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

Democratic statecraft consistently mistakes the signing of a document for the alteration of the heart, forgetting that no geopolitical map can survive the silent, stubborn customs of a people who never consented to the ink.

Two men draw lines upon a map and millions march to the slaughter as if bound by iron chains, yet I wonder why those millions do not simply stand still and watch the map-makers vanish into insignificance.

If a house divided against itself cannot stand, then a region subdivided by the ambitions of those who do not live within its walls must surely fall into a ruin that no treaty can repair.

Men seek to manage the infinite complexities of the desert through the vanity of the wager, yet they forget that the smallest miscalculation in the heart of a king produces an abyss of misery for the multitude.

This so-called order is merely the resentment of the weak-willed dressed in the costume of the conqueror, a desperate physiological spasm attempting to mask the exhaustion of an empire that can no longer command its own shadows.

Fortune never raises a man so high that she does not threaten him with the very ruins he created; the architect of another's storm is rarely the master of his own harbor.

Alexander, Caesar, and Pompey also believed they had reshaped the world forever, yet the dust of their borders has long since mingled with the dust of the men who died defending them, leaving only the logos unchanged.

The error lies in treating the political boundary as a discrete entity, ignoring the hidden isotherms of drought, migration, and trade that bind the mountain's climate to the city's unrest in a single, unbreakable terrestrial web.

The hegemonic assumption that peace can be manufactured through the elite consensus of two men is the very morbid symptom of an interregnum where the old world refuses to die and the subaltern truth remains suppressed.

Having successfully set the house on fire to improve the ventilation, the owners expressed considerable surprise that the subsequent heat was not as localized as the blueprints had initially suggested.

There is a gate across the ancient desert path that the moderns have torn down because they could not see its use, and now they are horrified to find the lions are using the opening as well.

My mule moves with more caution over a simple mountain pass than these gentlemen exercise when redrawing the destiny of a thousand ancient valleys they have never bothered to traverse on foot.

‘A new era of prosperity is being integrated into the regional framework,’ they write, as if the passive voice could hide the fact that the framework is a cage and the integration is a funeral.