing Middle East strike targets, while a crumpled peace agreement lies on the floor below, a telephone receiver off the hook beside it

He Was Warned. He Knew. He Did It Anyway.

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Trump was warned by Iran, by his own intelligence services, by international mediators and by members of his own Congress. The warnings were not vague — they were specific, on the record, and entirely accurate. Iran had agreed to a nuclear breakthrough the day before. Netanyahu lobbied for the strike. MBS made private phone calls urging it. US intelligence said there was no imminent threat. Trump attacked anyway. Now the region burns.