It would appear that the long shadows of the Roman proconsuls have found a new home in the modern Middle East. News comes that Israel, undeterred by the incoming American administration’s vague demands for restraint, has launched a fresh wave of strikes on Lebanon. This is not merely a military escalation, it is a declaration: the sovereign state of Israel acts in accordance with its own strategic calculus, not the whims of a man in Washington who imagines himself a modern-day Augustus.
Trump’s criticism, for all its bluster, is a paper tiger. The Israeli leadership knows that the West’s attention span is short, and its appetite for foreign entanglement is even shorter. We are witnessing the death throes of the liberal international order, replaced by a Hobbesian scramble where might, not a United Nations resolution, makes right.
The strikes are precise, the collateral damage is regretfully acknowledged, and the world will tut and move on. Meanwhile, the Lebanese people, as ever, are the ones who must live with the rubble. This is the reality of our decadent era: great powers no longer command, they merely comment.
And so Israel pounds Beirut, and we are all reduced to spectators of a tragedy that has no intermission.
