All geopolitical decisions come with an agenda. What it rarely comes with is an ending.

Robert Jervis, the late Columbia scholar of international relations, warned that complex systems do not simply absorb interventions but instead metabolise them. Individual actors make rational decisions, but the resulting outcomes are irrational as no one can see the whole board. Statesmen aren't chess players. They are nodes in a vast, interconnected system that they cannot fully read, and the system, invariably, writes back.

This is uncomfortably clear in few contemporary cases:

The goal of the US sanctions against Iran, including oil embargoes, removal from SWIFT and maximum pressure campaigns, was to isolate and capitulate Iran. The systemic effect was something that Washington did not foresee: Iran strengthened its strategic relationship with China, signing a 25-year cooperation agreement that made Beijing a part of Iran's economy. It provided Russia with Shahed drones, which........

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