The world they left us
I studied international relations. I read Brzezinski, Mearsheimer, Kissinger. They told me the Middle East was chaotic but legible, a puzzle with fixed pieces, held in place by American weight.
That world is gone.
What we are watching now is not a crisis. Crises resolve. This is a restructuring. And Europe, true to form, is watching from the sidelines, waiting for someone to hand it a summary.
The Iran that no longer exists
For three decades Tehran built power through proxies. Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hamas in Gaza. The Houthis in Yemen. Shia militias threading through Iraq and Syria. The logic was elegant: project influence, absorb punishment, never expose the state directly.
That architecture is broken. Not everywhere, not completely, but at its most visible joints. Hezbollah has taken damage that would have seemed impossible two years ago. Hamas has been ground down in Gaza. The command lines running from Tehran to its forward positions have been cut in multiple places.
The network still exists. But it no longer functions as a system.
The Israel that cannot stop
Israel has accomplished something remarkable militarily. And painted itself into a corner doing it.
Benjamin Netanyahu has been in power for three decades. He has open criminal indictments. His political survival instinct is the sharpest thing about him. He governs today because of a coalition that was never interested in peace, and knows it. Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich are not awkward partners he is stuck with. They are the reason the government stands. Without them, it falls. With them, every ceasefire is a betrayal, every negotiation a humiliation, every concession a defeat.
Ben Gvir wants Greater Israel. Smotrich wants the West Bank. Both need the war. It is their oxygen.
Netanyahu understands this. And he has chosen to stay.
The result is a country locked into a logic with no exit. Every escalation consolidates the coalition. Every serious peace effort threatens it. War stopped being a means somewhere along the way. It has become the point.
The America that left without leaving
Trump came back with a simple operating principle: deals, not alliances. Interests, not values. America First means America when it is convenient for America.
In practice, this looks like an erratic presence. Washington signals, then goes quiet. Threatens, then offers. Mediates, then walks away. This is not isolationism, isolationism is at least consistent. This is transactionalism. And transactionalism in the Middle East produces one reliable outcome: it removes the only player with enough leverage to impose costs on everyone at once.
Without a credible American backstop, every regional actor recalculates. Iran probes. Israel moves unilaterally. The Gulf states quietly deepen ties with Beijing and Moscow. The old architecture, never elegant but always functional, has lost the piece that held it together.
The Europe that watches
Europe does not have a Middle East policy. It has positions. Statements. Carefully worded communiqués that offend no one and commit to nothing.
This is not hypocrisy. It is structure. Twenty-seven member states, each with its own history, its own energy dependencies, its own domestic politics, cannot produce a coherent foreign policy in real time. France talks. Germany waits. Italy follows whoever seems most useful that week.
Meanwhile the region is being redrawn. New arrangements are forming. Deals are being struck. And Europe, the continent geographically closest to all of this, the one that will absorb the refugees, the energy shocks, the political fallout, is not in the room.
It is not in the room because it does not know what it wants. And it does not know what it wants because it has never been forced to decide.
The world the last thirty years built for us was, in its way, comfortable. American order. Predictable rules. Manageable disorder. That world is over.
What comes next, no one knows. What is certain is this: if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.
Sonnet 4.6 Basso