Ask yourself a simple question: if Australia's most important military ally launches what US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called "the most lethal, most complex, and most-precision aerial operation in history," and Canberra finds out roughly when the rest of us did, watching the news, what exactly does that say about the alliance?
That is the question that hung over Sunday's National Security Committee meeting, and it is the question Prime Minister Anthony Albanese conspicuously refused to answer. Foreign Minister Penny Wong confirmed Australia had no advance notice of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran. Asked repeatedly whether facilities such as Pine Gap, Australia's joint intelligence surveillance base in the Northern Territory, played any role, Albanese would only repeat that this was "unilateral action taken by the United States." That formulation is technically precise and diplomatically evasive in equal measure.
The operation itself was extraordinary by any measure. The joint US-Israeli attack, called "Epic Fury" by the Pentagon and "Roaring Lion" by Israel, came after weeks of escalating tensions and a major US military buildup in the region. Intelligence gathered over months by the CIA and shared with Israeli counterparts led to the missile strike that killed Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials on Saturday. According to CNN's reporting, Israeli and American agencies had been monitoring Khamenei's daily movements and patterns for months, waiting for the right convergence. The CIA had been tracking Khamenei's location for several months before the strikes, gaining deeper insight into his whereabouts as he moved around, before learning about a Saturday morning meeting of senior officials at a compound in Tehran that Khamenei was expected to attend. That insight, relayed to Israeli counterparts, accelerated the timeline for a strike to capitalise on the opportunity.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on Saturday, with sources telling CBS News the initial strikes were believed to have killed about 40 Iranian officials. Israel's military said top Iranian security officials were among those killed, including the defence minister, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the secretary of the Iranian Security Council. Iranian state media announced 40 days of mourning and a week of public holidays. The Islamic Republic, for all its ideological rigidity, was reeling.
The strategic logic Washington and Jerusalem offered was unambiguous. The US had been trying to negotiate a deal with Iran to limit its nuclear programme, holding the most recent round of talks in Geneva on Thursday, but Trump said those efforts had failed. Trump's envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner had reportedly called the president after the Geneva session to confirm Iran's refusal to dismantle its enrichment capabilities. According to 9News reporting, the administration had offered Iran options for developing a peaceful nuclear programme, including a proposal to provide nuclear fuel, but these were rejected. The decision to proceed militarily followed swiftly.
For Canberra, the immediate practical crisis involved Australian nationals. Wong said more than 4,000 Australians had registered for help to leave the Middle East, around 2,900 in Iran and 1,300 in Israel. Australian officials have been deployed to Iran's border with Azerbaijan to assist Australians who were able to cross. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade activated its Crisis Centre and urged any Australians remaining in Iran to shelter in place if they could not safely leave.
Albanese's public posture was supportive, if carefully calibrated. He described the Iranian regime as a "destabilising force" for decades, "through its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, support for armed proxies, and brutal acts of violence and intimidation." He pointed to direct Iranian interference on Australian soil: Iran directed at least two attacks on Australian soil in 2024, targeting Australia's Jewish community in acts that were "intended to create fear, divide our society and challenge our sovereignty," and Australia had responded by expelling Iran's ambassador, suspending embassy operations in Tehran, and listing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a state sponsor of terrorism.
The counter-argument deserves serious consideration
The critics are not only on the fringes. Australian legal experts joined international lawyers in raising questions about the strikes' legality under the 1945 UN Charter. Ben Saul, a professor of international law at the University of Sydney, described the US strikes as an "international crime of aggression," while Don Rothwell, professor of international law at the Australian National University, said the bombings had "no legitimacy under international law." Wong declined to offer a view on legality, saying she would leave that to Washington and Jerusalem to explain. Greens senator David Shoebridge called that "a comprehensive failure" of Australian governance.
The humanitarian dimension sits uncomfortably alongside any strategic calculation. The Iranian Red Crescent Society said more than 200 people had been killed in strikes across Iran. Reports emerged of a girls' primary school struck in the southern Iranian town of Minab, though the full casualty figures from that incident remain contested. Iran has launched drone and missile strikes against Bahrain, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and has threatened further retaliation, meaning the civilian toll on all sides continues to rise. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he "deeply regrets" that diplomacy had been "squandered" and warned the strikes risk "igniting a chain of events that nobody can control."
The Australian Greens were direct in their opposition. Senator Larissa Waters framed the operation as an illegal attack that would not advance Iranian democracy, and called on the government to offer safety to Iranian refugees already in Australia. One can disagree with the Greens' broader foreign policy instincts while acknowledging that their core concern, that military decapitation of a state does not automatically produce liberal democracy, is supported by the historical evidence of Iraq and Libya.
The succession crisis and the Hormuz gamble
The death of Khamenei ushers in only the second leadership transition since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, a member of the Guardian Council, was appointed on Sunday to a temporary three-member council whose other members are President Masoud Pezeshkian and Supreme Court Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei. According to Article 111 of the Iranian Constitution, this transitional council will govern until an 88-member panel called the Assembly of Experts chooses a new supreme leader.
The Council on Foreign Relations offered a sobering assessment of what comes next. "Taking out Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is not the same as regime change. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the regime," the CFR noted. "Leadership change in Iran could take three primary trajectories: regime continuity, military takeover, or regime collapse," the CFR reported, with the least likely of those three being the outcome Washington appears to be betting on. Analysts have warned that a regime fighting for its survival, stripped of the supreme leader's doctrine of strategic patience, may prove more violent and less calculated than the one it replaces.
The economic stakes for Australia are direct and serious. After coming under attack, Iran appeared to exercise one of its options for retaliation by putting a squeeze on the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf that handles about a quarter of the world's seaborne oil trade. A semiofficial Iranian media outlet described the strait as effectively shut, and ships reported hearing radio broadcasts purporting to come from the Iranian navy announcing that transit was banned. Some oil and gas tankers began avoiding the waterway. "A prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a guaranteed global recession," said one energy analyst. Major trading houses halted shipments through the strait amid Iranian threats, and insurance companies responded swiftly with dramatic price rises and war risk notices for some policies being cancelled. The last thing a household budget under cost-of-living pressure needs is a fuel price shock driven by a conflict on the other side of the world.
The bigger picture Australia cannot afford to ignore
Strip away the talking points and what remains is this: Australia supports a military action it was not consulted on, cannot confirm the legal basis of, and may have indirectly enabled through shared intelligence infrastructure. That is not an accusation. It is a description of the structural reality of the ANZUS alliance and of hosting joint facilities like Pine Gap. Every Australian government, Labor and Coalition alike, has accepted this arrangement as the price of collective security. The question is whether the Australian public is being given a sufficiently honest account of what that price actually entails.
The fundamental question is not whether Khamenei's regime was malign. It plainly was, and Albanese was right to say it will not be mourned by those who suffered under it. The question is whether this particular action, at this particular moment, conducted without UN authorisation, without congressional approval, and without notice to treaty allies, will produce a more stable or less stable Middle East. History will judge this moment by whether the gamble paid off, and the indicators this weekend are not encouraging.
Reasonable people, including reasonable strategic thinkers, can weigh the risks differently. The case for action rested on a genuine nuclear proliferation threat, on diplomatic failure after multiple rounds of talks, and on a hard-won intelligence opportunity that may not have recurred. The case for caution rested on international law, on the unpredictability of regime collapse, and on the economic catastrophe a sustained Hormuz closure would represent. Both cases contained real substance. Australia, sitting at the intersection of its US alliance and its dependence on open Asian trade routes, has more riding on getting this calculation right than almost any other country watching from the sidelines.