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

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.