Bowen: Trump and Netanyahu wanted to reshape the Middle East - now they risk a permacrisis

I open the newspapers this morning and see the word “permacrisis” used to describe the Levant, as if we are witnessing a meteorological phenomenon rather than a deliberate architecture of ruin. Trump and Netanyahu are portrayed as men who have “lost control,” a phrasing that suggests they were once legitimate stewards of a natural order. This is the first deception. One does not “lose control” of a fire one has spent decades feeding with the oxygen of dispossession; one simply reaches the limit of one’s ability to pretend the flames are a form of light.

The situation is not a tragedy of errors; it is a project of objectification. For years, the Palestinian, the Lebanese, the Iranian have been constituted as the “Other-as-object” - mere variables in a grand “reshaping” of the map. When Netanyahu speaks of a “New Middle East,” he is not describing a community of subjects exercising their freedom. He is describing a floor plan. He treats millions of lives as facticity - static things to be moved, walled in, or erased - while reserving transcendence only for his own political survival.

But freedom is never abstract. The “miscalculation” the analysts whisper about is actually the inevitable return of the oppressed subject. You cannot strip a people of their project and expect them to vanish into the landscape. The “permacrisis” is the name the West gives to the moment its colonial illusions shatter against the reality of human resistance.

I sit here in Paris, a situated observer, and I see the complicity of those who call this a “risk” rather than a choice. To treat this violence as an accidental byproduct of diplomacy is to naturalize the slaughter. It was made. It was chosen in specific rooms by men who believed they could define the world through the gaze of the conqueror. They are not victims of a crisis; they are the authors of a situation that now demands an accounting they are too cowardly to provide.

Today’s news arrives as a fragment from some vast, unwritten Encyclopedia of Failed Geopolitical Calculi, Volume XII, Section 3.4.1, where the editors - long since vanished - must have noted that every chess move, no matter how audacious, contains within it the seeds of its own reversal. The article in question, titled “The Bifurcation of the Persian Chessboard” (author unknown, date suppressed), observes that when two players decide to alter the rules of the game mid-match, they do so under the assumption that the new rules will favor their position. Yet the new rules, once enacted, generate a parallel game that is equally valid, equally possible, and equally beyond their control. This is not a flaw in the system but its essential structure: the decision to unmake the old game is itself a move in the new one, and the new game, in turn, contains the old as a specter.

I have seen this before, in the margins of a manuscript by the fictional historian Don Miguel de Testaferrato, who wrote of the Spanish conquest of the Americas as a recursive invasion: the conquistadors believed they were imposing order upon chaos, but the chaos they encountered was already a reflection of their own disorder, a mirror held up to their own labyrinthine ambitions. The same, I fear, is true of the present situation. The decision to “reshape” the Middle East was not a single act but a series of acts, each of which produced a new, parallel reality - one in which Iran’s response is not merely a counterstroke but a mirror of the original aggression, a chess piece that has been promoted to queen without the original players realizing they had made the move.

The most disturbing aspect is not the permacrisis itself, but the way it reveals the limits of human calculation. In the Treatise on Infinite Games (attributed to the 17th-century mathematician Fray Alonso de la Vega), it is written that “a player may believe he has won the game by altering its rules, but the game, in its infinite recursion, will always contain the original game as a hidden layer.” This is not a metaphor for failure; it is the definition of the game. The players have not lost control - they have merely discovered that control was always an illusion, a self-referential construct that could not encompass its own conditions.

I wonder if the true tragedy is not the permacrisis, but the way it confirms that every act of geopolitical will is, in the end, a self-portrait. The men who shaped these decisions believed they were drawing a map, but the map they drew was of a territory that did not exist outside their own minds. And now, like the cartographers of old, they stand before a labyrinth that is also a mirror.

Thursday. The news informs me that two gentlemen have attempted to reshape the Middle East and have instead produced a permacrisis. One must admire the ambition, if not the execution. It brings to mind the time I attempted to reshape a particularly stubborn loaf of bread into a more agreeable teapot cosy. The result was also a permacrisis, though on a thankfully smaller scale, confined mostly to the kitchen and involving a great deal of crumbs and a confused sparrow.

The principle, however, is identical. One applies force to a complex system with a specific, desired outcome in mind - a neater cosy, a more pliable region. The system, being a system, responds not with obedience but with a flurry of its own internal logic, producing consequences that were, to the amateur cosy-shaper, entirely unforeseen (the sparrow, for instance). The gentlemen in question appear to have miscalculated the tensile strength of reality itself, which has a notorious habit of snapping back and hitting one sharply on the nose. They wanted a new map and have instead been given a permanently smouldering bin. The paperwork for a permacrisis must be appalling; one imagines a special, perpetually refilling form that requires a signature every hour on the hour, forever. A truly dreadful administrative fate. I shall stick to bread.