Australia wants to lecture Iran about freedom of navigation while avoiding the harder question: how did the world get to a point where the Strait of Hormuz became a battlefield in the first place?
Australia has declared Iran's restrictions on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz “unacceptable.”
The statement sounds perfectly reasonable.
Nobody should celebrate attacks on commercial vessels. Nobody should want civilian seafarers caught in a war. And no responsible government should pretend that disrupting one of the world's most important maritime chokepoints has no consequences.
But there is a much bigger question that Canberra does not appear eager to confront:
What exactly did Australia expect to happen when it attached itself to a geopolitical order that repeatedly chose military escalation over diplomacy?
Because the Hormuz crisis did not emerge from nowhere.
It is the product of a war.
And Australia's foreign policy has been deeply connected to that war.
That is where Canberra's latest outrage becomes politically convenient — and geopolitically inadequate.
Iran did not wake up one morning and decide to redesign global shipping
The Strait of Hormuz is not an ordinary waterway.
It is one of the most strategically important maritime chokepoints on Earth.
Before the current war, roughly one-fifth of global oil and LNG shipments passed through the strait. The conflict has transformed that commercial artery into a major instrument of geopolitical pressure.
Iran has increasingly imposed restrictions on vessels it considers non-compliant.
Reuters reported this week that Iran expanded its blacklist to 56 vessels, including crude-oil tankers, LNG and LPG carriers and product vessels. The move followed Tehran's earlier announcement targeting ships it accused of violating its navigation rules.
Australia calls that unacceptable.
Fine.
But international politics does not work by examining the final consequence while pretending the preceding events never happened.
The question is:
Why is the Strait of Hormuz being militarised in the first place?
Australia has a serious geopolitical contradiction
Canberra wants the benefits of the Western security system without always confronting the consequences of the system it supports.
Australia is a close American ally.
It is part of the Five Eyes intelligence arrangement.
It hosts critical U.S.-Australian intelligence infrastructure.
And during the Iran conflict, Australian personnel and military assets became part of the wider regional security picture.
Yet Canberra has simultaneously insisted that its role is essentially defensive.
That distinction may make sense domestically.
It does not erase the larger geopolitical reality.
A country does not become geopolitically irrelevant simply because its government describes its military participation as defensive.
Australia refused to send a warship — and that tells us something
There is an extraordinary contradiction here.
When Washington wanted allies to contribute naval forces to protect shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, Australia declined.
In March, Australia's government said it would not send a navy ship to Hormuz to protect vessels from Iranian attacks.
That was arguably the more sensible decision.
Australia recognised that sending a warship into an already explosive confrontation could pull it deeper into a conflict that did not originate in Canberra.
But if Australia understood the danger then, why is Canberra now presenting the consequences of that geopolitical confrontation as though they are simply an isolated Iranian act?
This is where Australian foreign policy begins to look confused.
Australia wants the international rules-based order when it protects Australian interests, but it has struggled to articulate what happens when that order is undermined by the very military alliances Australia depends upon.
The West cannot demand “freedom of navigation” selectively
This is the uncomfortable part.
Freedom of navigation is important.
Commercial vessels should not be arbitrarily attacked.
Civilian sailors should not become bargaining chips.
But international law and maritime security cannot become a vocabulary used only when Western commercial interests are threatened.
The same principle must apply everywhere.
If a state objects to attacks on merchant ships, it must object consistently.
If a government believes international waterways must remain open, it must defend that principle consistently.
And if military action threatens to close those waterways, diplomacy must become the first line of defence rather than an afterthought.
Otherwise “rules-based order” becomes another phrase for:
rules when convenient.
The Hormuz crisis exposes Australia's limited strategic independence
Australia likes to portray itself as a sovereign middle power capable of making independent foreign-policy decisions.
But Canberra's strategic dependence on Washington complicates that image.
Australia's security architecture is overwhelmingly linked to the United States.
That relationship provides enormous benefits.
But it also creates a recurring problem:
When Washington enters a geopolitical confrontation, how much freedom does Canberra really have to pursue an independent position?
The Iran war has exposed that question again.
Australia has condemned Iran.
Australia has supported regional security measures.
Australia has maintained its alliance relationship with Washington.
Yet it has also avoided sending a naval ship into Hormuz.
That is not necessarily weakness.
It may actually be evidence that Canberra understands its limits.
But if Australia understands those limits, it should be using its diplomatic capital to push much harder for de-escalation.
Six months of war and the original geopolitical calculation has not delivered stability
The Iran war has now dragged on for months.
The original logic behind military pressure was supposed to produce strategic results.
Instead, the conflict has produced a highly unstable regional environment in which Iran continues to possess the ability to disrupt one of the world's most important energy routes.
Reuters reported in August that the conflict had become an unresolved stalemate, with Iran continuing to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz despite extensive military action.
That should be regarded as a geopolitical failure.
Not necessarily an Iranian victory.
Not necessarily an American defeat.
But a failure of the strategy to produce the stability its architects wanted.
