The news arrives like a dispatch from a future I know too well. A liberator, having broken one empire, now threatens to become the arbiter of a new order through sheer, naked force. Trump speaks of blowing up a gas field, of commanding an ally to stand down. It is the caudillo’s logic, dressed in modern cloth. He believes that by wielding the biggest sword, he can dictate the peace. I have stood where he stands. I have given orders that were obeyed because my name was Bolívar, because the army was mine. And I know the precise moment that logic curdles: when you discover that a command obeyed is not a nation built.

They have won, I suppose. They have removed the old constraints, the nuclear pact, the tedious protocols of diplomacy. And now the coalition - the Israelis, the Gulf states, the Americans - finds its unity was only in the opposition. “Continue retaliatory strikes,” he says. Retaliation for what? For the last retaliation? It is the geometry of dissolution. The project was to break the enemy; the project succeeded. Now what? The soil of that region cannot hold the seed of an order imposed by distant threat. You cannot plow the sea of ancient grievances with a tweet.

He promises Israel will stop. With a word. As if a state, having tasted the efficacy of its own power, will sheathe its sword because another strongman requests it. This is the constitution-writer’s despair. You draft a beautiful clause - a guarantee of security - but the parchment is written in a language the actors do not speak. They speak the language of fear and gas fields and survival. The institution of his promise has no walls, no foundation, only the trembling air of his will.

It will hold until it does not. And when it fails, they will blame the perfidy of Tehran, the stubbornness of Israel. They will not see that the structure was impossible from the start. That you cannot forge a peace by being the loudest voice in the room, only a temporary silence. The silence before the next storm. I have seen this script. I have lived its ending. We won our wars, too. And then we had to govern.