Thank You, Israel, for Overplaying the Empire’s Hand

One must give credit where credit is due: Israel, by behaving with the strategic subtlety of a chainsaw in a porcelain museum, has achieved what diplomats, clerics, monarchs, generals, and think-tank acrobats spent decades failing to accomplish. It has helped bury the old Sunni–Shia melodrama as the organizing principle of West Asian politics, and it has made the American “security umbrella” look less like an umbrella than a very expensive lightning rod. This is no small accomplishment. For years, the region was instructed to understand itself through sectarian grammar. Riyadh and Tehran were not merely rival capitals; they were presented as metaphysical opposites, civilizational antagonists, eternal enemies locked in theological combat. Every battlefield was translated into sectarian prose. Yemen, Syria, […]