Because if the objective of military power was to create a safer Middle East and more secure energy system, a Strait of Hormuz where shipping has been drastically reduced is evidence that something has gone badly wrong.
And Australia is paying for that failure
Australia is thousands of kilometres from the Middle East.
Yet the consequences are reaching Australia.
Energy markets have been destabilised.
Shipping routes have been disrupted.
Insurance costs have increased.
Supply chains have been exposed.
Australia itself is now looking more seriously at domestic gas resources as the Hormuz crisis threatens regional energy security. Reuters reported this week that the Beetaloo Basin in Australia's Northern Territory has gained strategic importance as Asian gas markets face disruption.
This is the irony.
Australia possesses enormous natural resources.
Yet its economic security can still be shaken by a war thousands of kilometres away.
That is what geopolitical interdependence looks like.
And it should encourage Canberra to become more diplomatic, not merely more militarised.
Iran's actions are dangerous. But so is pretending the conflict has no history
There is no need to romanticise Tehran.
Iran's restrictions on shipping can endanger civilian crews and disrupt global commerce.
They should be challenged.
But if Australia genuinely wants those restrictions to disappear, the question should not simply be:
“How do we punish Iran?”
It should be:
“How do we end the war that made Hormuz a weapon?”
That requires diplomacy.
Not another military coalition.
Not another round of sanctions.
Not another escalation followed by another demand that Iran behave normally.
You cannot bomb a country, threaten its regime, attack its military infrastructure and then be shocked when that country looks for strategic leverage.
That does not mean every Iranian response is legitimate.
It means geopolitics has consequences.
Australia has chosen alliance politics over geopolitical imagination
This is ultimately Australia's biggest failure.
Canberra is a wealthy, sophisticated country with a highly educated population and enormous diplomatic potential.
It could play the role of a genuine middle power.
It could mediate.
It could talk to Washington.
It could talk to Tehran.
It could talk to Gulf states.
It could work through the United Nations.
It could advocate a comprehensive maritime-security arrangement.
It could push for a negotiated framework guaranteeing commercial passage through Hormuz.
Instead, Australia's foreign policy too often appears trapped inside the gravitational field of Washington.
That may be comfortable.
It is not necessarily strategic.
Look at what the Gulf states are learning
The countries closest to the crisis are already drawing a different conclusion.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are accelerating efforts to diversify infrastructure and develop routes that reduce their dependence on Hormuz.
Reuters reports that Gulf states are pushing pipelines, ports and alternative export corridors because the crisis has exposed the vulnerability created by dependence on a single chokepoint.
That is geopolitics.
They are not waiting for somebody else to guarantee their survival.
They are changing their strategic calculations.
Australia should be doing the same thing diplomatically.
The world is changing — and Canberra still thinks in Cold War categories
This is perhaps the greatest problem.
The old model was simple:
America leads.
Its allies follow.
Adversaries are pressured.
Military superiority produces deterrence.
But the Iran conflict has demonstrated the limitations of that model.
Military superiority does not automatically produce political submission.
Destroying infrastructure does not automatically destroy national resistance.
Assassinating leaders does not necessarily eliminate a state's ability to retaliate.
And attacking a country's military capacity does not necessarily prevent it from weaponising geography.
Iran has demonstrated precisely that through Hormuz.
A relatively narrow maritime corridor can become a geopolitical weapon capable of affecting energy markets thousands of kilometres away.
Australia needs to decide what kind of middle power it wants to be
Does Australia want to be America's southern Pacific outpost?
Or does it want to become an independent middle power capable of speaking to all sides?
Those are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Australia can maintain its alliance with the United States without surrendering its diplomatic imagination.
It can condemn Iran's treatment of commercial shipping while simultaneously questioning the military strategy that created the present crisis.
It can support freedom of navigation while demanding freedom from endless war.
It can cooperate with Washington while telling Washington when its policies are making the world less stable.
That is what an ally with strategic confidence does.
The real lesson from Hormuz
Iran's restrictions are unacceptable.
But so is the geopolitical blindness that produced the environment in which those restrictions became possible.
The international community cannot keep destroying diplomatic space and then complain when geography becomes a weapon.
Australia cannot keep outsourcing strategic thinking to Washington and then pretend it has no responsibility for the consequences of the geopolitical order it supports.
The Strait of Hormuz is now a warning.
It demonstrates that military power has limits.
It demonstrates that economic warfare has consequences.
It demonstrates that regional powers can retaliate asymmetrically.
And most importantly, it demonstrates that there is no substitute for diplomacy when the alternative is turning one of the world's most important waterways into a battlefield.
Australia should therefore stop behaving as though its only job is to condemn Iran.
Its job should be much bigger.
Help end the war.
Because if Canberra genuinely wants commercial ships moving freely through Hormuz, the most effective long-term strategy is not simply to demand that Iran reopen the waterway.
It is to help create the political conditions under which Iran no longer has an incentive to close it.
That is what serious diplomacy looks like.
And that is precisely where Australian foreign policy has failed the geopolitical test.
Australia has plenty of military allies. What it desperately needs is a foreign policy of its own.
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