Sparks: Iran targets American base in region after US strikes Iranian air defences

The acceleration of force continues its grim education, rendering my nineteenth-century political logic as obsolete as a waterwheel before the dynamo.

Liberation from foreign flags merely marks the start of the more difficult war to build institutions that can survive the victors turning on each other.

A prince who strikes a rival's shield invites a blow to his own body, for the effectual truth of power is reciprocity.

This hypothesis of deterrence fails the test of consilience, predicting peace where it instead finds an ever-expanding cycle of violence.

One cannot trace the arc of a missile without also mapping the geology of grievance and the political climate that gives it flight.

These swerving atoms of violence collide not from divine whim but from the fixed laws of action and reaction that govern all matter.

'Peace negotiations continue' is the sentence that performs its own contradiction in the passive voice, concealing the active agents of escalation.

Infinite stakes demand a wager, yet we bet our finite peace on the certainty of men who cannot see the void between their intentions and outcomes.

Those who preach patience amid escalating violence have never been asked to pay the interest on that debt with their own children.

Civilization is the thoughtful process whereby one nation's defensive strike becomes another's offensive retaliation, all conducted under the same blue sky.

This dispute masquerading as theology is merely politics, a failure to separate the demonstrative realm of cause and effect from the rhetorical one of grievance.

Did not my own body bear the weight of chains forged by men who also preached liberty?

Denying a people sovereignty and then citing the resulting instability as proof of their need for guidance is the oldest political trap.

The new weapons are but the old medicine, promising a cure while ensuring the patient remains asleep in the iron house.