“We take the world as it is, but we seek to shape it for the better.”

This has been Penny Wong’s guiding foreign policy mantra since before Labor returned to power in 2022, a dictum that seeks to fuse the two competing strands of international relations: realism and idealism.

The two-state solution conference co-hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday morning, Australian time, at United Nations headquarters in New York was heady with idealism. World leaders, including Anthony Albanese, rose to the podium to speak about their goal to shape the world for the better by advancing the cause of Palestinian statehood.

Hard-headed realism was in shorter supply. For three hours of lofty speech-making, the grim reality of the world as it is often vanished from view, smothered by vis

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