Exhibit A is last weekend’s South Australian election. For all the glee among hardliners at One Nation overtaking the Liberals and thereby punishing weakness, the result was not a more conservative government but a record Labor majority as the overall centre-right vote splintered and dissipated in preferences.

Maybe that matters little in a state with a competent, centrist, business-friendly government with a right-wing Labor Premier.

But what about in Victoria this coming November, where a big One Nation vote could yet save the worst Labor government in the country? And what about in Canberra in two years, when a big One Nation vote could give a third term to a government that has not only delivered a stagnant economy and a fractured society but that, quite possibly, due to its neglect of energy security, won't even have kept the traffic moving and the lights on?

Many admire Paulene

Many voters admire Pauline Hanson for her resilience and her consistency. As she has grown less angry and more assured and as her organisation has become more professional and less likely to endorse misfits, the message that she’s saying what you're thinking has become more compelling. Her once alarmist claim about the country being swamped by migrants now looks almost prescient.

The Scanlon Foundation Research Institute has been mapping social cohesion for almost two decades. In 2007, at the close of the Howard era, 77% of us told the institute’s pollster that we had a great sense of belonging to Australia. By the middle of last year, that had dropped to 46%.

Over the same period, the percentage taking great pride in the Australian way of life had dropped from 58% to just 34%. And 51% now think migration is too high, with far more Australians being negative than positive about migrants from the Middle East and about Muslims. So the concern that Hanson has been articulating, more or less continuously since 1996, that we risk becoming strangers in our own country is now much more widely reflected among voters.

No aspirations to be PM

Yet while she has tapped the national mood more effectively than either big party, she’s not aiming to replace either of them, saying the idea that she could be the PM or even the leader of the opposition is ridiculous.

While Hanson is plainly closer to the Coalition than to the ALP, One Nation failed to direct its preferences, despite the Liberals explicitly sending theirs her way. Which meant that despite obtaining over 40% of the first preference votes, the two right-of-centre parties will be lucky to get 20% of the South Australian seats.

Because most One Nation supporters are former Liberal voters, it’s the Coalition that they're most angry with; because on hot-button issues impacting social and economic wellbeing, like mass migration and net zero, for much of the past decade, the Libs have been Labor-lite. For some, it’s now less a protest vote against a party that has lost its way ∼ or even a bid to change a bad Labor government; because, they think, the so-called uni-party always wins ∼ than vindictiveness against the party they feel has most let them down.

Need for deeper convictions

The Liberals won't win jilted conservatives back just by changing policies on energy and immigration. That’s necessary but it’s not sufficient. More than just better, stronger policies in critical areas, the Liberals need deeper and stronger convictions. It has to be less a change of policy than a change of heart with the new policies built on conviction, not just calculation. If they can't manage that, the Liberals could turn out to be as doomed as the old United Australia Party was in 1943.

The Liberals under John Howard and Tony Abbott could win landslides because voters knew that they actually believed in policies that put Australia first. Whether they voted for them or not, the public saw in Howard and Abbott men of conviction and consistency. And whether you agree with Hanson or not, that is what One Nation supporters see in her. Under Howard and Abbott, One Nation was kept in check because in those days, there was no vacuum on the centre right.

Created first by Malcolm Turnbull, made worse by Scott Morrison, left open by Peter Dutton and not yet filled by Angus Taylor. An unholy combination of treachery, net-zero capitulation, cultural ambiguity and policy agnosticism. Even though it’s an iron law of politics that vacuums will eventually be filled — as One Nation has lately done very effectively.

Yet still, even when faced with last Saturday’s disaster, some Liberals continue to deny reality.

Still tilting left

Senior federal Liberal frontbencher Anne Ruston, a South Australian, declared the party needs to return to governing from the centre. Return? It was the very move to the centre ∼ a leftward move ∼ that has brought them down, opened up the opportunity for One Nation and left them facing oblivion.

Rather than sneer at One Nation, Liberals like Ruston need to appreciate that on issues of national unity and pride, One Nation was always far more right than wrong. And One Nation supporters need to appreciate that a strong Liberal-National Coalition remains the best hope of better government in this country.

Politics in this country is changing fast, and Liberals need the same relationship with One Nation that Labor has long had with the Greens because without disciplined preference flows Labor is the only winner.

Should the strikes on Iran end with nothing resolved, the conclusion deserves to be starker still: it is not only the plan that has failed but the doctrine behind it.

That doctrine ∼ limited war theory ∼ was born in the 1950s. Recoiling from the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction and from an American approach, forged in World War II, that coupled technological superiority with overwhelming firepower, the think tanks associated with the Pentagon proposed a more calculated alternative: restricted, proportionate force calibrated to political objectives.

Wars were reconceptualised as bargaining exercises.

Adversaries, subjected to graduated escalation, would read the signals, weigh the costs and, once continuing proved costlier than settling, come to the table. Armed force was just coercive diplomacy, each move a carefully pitched message leading to a negotiated outcome.

Vietnam exposed the doctrine

President John F. Kennedy embraced it, including as the answer to a Cold War increasingly waged in the jungles and shanty towns of the Third World.

