In the hands of unpredictable leaders

The world is waiting to see how Benjamin Netanyahu will react to Iran's attack on his territory, while the Israeli leader continues to weigh his response. He has managed to get the spotlight on him, to get Western diplomacy to dedicate hours of calls and meetings to ask him for restraint. The fact that the Iranian attack was not spontaneous, but rather retaliation for Israel's bombing of an Iranian consular building in Damascus on April 1, in which 13 people died, seven of them Iranian military advisors, has become secondary. Furthermore, Netanyahu has the international community on edge over his announced invasion of Rafah, the last refuge of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. He has already deployed soldiers to the border. If they launch the offensive, as a Doctors Without Borders spokesperson has said, it will be carnage.

Netanyahu is making the most of being scary and controlling the times: nobody wants a war in the Middle East. Arms and firm support come from the United States, to the point that Washington a few weeks ago assured that the Security Council resolution to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and the unconditional release of all the hostages, in which abstained, it was not binding. The White House has been mediating for months to balance the feeling that the region could explode at any moment.

If we look at a map, the major conflicts are hijacked by unpredictable leaders: Netanyahu himself, in Israel; Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader; or Vladimir Putin, in Russia. If Donald Trump wins the American elections in November, the world's leading power will be governed by someone who is on trial for allegedly allowing an assault on his country's Capitol and who has threatened to cut off military support to Europe. Meanwhile, the European Union deals with its own dissonances: it wants to rearm itself to protect itself, to be more autonomous, but it does not even know how much weight the Europhobic extreme right will have in its institutions starting in June.

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The politics of the unpredictable move with shocks, fires set on social networks and empty spectacle. It does not generate agreements or trust in citizens. It is contributing to democratic degradation in a world where governance indices have been worsening for 18 years, according to Freedom House. Israel and the United States are already democracies in regression. They can get worse.

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