The world has never been in such a state. While a benign, admittedly imperfect alliance for good  has existed since before the settlement of Australia in 1788 – originally British-led and now American – it now faces a worldwide Axis of Evil, one intent on our destruction. As Beijing demonstrated in moving from communist to fascist, one thing is fundamental in the Axis, and that is power. It is not so much theory or dogma; it is brutal evil power.

What is different today is the emergence in the West of singularly large and influential treasonable fifth columns, working openly or clandestinely for the Axis. Meanwhile, the greatest lie told by Australia’s worst government is not the fifty-times-denied imposition of new and destructive taxation. It is the lie that it is a government of the centre. It is, by far, Australia’s most hard-left or far-left government. Whenever it can get away with it, it will favour the Evil Axis over the American alliance, so much so that it is prepared to damage and even wreck our economy, render the nation defenceless, and publicly criticise or even insult Donald Trump in a way that the Beijing dictator never is. Nowhere is this institutional rot more visible than in their refusal to fully back the American offensive against the regime in Tehran, preferring the cowardice of the sidelines when  minimal naval support was requested.

Meanwhile, the Western foreign policy establishment remains trapped in a loop of perpetual self-delusion. As reports circulate of a fresh push by career diplomats to secure a new memorandum of understanding with Tehran, the permanent bureaucracies of Washington, London, and other European capitals are salivating to return to a failed status quo of ‘managed containment’. Canberra and a predictable chorus in the legacy media follow, telling us that a diplomatic settlement is unavoidable because, in their jaundiced view, Tehran is winning.

It is a movie we have watched before, and the ending is always written in Western capitulation and regional blood.

As American broadcaster Mark Levin recently warned, any deal with the current totalitarian regime is obviously doomed. He correctly frames this not as a standard diplomatic dispute, but as a fundamental clash between Western civilisation and a theological dictatorship backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps which, like all praetorian guards, will take over to survive. To offer this cornered regime an economic lifeline and a pause in military pressure is madness.

Worse still, this sudden rush to the negotiating table represents a coordinated attempt by the permanent establishment to subvert Donald Trump’s long-standing, wise policy of ‘maximum pressure’ and force his administration back into the failed, defensive lines of the Carter-Obama-Biden eras.

The Western media – including much of the defensive-realist foreign policy establishment in Australia – is actively cheering this manoeuvre. They want us to forget that Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was rammed through over the fierce, bipartisan objections of the US Congress, the explicit warnings of our most vital Middle Eastern allies, and the precise analytical demolition of the deal by heavyweights like the late Charles Krauthammer.

As consistently argued in these pages, the legacy of that era was not peace, but a multi-billion-dollar windfall handed over by naïve Western leaders directly to the mullahs  to finance  regional proxy wars and terrorism. When the current administration initiated Operation Epic Fury, it stood in stark contrast to the historical passivity of Obama and his amanuensis, Joe Biden. To retreat from that position of strength now would be strategic tragedy.

But the fatal flaw of the current diplomatic push goes deeper than mere political amnesia. The fundamental error of the Western diplomatic elite is the absurd, mirror-imaged belief that a ‘good deal’ can be verified into compliance. It assumes an adversary that views an international treaty as a binding covenant. The mullahs never do.

In the political culture of the Islamic Republic, strategic deception is not a vice; it is an institutionalised instrument of statecraft. Under the doctrines of Taqiyya (strategic dissimulation) and Ketman (concealment of true intent), misleading a non-believing foreign government is a legitimate tactical weapon.

If Western diplomats bothered to study the active governing logic of the regime, they would find that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini himself, in his treatise Risala-ye Taqiyya, codified the reality that deceptive concealment becomes a binding religious obligation if it serves the public good and the preservation of the Islamic state. This is further reinforced by the overarching doctrine of Maslahat (Regime Expediency), which dictates that the Supreme Leader possesses the absolute authority to suspend any legal, moral, or religious prohibition if the survival of the regime requires it.

We have the empirical, undeniable receipts of this duplicity in action. For a decade, Western liberals treated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s phantom ‘nuclear fatwa’ – an oral pronouncement allegedly banning nuclear weapons – as a load-bearing assumption of international diplomacy. Yet a codified text of that fatwa never existed. It was a masterpiece of political theatre. Iranian negotiators later openly boasted that this presentation was merely a tactical improvisation designed to exploit Western naivety.

The ultimate smoking gun arrived when Israeli intelligence successfully spirited the massive ‘Amad Archive’ out of the heart of Tehran. The captured internal memos, engineering blueprints, and test data proved that while diplomats smiled and swore their intentions were peaceful, the regime was systematically filing away the technical schematics required to build a nuclear warhead.

To enter into an apparently ‘favourable’ agreement with an entity whose governing theology mandates duplicity, and whose historical record is an unbroken chain of perjury, is worse than unwise – it is a betrayal of Western security. A favourable deal is simply a more heavily gilded trap. As the head of the Iranian opposition movement, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, so insightfully observes: ‘You cannot reform a snake. Venom is in its DNA.’

Mark Levin is entirely correct: the West and the United States have unwisely restrained Israel from delivering a decisive blow for far too long. The solution to the Iranian threat will never be found on a signed piece of paper in Geneva or Oman. The only meaningful resolution is to  paralyse then destroy the power of the mullahs, and their Praetorian Guard, and enable the Iranian people to change the regime.  That is undoubtedly their wish, indeed, their dream, expressed in the prayer, ‘Javid Shah’, ‘Long Live The Shah.’