But Vietnam exposed the doctrine’s fatal flaw. Having entered the war, Washington placed elaborate restraints on itself — geographic sanctuaries, target immunities, incremental deployments.

Meanwhile, Hanoi fought for total stakes: the unification of Vietnam, by any means, over any timeline. General Giap grasped exactly what American strategic restraint reflected: not scrupulous proportionality but limited will. Each restriction confirmed, in the Communists' reading, that the US lacked the stomach for a real fight.

The proof came with Operation Rolling Thunder, launched in 1965: a highly selective bombing campaign designed to send signals and bring Hanoi to the table. The message didn't get through. Rolling Thunder ground on for three years, inflicting damage without dinting the Communists' unrelenting focus on victory.

By '72 the war was lost

When the far deadlier Linebacker campaign of December 1972 finally targeted critical infrastructure, it did induce the North to negotiate — but by then it was far too late: the war was politically lost at home, the endgame already written.

As Robert Osgood, who advised presidents Nixon and Reagan, concluded, the US was in an inferior position in any contest of wills because its interests were less absolute, and its reliance on public support far greater, than Hanoi’s.

The Tet offensive of January 1968 had proved the point. A military rout for the Communists, it was a political catastrophe for the Johnson administration — all the more so as North Vietnam timed it to resonate in the primaries and the upcoming elections.

The president’s own advisers ∼ the Wise Men ∼ told him the war was unwinnable. If they had been so deeply influenced by Tet, Johnson noted, what must the average citizen be thinking? Giap sensed the change: Until Tet they thought they could win the war, now they knew they could not.

Can't remake in US image

From Vietnam, America drew two lessons. First, if you fight, fight to win. When we commit our troops to combat, we must do so with the sole object of winning, Reagan’s defence secretary, Caspar Weinberger, declared in 1984, articulating the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine of decisive force that marked a return to pre-Vietnam practice.

Second: don't try to remake foreign nations in America’s image. Entanglement in civil conflicts has a grim internal logic ∼ costs mount, resolve withers ∼ and Tolstoy’s two great warriors, Time and Patience, will outlast any occupier whose electorate tires of deaths and pain.

George W. Bush heeded the first lesson and ignored the second. Shock and awe ∼ the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine’s direct progeny ∼ was devastating on the battlefield. But as the second lesson had predicted, nation-building turned into a politically unsustainable fiasco.

Reeling from that outcome, Barack Obama abandoned the first lesson too. Nothing made that clearer than the absence of the word victory in his 2009 West Point address on strategy. Limited war theory returned under new branding ∼ strategic patience ∼ repeating the failed logic of its previous application: a decision in favour of indecision.

Joe Biden then applied that logic to Ukraine, barring Kyiv from striking Russian soil and rationing weapons in cautious ∼ sufficient but not escalatory ∼ tranches. That gifted the initiative to Vladimir Putin and turned the conflict into a blood-soaked quagmire.

The Ukraine conflict should have made one thing unmistakeable: graduated escalation is not a strategy; it is a way of avoiding one. But Iran is an even less promising context for the doctrine’s application. Where Hanoi and Moscow each pursued strategic ends, the Iranian regime frames the conflict in categorically different terms: not a contest to be managed but a Holy War, fuelled by an apocalyptic theology of redemptive martyrdom.

Half-measures will not work

Against such an adversary, half-measures are futile. Victory requires the decisive force Obama and Biden would not countenance: a sustained campaign aimed at crippling critical infrastructure, paralysing the regime’s capacity to function and obliterating its offensive capabilities.

Instead, after a strong start, Donald Trump drew a red line and then, seemingly seduced by the lure of the deal, deferred the reckoning.

The risk is of a return to the discredited doctrine of limited war, leaving Iran free to attack its neighbours, hold the world economy to ransom, and feign negotiation — or even worse, dictate a deal’s terms.

Wars, Machiavelli warned, begin where you will but do not end where you please. How this one will end remains clouded by an impenetrable fog in which all options are possible and none certain.

What is clear, however, is that the ramifications reach far beyond the conflict itself. Looking at the United States, it is hard not to recall Joseph Chamberlain’s despairing remark in 1902, as Britain emerged badly shaken from the Second Boer War. Victorious but financially, militarily and politically depleted, Britain was, said Chamberlain, a weary titan, staggering under the too vast orb of its fate.

No political will

The consequences were inexorable: Britain could no longer underwrite the Pax Britannica and the burden of guarding the global commons slowly passed to the United States. It is that inheritance which is being tested in the Strait of Hormuz.

The problem is that no alternative guarantor stands ready. European governments have neither the military means nor the political will. Accustomed to luxuriating in the benefits of a peace they have done nothing to secure or defend, they mutter fighting words only to immediately walk them back, petrified at the prospect of their own blood being shed. Nor can the gap be filled by the paper tiger of international law, which, unlike real law, is more often invoked against upholders of the rules than against their defiers.

That leaves the United States. But Americans are as divided as at any time since the Civil War, and less willing than ever to shoulder costs from which others make the greatest gain.

For Australia, which has long prospered in the shelter of a powerful ally, the oil price is likely to prove the least of the shocks to come. A country that has never had to assure its own lifelines may now face the harshest challenge of all: a world in which the threats can be trusted but the promises cannot.