It is a curious thing to watch the architects of chaos lecture the bricklayers. The recent warning from Sir John Bowen, that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are steering the Middle East toward a “permacrisis,” carries the odour of a man who has spent too long in the pleasant gardens of Whitehall. He is, of course, correct in the grim diagnosis but profoundly dishonest in assigning blame. The permacrisis is not a novelty; it is the natural state of a region abandoned to the fantasies of American evangelicals, Israeli maximalists, and British diplomats who believe that negotiating with theocrats is a form of statecraft.
Let us recall the lessons of the Victorian era, when the British Empire understood that a stable Middle East required a delicate balance of tyranny and bribery. We propped up the Ottomans, played the Persians against the Arabs, and kept the holy places quiet with a mixture of force and guile. Today, we have neither the force nor the guile. What we have is a prime minister who mistakes press releases for policy, and a foreign secretary who appears to believe that threatening Israel’s sovereignty while courting Iran’s mullahs is a coherent strategy. It is not. It is the intellectual decadence of a nation that has forgotten how to think in terms of power.
Bowen’s thesis is that Trump and Netanyahu are “accelerating collapse” by undermining the two-state solution, annexing the West Bank, and failing to address the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. But this criticism ignores a fundamental truth: the two-state solution has been a cadaver since 2000, propped up only by the ritual incantations of diplomats who have no other ideas. The Palestinian Authority is a corrupt kleptocracy that cannot govern even the bits of land it nominally controls. Hamas is a death cult that sacrifices its own children for the glory of martyrdom. Israel, meanwhile, has discovered that a wall and an iron dome are more effective than any peace process. The permacrisis is not a failure of Netanyahu’s policy; it is the result of a region where no party wants peace as much as they want victory.
Where Bowen is right is in his diagnosis of British diplomatic strategy. It is in disarray because it is based on a fiction: that the United Nations, international law, and the “rules-based order” can substitute for hard power. We have cut our military to the bone, surrendered our independence to the European Court of Human Rights, and allowed our foreign policy to be dictated by the moralising whims of NGOs and the BBC. The result is that we have no leverage in Jerusalem, no influence in Riyadh, and no credibility in Tehran. We are reduced to issuing warnings like a schoolmaster who has forgotten how to cane.
The only way out of this permacrisis is for all parties to acknowledge the reality of the situation. Israel will not return to the 1967 borders because it cannot. The Palestinians will not recognise Israel as a Jewish state because they will not. The United States will not impose a solution because it has no interest in doing so. And Britain will not matter because we have chosen not to matter. So we shall continue to issue warnings, shake our heads, and watch the Middle East burn. It is the British way: to moralise while the world turns away from us.
If Bowen truly wants to avoid permacrisis, he should stop lecturing Trump and Netanyahu and start lecturing his own government. Tell them to rebuild the Royal Navy, to abandon the fantasy of a two-state solution, and to treat the Middle East not as a moral problem but as a strategic chessboard. Or they can continue to preen and warn, and watch history pass them by. The choice, as always, is theirs. But the patient is dying, and the doctors are arguing about bedside manner.
