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

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.