As Trump fans the flames of a world on fire, can diplomacy take back control?

The Middle East has been likened to a Rubik’s Cube, whereby a single move can inadvertently affect the whole picture. Composite: Guardian Design/ View image in fullscreen The Middle East has been likened to a Rubik’s Cube, whereby a single move can inadvertently affect the whole picture. Composite: Guardian Design/ As Trump fans the flames of a world on fire, can diplomacy take back control? Amid the chaos, havoc and war caused by a capricious and amoral US president, countries are waking up to the dangers of being excluded and abused a time when the world has been more interconnected than now. What happens in the secretive inner councils in Tehran, the mountains of south-west Yemen, the steppe of the Donbas, the still bloody wasteland that is Gaza and even the elegant boulevards of Paris and Milan have a common thread. One cannot understand one set of conflicts without weaving them into another, and it is this very interdependence that is making each problem so contagious, layered and difficult to resolve, leaving the world to live as if trapped inside a pressure cooker on the brink of an explosion. Each night it seems the world has reached a collective rock bottom, only to wake in the morning to the sound of knocking from below. In this great age of noncooperation and lawlessness, the need for one crisis to be resolved before another can be addressed leads to a collective paralysis, especially in the total absence of clear leadership ’s leading power. Speaking this week, the Indian external affairs minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said: “The indivisibility of our existence permeates every aspect of human activity and it has deepened as globalisation has advanced. The fact now is that war anywhere threatens peace everywhere.” View image in fullscreen An Iranian woman films a man performing as Donald Trump inside a symbolic cell mounted on a billboard in northern Tehran. Photograph: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/ShutterstockTom Barrack, Donald Trump’s envoy to Turkey and wider counsellor to the president on the Middle East, in remarks in Doha last week highlighted these threads, admitting the war on Iran launched , turning “camp fires into forest fires”. He likened the Middle East to a Rubik’s Cube, whereby a single move can inadvertently affect the whole picture. “When you adjust one thing in the region what we have seen is everything then changes. Those unintended consequences, and the sequential pace of what is happening, is unexpected,” said Barrack.