For nearly three years now, precisely since October 7, 2023, earthquakes and hurricanes have been battering the world, and what matters most to us is what is happening in the Middle East. It is no longer the site of confounding wars alone, but of "confounders" no one expected to carry such weight, wrapped in vast clouds of uncertainty. How can any scholar or analyst discuss a subject while it is still fermenting and shifting, most likely undergoing what happens to tectonic plates during an earthquake? We are, in all likelihood, in the position of a blind man trying to measure an ice cube as it melts between his fingers.
Wars and revolutions are by definition bloody and full of surprises, astonishing us at the moment they begin, then surprising us again at the moment of their sudden end. This most likely happens because we are, in the end, human beings who have lived through social movements and leaderships with astonishing qualities of their own. In the not-distant past we were caught off guard by the revolutions of Eastern Europe, exactly as we were by what came to be called the "Arab Spring," which was hard to imagine in a Middle East where spring is short, the sands are hot and gusting, and a brief winter gives way to a long summer.
We are now in another decade, yet the Gaza wars have stretched to five; and despite a relative calm under the Board of Peace, the surrounding circles are hot - in Lebanon and Syria, extending into a deteriorating reality in the West Bank under the unjust tutelage of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. The fourth Gulf war oscillates between hot and cold, between the drive to war and its escalation; and the truce offers no solution, only room for a crueler resumption of the fighting, with nothing on the horizon to suggest the exhaustion usually offered up to halt it.
Innovation in the instruments of violence has become vast and continually renewed, whether by states, by armies, or by the militias that are now part of the complicated picture.
In earlier columns we pointed to that group of countries that pursued modernization and modernity, drawing on their patriotism within a national state that has a project and a time-bound "Vision"; these states hold fast to achieving regional stability while preserving their own capabilities. They have worked seriously to prevent war, to blunt its harshness and aggression, or to delay its outbreak, but the dilemma is the extreme volatility of the warring parties.
Ambiguity, volatility, and complexity all turn on individuals with the power to make decisions. In international relations there are three circles around which diagnosis and the grasping of truth revolve. The first is "the international system and the degree of its tension and hostility," and here the United States is immersed in the Iranian war while Russia is immersed in the war in Ukraine. China, meanwhile, gazes off into the distance, its diplomacy a matter of economics, markets, and silence in a time of war. It offers a new model of the great power that waits at length, believing all the while in the familiar saying that the killer's patience with his victim may be enough to see him dead. The Soviet Union collapsed at one point; perhaps the time has come for the rival pole to entertain the same thought.
The second circle is the regional order, out of which ten states have fallen - still fighting civil wars or hovering at their edge - all of them having shed the garb of the national state the moment militias took up arms and offered themselves as an alternative to the national army.
The third is the leaderships that must, in the end, take decisions after identifying national objectives and devising a strategy capable of reaching goals measurable in capability and in time. Despite the great distance between the US and Iran, their mental maps are as far apart as the sky from the earth: one carries the smell of the New York exchanges, while the other is wrapped entirely in the dreams of Iran's "Revolutionary Guard," underwritten by verses from heaven. If anything unites them, it is volatility and reversal, while the strategic objectives befitting grand projects for the Middle East change by the hour.
The Middle East is crowded with figures of influence, seduced by the urge to leave their mark on history, while its reality carries it and its world beyond the realm of stability and prosperity. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has drawn deeply from the books of racism and hatred.
