History, as we are forever reminded by the dullards who cannot read a newspaper without a scorecard, does not repeat itself. But it does, on occasion, rhyme. And the current cacophony emanating from the Levant has a familiar, ominous cadence: the hubris of empires, the blindness of generals, and the slow, grinding collapse of a strategy that was never a strategy at all, but a series of improvisations dressed up as grand design.
Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s indefatigable Middle East editor, has issued a warning that should chill the blood of anyone with a passing interest in the difference between peace and perpetual war. He speaks of ‘permacrisis’, a term so perfectly ugly it could only have been coined in this century of relentless novelty. It is the condition of being permanently on the brink, of having no exit strategy because no one ever thought one was needed. It is the state of a civilisation that has forgotten how to think in centuries and now plans only for the next news cycle.
Trump and Netanyahu, strange bedfellows in this theatre of the absurd, have between them managed to achieve the near impossible: they have made the Middle East more volatile, more fragmented, and more dangerous than at any point since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The so-called ‘Deal of the Century’ was dead on arrival, a document written in the language of real estate rather than diplomacy. And now, as the pillars of that non-deal collapse one by one, we are left with the debris of shattered expectations and the whiff of cordite.
Netanyahu’s legal troubles, his desperate clinging to power, have made him a liability to his own country. He has become a prisoner of his coalition, a man who cannot make peace because peace would require compromise, and compromise would be political suicide. Meanwhile, Trump, in his twilight months, has thrown fuel on the fire by normalising relations with the Gulf states while ignoring the Palestinian question entirely. It was a brilliant tactical move, but a strategic catastrophe. The Palestinians have been reduced to a footnote in their own history, and as any student of the classics knows, men who are treated as non-persons tend to become very loud persons indeed.
The result is a permacrisis: a situation where every supposed solution creates a new problem, where every ceasefire is a pause before the next round of violence, where the only constant is the absence of any desire for a permanent settlement. The United States, once the reluctant sheriff of this chaotic county, now acts as a partisan provocateur. The Europeans wring their hands and issue statements. The UN passes resolutions that are ignored. And the people of the region, Arabs and Israelis alike, are left to suffer the consequences of the incompetence of their leaders.
We have been here before. In the 1930s, the failure of the League of Nations to manage the crises of the day led to the Second World War. In the 1850s, the collapse of the Concert of Europe produced the Crimean War, a conflict that started over a key and ended in a demonstration of the farce of great power diplomacy. And in the late Roman Empire, the constant pressure on the frontiers, combined with the absence of any coherent strategy beyond the immediate survival of the emperor, led to the slow bleed that we call the Decline and Fall.
Bowen is right to sound the alarm. The ‘permacrisis’ is not a bug; it is a feature of a system that no longer believes in the possibility of a better future. We fight not for victory, but to avoid defeat. We negotiate not for peace, but for a postponement of war. And we write history not as a guide to action, but as an epitaph for our own failures.
It is time for a dose of intellectual honesty. The West has lost its appetite for grand strategy. We no longer have the patience for the slow work of diplomacy, the quiet cultivation of alliances, the knowledge that some problems cannot be solved but only managed. In its place, we have the cult of the deal, the narcissism of the leader, and the belief that a tweet can undo the work of centuries.
It cannot. And the Middle East, that ancient crucible of empires, is about to teach us that lesson once again. Whether we are willing to learn it is another matter entirely.
