History, as Gibbon nearly said, is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. And so it is that we observe, with a mixture of fatigue and horror, the latest escapade from the duo of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Their grand scheme to ‘reshape the Middle East’ by sheer force of will – and by will, I mean American bombs and Israeli settlements – is a recipe for a permanent crisis that will leave Britain’s allies gasping for breath.
Let us be clear: the notion that the Middle East can be remade by a handful of men in a Tel Aviv bunker or a Mar-a-Lago ballroom is the kind of delusion that characterised the worst of Victorian imperialism. Lord Curzon must be smiling in his grave. The region is not a blank canvas; it is a palimpsest of ancient hatreds, colonial scars, and sectarian fissures. To ignore this is to invite the very permacrisis that Bowen warns of.
Consider the track record. The Iraq war, sold as a neat democracy project, gave us ISIS and a shattered state. Libya’s ‘liberation’ produced a failed state and a slave market. Now, the Trump-Netanyahu axis proposes to ‘normalise’ relations with Saudi Arabia, dangle a defence pact, and ignore the Palestinian question entirely. This is not statecraft; it is arson disguised as diplomacy.
For Britain’s allies in the Gulf – the UAE, Bahrain, even Jordan – this is a nightmare. They are being asked to sign up for a strategy that promises stability but delivers chaos. The Houthis, Hezbollah, and Iran’s proxies will not vanish because Trump tweets. They will adapt, strike back, and drag the region into a spiral of retaliation. The result? A permacrisis: low-grade, unending conflict that drains resources and radicalises populations.
And what of Britain? Our foreign office, ever eager to cling to America’s coattails, will nod along. But the cost will be borne by our allies: the Saudis facing a boomerang of Wahhabi extremism, the Emiratis stuck with a billion-dollar ‘Abraham Accords’ that deliver nothing but slogans, and the hapless Jordanians, who stand to lose their last buffer if the West Bank boils over.
This is intellectual decadence of the highest order. The belief that history is a pipe to be played as we wish is the folly of the powerful. The Middle East is a patchwork of grievances; to claim it can be ‘shaped’ is to repeat the mistakes of every empire from Rome to the Raj. We are not in an age of great civilisations, but of gangsters with nuclear briefcases. And the British establishment, in its wisdom, seems content to let them play.
But let them play, they will burn. And Britain, true to form, will be left to sweep up the ashes.
