If the world were reminded of one thing this week, it is that America remains the world’s dominant imperial power, or, as is said, ‘superpower’. The point is that since colonial settlement, Australians have always belonged to what was the most advanced, powerful and benevolent empire. Despite a brief British flirtation curiously under the Chifley Labor government, Australia has been with the Americans since 1941. However, under the Albanese Labor government, this relationship could at best be described as nominal.

If you don’t think we belong to an empire, just remember what happened at about 2 a.m. a few nights ago. President Trump phoned Prime Minister Albanese and effectively instructed him to give asylum to the Iranian women soccer players. (See ‘The Trump Pivot,’ 11 March, spectator.com.au/author/david-flint. This and other comments between issues are available on Flat White, an online resource superbly edited by Alexandra Marshall. You can read each  comment in full by clicking the left-hand ‘x’ on the superimposed notification.)

It is, of course, to be expected that the leaders of imperial powers will vary in ability, and the respect they enjoy. This was particularly obvious to me when I was invited several weeks ago to speak at a rally of the Iranian diaspora. When I referred to President Trump, the crowd repeated his name approvingly several times, as if calling on him to intervene.

Contrast Donald Trump with another president, Jimmy Carter. In 1979, with the French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, he unbelievably pulled the rug from under a great ally, the Shah of Iran. The result was that from that moment, the West has been subject to the growing aggression and other criminal activities of the mullahs, the Islamist clerics who run that unfortunate country. They have been entirely open in their plans, which they summarise briefly through the brutal slogans, ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Death to America’. To destroy the United States, they have long planned to develop intercontinental missiles armed with nuclear bombs.

Even now, as the world’s greatest purveyors of terrorism, there can be little doubt that they are unleashing or preparing to unleash acts of terrorism in the United States, an endeavour greatly eased by Biden’s insane decision to throw open the borders.

As to the current US campaign in Iran, Operation Epic Fury, the Americans have put a strong case under international law. Having studied and taught in this field of law, I have no doubt that the US case is more than persuasive. The advent of the extraordinary number of people making rulings in international law encouraged me to post this comment: ‘Has every galah in every pet shop become an expert in international law?’, 6 March.

Notwithstanding the existence of this evil regime for 47 years, Donald J. Trump is the first president to decide to take concrete steps to ensure the mullahs never obtain a nuclear weapon. As noted in my comment ‘The Kharg Option’, 14 March, the elites prefer the ‘sophistication’ of Obama’s and Biden’s  nuclear deals, which provided billions to fund Iranian terrorism, rather than the Trumpian decision to exercise force.

What is surprising is that in a media interview in 1988, Trump had argued that the solution to Iranian aggression was simple: just ‘take Kharg Island’. This indicated that he had studied the problem, knew that 90 per cent of Iranian crude passed through there, and had considered the executive’s powers. The point surely is that dominant imperial power is most effectively exercised by a president who both understands power and, just as importantly, its limitations.

President Trump is such a president. He is as wise as those great leaders of the British in the 19th century who understood that their small country would remain dominant only by both exercising and knowing the limits of power.

In the meantime, Operation Epic Fury – the air-dominant campaign coordinated with Israel – has systematically dismantled the Iranian regime’s military hardware, neutralising 90 per cent of its ballistic missile capacity and decapitating the IRGC’s command structure. We are seeing the ‘Pahlavi Bridge’ move from theory to operational reality. Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi is widely expected to return once a ‘Stability Zone’ at a convenient airfield is secured, probably by a defecting elite military unit. He will no doubt confirm a referendum protocol that returns the ultimate choice of government, to the Iranian people as argued in my column ‘The Persian Vacuum’, 8 March.

This push for restoration of the monarchy comes as the senior clerics in the Holy City of Qom balk at the elevation of Mojtaba Khamenei and as President Trump signals his transactional ‘Miga’ (Make Iran Great Again) strategy, eyeing the rapid restoration of oil corridors at Kharg and Abadan to flood global markets. This will not only liberate Iran, but it will also take the nation out of the Beijing-Moscow-Pyongyang axis of evil. Moreover, after losing Venezuela, Beijing will lose a second significant source of black-market oil.

In the meantime, in Australia, our chameleon Prime Minister – a man of the far left, cunning enough to know he can only stay Prime Minister if he is thought to have moved to the centre – had to support Epic Fury, at least on paper. He avoided, where possible, any mention of our old ally Israel, insisting at every point that we were in no way involved, even where submariners were serving on a submarine in action.

Meanwhile, the establishment parties, including Labor, who have long made the fatal mistake of taking their members and supporters for granted, are being taught a lesson. Without the option of preferring One Nation, the recent leadership changes in the Liberals and Nationals would probably not have occurred.

These voters are especially irritated by the blatant untruth that One Nation is not a party of policy.

What is crucial is that Liberals, Nationals and One Nation all exchange preferences and direct their attacks on hard-left Labor and the Greens, a point I made in ‘Don’t attack Pauline, Senator Matt Canavan’, 12 March. (Unsurprisingly, Canavan received rich praise for his attack in a full report from the  left-wing Sydney Morning Herald.)

What is of singular importance and must dominate all the right’s actions is that to save this nation, the destructive Albanese government, by far the worst in our history, must be consigned to the waste bins of history.