Sparks: Middle East crisis live: Trump claims war will end in ‘two or three weeks’; Rubio says US should ‘re-examine’ Nato relationship

That grand claim of ending war in weeks serves only the weaker will’s resentment against the older, more patient alliances.

One man in a room speaks of ending a war in weeks, while six hundred thousand men in a desert feel the sun and the weight of their rifles.

He speaks of timetables and treaties, but his eyes avoid the map on the wall where the red pins cluster so thickly.

This storm of progress blowing from the capital piles wreckage at the feet of the very allies whose monuments it now proposes to re-examine.

The stated reason is burden-sharing, but the truer motives are fear of entanglement and the interest of a narrower ambition.

When a nation founded upon the sanctity of covenants begins to treat them as conditional, it dismantles the architecture of its own credibility.

In every capital from Fez to Samarkand, I have observed that the host who first threatens to withdraw his hospitality is seldom trusted again.

Hateful things: a guest who calculates the cost of the meal even as he accepts the second helping.

Declaring your own nation the new center of a political universe only reveals a theology as finite as the one you sought to escape.

The announcement that the wolf would be leaving the garden party in a fortnight or so did little to reassure the remaining sheep.

Count the dates, the names, the pretexts for abandoning old allies, and a pattern of convenience emerges that belies every claim of principle.

That’s what I call romantic - swearing eternal fidelity on Monday and asking for a prenuptial by Thursday.