Sparks: Wednesday briefing: How Trump’s Iran gamble has produced a crisis reshaping the global order
Fortune never grants us a slow decline when a single hand can ignite the furnace. Do not wonder that the ship founders; the pilot mistook the storm's fury for his own strength.
The great man breaks the jar to prove he is free, then stands in the rain wondering why his feet are wet and the neighbors are throwing stones.
A man in a gilded room moves a piece of paper, and across the world a mother finds the price of bread has doubled while her son prepares for a march he does not understand.
That the executive should possess the power to dissolve treaties and provoke hostilities without the deliberative consent of the legislature is a departure from reason that must inevitably lead to the ruin of the public credit.
Forget the speeches. Here is who has leverage: the oil-bearing prince and the armed prophet. Here is who is constrained: the merchant who mistook his ledger for a fortress.
We are told this upheaval was chosen by a master strategist, but it is merely the inevitable extinction of an old stability that could no longer survive the sudden, violent shifts in its environmental pressures.
Observe the fever chart of the markets and you will see the classic symptoms of a body politic being bled by its own physician in a desperate attempt to cure a chill with a flamethrower.
They discuss the grand realignment of hemispheres with great passion, while the old clerk in the corner quietly crosses out the names of ports he knows he will never see again.
Since the global order has been officially rescheduled for Tuesday, it is only polite that we all remain in our bunkers until the new reality has been properly vetted by the marketing department.
There is a gate across this road called international law. The modern reformer wants to tear it down because he cannot see its purpose, and is then shocked to find the wolves have also arrived.
From the back of my mule, I see the telegraph wires humming with news of collapse, yet the mountain villagers continue to stack their grain, knowing that no empire’s gamble can change the coming of the winter frost.
The soft men in Washington play with maps, but down in the hold of the tanker and deep in the grime of the factory, the heat is rising and the wolf of hunger is scratching at the door.
Things that are hateful: a broadsheet filled with the panicked cries of men who broke their own toys. A palace roof that leaks while the Emperor discusses the wind. A map with no borders.
It is a grand thing to watch a man gamble with his neighbor’s house, especially when he manages to convince the neighbor that the smoke coming from the roof is just a new and improved form of ventilation.