Never has there been a time when the world has been more interconnected than now. What happens in the secretive inner councils in Tehran, the mountains of south-west Yemen, the steppe of the Donbas, the still bloody wasteland that is Gaza and even the elegant boulevards of Paris and Milan have a common thread.<\/p>\n
One cannot understand one set of conflicts without weaving them into another, and it is this very interdependence that is making each problem so contagious, layered and difficult to resolve, leaving the world to live as if trapped inside a pressure cooker on the brink of an explosion.<\/p>\n
Each night it seems the world has reached a collective rock bottom, only to wake in the morning to the sound of knocking from below.<\/p>\n
In this great age of noncooperation and lawlessness, the need for one crisis to be resolved before another can be addressed leads to a collective paralysis, especially in the total absence of clear leadership by the world\u2019s leading power.<\/p>\n
Speaking this week, the Indian external affairs minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said: \u201cThe indivisibility of our existence permeates every aspect of human activity and it has deepened as globalisation has advanced. The fact now is that war anywhere threatens peace everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
An Iranian woman films a man performing as Donald Trump inside a symbolic cell mounted on a billboard in northern Tehran. Photograph: Morteza Nikoubazl\/NurPhoto\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n
Tom Barrack, Donald Trump\u2019s envoy to Turkey and wider counsellor to the president on the Middle East, in remarks in Doha last week highlighted these threads, admitting the war on Iran launched by his president and Israel in late February had brought unexpected consequences, turning \u201ccamp fires into forest fires\u201d.<\/p>\n
He likened the Middle East to a Rubik\u2019s Cube, whereby a single move can inadvertently affect the whole picture. \u201cWhen you adjust one thing in the region what we have seen is everything then changes. Those unintended consequences, and the sequential pace of what is happening, is unexpected,\u201d said Barrack.<\/p>\n
double quotation markThe fact now is that war anywhere threatens peace everywhereSubrahmanyam Jaishankar<\/p>\n
He then admitted: \u201cWe started trying to do something with our allies in Iran that spread through Hamas, Hezbollah, to six Iranian militias, the Houthis<\/a> and is now going to north Africa. So where does it stop? How much does this US intervention help or hurt?\u201d<\/p>\n Without breaking from Trump, he answered his own question pretty unambiguously. \u201cWe have had 23 regime changes take place across the greater Middle East and Levant instituted one way or another by some American hand or influence, and none of them have worked.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery time we try to intervene and change the person or the regime, it seems to have been a mistake,\u201d Barrack said, pointing to Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, but discreetly omitting Iran<\/a>.<\/p>\n Deep tectonic transformations<\/p>\n So it is easy to blame what has gone wrong on excessive interventionism and failed multilateralism.<\/p>\n In his new book, the American international relations expert Charles Kupchan explains: \u201cThe world is experiencing deep tectonic transformations. Power is rapidly diffusing across the international system, decentering global politics and reawakening great power competition.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the same time the advance of the digital era is eroding the social contract of the industrial era producing massive socioeconomic disruption that is affecting political life inside nations as well as relations among them.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump, he argues, is a symptom of a trend that is systemic and widespread.<\/p>\n But it is also hard not to believe that in this interconnected world the disruptive damage that a capricious, vain and amoral US president can inflict has grown tenfold, and that is what we are experiencing. World disorder meets personality disorder.<\/p>\n The Iran war remains Trump\u2019s most consequential mistake as its repercussions reverberate across the world. Photograph: Shawn Thew\/CNP\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n The Iran war, for instance, as Barrack implied, remains Trump\u2019s most consequential and most mysterious mistake, and its repercussions reverberate across the world. Any US president would have had to address the Iran issue, itself a product of system failure, the inability of the multilateral system to incorporate and change Iran. But the way in which the Iran issue was addressed is down to Trump, and his psyche.<\/p>\n The Democratic candidate for senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, put it simply: \u201cEverybody could have told you this is a dumb idea. There was really only one person in the whole world who had a 40-year project to get us to fight this war. He\u2019s a prime minister of another government [Netanyahu]. And he finally found the dumbass who was willing to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n The foreign minister of Oman, and mediator in the February Iran-US talks, speaking in Cambridge this week reminded his audience an agreement on the core issue \u2013 Iran\u2019s nuclear programme \u2013 had been within reach before the bombing started.<\/p>\n The strait of Hormuz, a waterway open to commercial traffic for centuries, has become an Iranian bargaining chip. Photograph: Vahid Salemi\/AP<\/p>\n On every test the war has been a catastrophic failure, whose consequence keeps spreading beyond its initial boundaries, pushing worldwide inflation to 4%. The strait of Hormuz, a waterway open to commercial traffic for centuries, has become an Iranian bargaining chip. Less than a fortnight before the midterms, the price of Brent oil per barrel reached $117 \u2013 50% higher than prewar levels.<\/p>\n