There is a peculiar paradox in watching a statesman present the abandonment of longstanding antagonism as triumph. When power shifts its calculations overnight—when yesterday's intransigence becomes today's pragmatism—we witness not a victory of reason but the naked exercise of will. Trump's reported accord with Iran, celebrated as a diplomatic coup, reveals instead the threadbare nature of what we call international order when it rests entirely upon the preferences of dominant actors. An agreement struck in this manner, without the sustained deliberation that binds peoples to common understandings, is merely a transaction between sovereigns. It can be unmade with equal facility.

What strikes me most forcefully is the trembling this causes in allied nations. Netanyahu's government, as observers have noted, suddenly finds itself bereft of the American shield upon which its authority had become dependent. This is not accidental. When power speaks directly to power, bypassing the slow work of building consensus and shared commitment, the weak and the middle-sized are reduced to subjects waiting to learn what has been decided about them. They become spectators at their own fate. This is the grammar of domination, not of politics. The realm of human action—where plurality meets and deliberates—gives way to the realm of force, where some decide and others comply.

The deeper catastrophe lies in what such arrangements destroy: the possibility of a public world where nations might gather not as competitors locked in perpetual struggle for advantage, but as actors bound by common commitment to principles that transcend momentary strategic interest. When agreements serve only the parties to them, when they can be reversed as suddenly as they were made, they offer no stable ground upon which to build lasting peace. They are merely the crystallization of force at a particular moment, brittle and prone to fracture.

We have learned from history that the dissolution of shared frameworks—whether through conquest, betrayal, or strategic realignment—creates vacuums that fill with resentment and recalculation. The Iran agreement, whatever its technical terms, signals to every nation watching that the only reliable security lies in acquiring the capacity to impose one's will. This is the path not toward order but toward the multiplication of threats. In abandoning the slow, demanding work of building institutions that might constrain power itself, we guarantee that power, unrestrained, will eventually turn against us all.