Like a smashed antique clock – with its elaborate cogs, ratchet wheels and innards splayed out from the casing – so the mechanics of the Middle East lie similarly exposed and broken. All the region is in play – Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt and Iran. The original Obama strategic blueprint for containing and balancing the potentially violent energies of West Asia was subsequently handed to Team Biden at the end of the Obama term – and it still clearly bore the Obama imprimatur right up...
