Is Iran Trump’s Suez crisis, or just a passing thunderstorm?

Britain’s standing in the world was never the same after its assault on Egypt in 1956. Now the US risks repeating history in the Middle East Donald Trump’s addiction to framing every event in the most apocalyptic terms is what allows conservative commentators such as Mark Levin to praise him as “a once-in-a-century president”. But Trump cannot play out his entire presidency on a reckless high wire without eventually falling off – potentially taking America with him into a steep decline into the unknown. Trump likes to portray Europe as being under civilisational threat from migration, but this week he threatened that a 7,000-year-old civilisation would “die … never to be brought back” if it did not comply with his demands. He swiftly discovered it was not a threat on which he could follow through, and had to be extricated from it in a rescue mission led by Pakistan and, ignominiously for him, China. He pulled back in a social media post issued just 88 minutes before the implied destruction of Iran. Not for the first time, Trump had disregarded Iran’s history of resilience. As the late Iranian essayist Bastani Parizi once wrote: “Sometimes the fate of this kingdo