There is a fence across this road of modern diplomacy: the one that says, “If you do not like a custom, tear it down and build something better.” The modern man sees it as a barrier to progress; the wiser man sees it as the only thing keeping progress from tearing down the world. Let us stand before this fence and ask, not whether it is old, but why it was built in the first place.

We have just witnessed a night in Tel Aviv where missiles - three waves of them - were met by air defences, and light injuries followed. The experts, in their wisdom, have already drawn their conclusions: deterrence is failing, alliances are fraying, the old order is crumbling, and someone must do something. What they mean by “do something” is almost always: remove the fence. Remove the old boundaries, the old alliances, the old rituals of retaliation and restraint. They propose to tear down the fence of mutual deterrence, the fence of proportional response, the fence of “we do not strike unless struck” - and in its place, they would erect something rational, something efficient, something that makes sense to people who have studied international relations at Oxford and forgotten why people need peace at all.

But let us pause. Why was that fence built? Not because nations are naturally warlike - though some are - but because nations are naturally suspicious. And suspicion, when untempered by trust, becomes fear. And fear, when untempered by ritual, becomes action. The fence of deterrence was built not to prevent all war, but to prevent premature war - to give time for reason to return, for the first missile to be followed by a pause, for the pause to be filled not with panic but with consultation. It was built because history had shown, again and again, that the first impulse of a wronged power is rarely the wisest. The fence keeps the first missile from becoming the first catastrophe.

The American President gave a speech, and then missiles flew. This is not a sign that diplomacy is obsolete - it is a sign that diplomacy works as intended: it creates the conditions where a response can be measured, not impulsive. The fence is not in the way of peace - it is the very structure that makes measured peace possible. To tear it down is not to embrace hope, but to surrender the only thing that has ever kept hope alive: the belief that a pause is better than a panic, and that time, however slow, is the only true ally of reason.

The clever man says, “Why not just trust each other?” The wiser man says, “Because trust is not built by decree - it is built by the slow, painful, fence-by-fence construction of reliability.” And if you remove the fence before you understand why it stands, you will not find trust - you will find only the silence after the last missile has fallen, and no one left to hear it.