Despite the fact that international politics should be based on rationality and logic, what has been happening in the Middle East in recent months indicates otherwise. The events in the region, especially the actions of the Israeli government, remind me of a book by the US historian Barbara Tuchman, published in 1984, titled The March of Folly.

The book’s premise is that governments commit egregious mistakes for a variety of reasons, including folly, which means adopting policies that contradict logic and reason and even the state’s own interests.

It chronicles examples of this from the ancient Trojan War, where the rulers of Troy brought the famous wooden horse inside their walls despite their having every reason to suspect it was a Greek trick, to Swedish King Charles XII, Napoleon, and Hitler successively invading Russia despite the disasters that befell their predecessors and the US getting involved in the Vietnam War over several decades despite clear signs it would be a quagmire.

The march of folly is associated with three criteria. The first is that the results of it are evidently counterproductive at the time, meaning that harms are visible in the present and not just the future. The second is that there was a feasible alternative to the foolish policy concerned, which the government in question did not pursue. The third is that the policy in question is collective and not the decision of one person and that it is agreed upon by a significant segment of a country’s ruling elites.

There are many signs of folly in this region, but I will point to only a few examples.

Take, for example, the Israeli policy of assassinations targeting Hamas leaders. All previous attempts, starting with the assassination of the group’s founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 2004 and including the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in 2024, have failed to achieve their goals. They neither eliminated the group nor changed its policies, as has been evidenced by the emergence of new leaders and Hamas’ breaking the Israeli deterrence barrier around Gaza during the 7 October attack.

Studies of assassination policies indicate that they may have results with small groups whose leaderships can be eradicated and thus collapse, but that they are not effective with a group the size of the Hamas network. Nevertheless, Israel continues with this folly.

The same thing applies to the assassination of scientists working for Iran’s nuclear programme and striking targets within Iran. This has neither stopped Iran’s nuclear programme, which has accelerated, nor deterred it from confronting Israel. On the contrary, Iran has changed the rules of engagement with Israel by launching missiles and drones at it, and the world now anticipates a second Iranian attack.

Another aspect of the march of folly is the belief that escalating and expanding the conflict in the region will divert attention from Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and might provide an opportunity to strike Iran’s nuclear programme, possibly dragging the US into a war against Iran and adopting a regime change model there similar to what was done in Iraq.

This great folly requires the wise and the rational to be aware that its destructive impact, were it to be carried out, would not be limited to the parties directly concerned but would extend to the entire region.

The writer is a professor of political science at Cairo University.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 15 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly