For all of our sakes, let’s hope that Donald Trump’s Operation Epic Fury doesn’t turn into Operation Epic Fail.

It could still go either way.

And although I’ve written here before that hope is not a strategy, the rapid disintegration of the global order means there’s little else to lean on in this moment.

Last year, in an interview with the New York Times, Donald Trump said the only constraint to his power as US president was: “My own morality, my own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

He added: “I don’t need international law.”

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Today, we’re living that quote from the “apex opportunist”, as the Liberal MP and SAS veteran Andrew Hastie rightly describes Trump, who aims to hoover up global oil supplies (via first Venezuela and now Iran) as much as anything else.

Hastie also says anyone who thinks the global rules-based order still exists is in “fantasyland”.

The attacks on Iran are a vindication of the Canadian prime minister’s viral Davos speech, where Mark Carney rightly declared: “Nostalgia is not a strategy … Stop invoking a rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised.”

We can hardly expect to influence the behaviour of others – China in relation to Taiwan, for example – when the world’s biggest democracy is taking a “might is right” stance.

It’s clear any means of accountability or consistent application of........

© The Guardian