This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

The Donald Trump time machine fuelled by hatred, violence and lies is carrying humanity back to the dark ages with terrifying speed.

After Venezuelan seamen clinging to their capsized boat in the Caribbean are deemed a threat and killed by a US air strike, and two protesters in Minneapolis are shot to death by federal immigration agents acting as a government-sanctioned lynch mob, over a hundred schoolgirls in Iran are slaughtered by a Tomahawk missile in their classrooms.

In the 1930s, the savagery of European fascist regimes shocked contemporaries, who discovered to their horror that human capacity for evil had in no way diminished during centuries of material and educational progress.

“Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant” – they make a wasteland and call it peace – were the bitter words of a British chieftain called Calgacus 2,000 years ago, as reported by Roman historian Tacitus, denouncing the destruction of his country and its people by the Roman legions. His condemnation of imperial brutality and hypocrisy has reverberated down the centuries, and, were Calgacus alive today, he would find much horribly familiar in the American and Israeli air war on Iran, their targets including bridges, universities, hospitals and pharmaceutical plants.

In Lebanon, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) blow up whole villages and have driven 1.2 million Lebanese from their homes. Within a few minutes on Wednesday, Israeli air strikes across Lebanon killed 303 people and injured 1,165, according to health officials .

“Back to the Stone Age,” whooped the US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, with loathsome relish in a post last week, repeating Trump’s own threat to demolish all civilian infrastructure in Iran. No lie was too ridiculous not to be pressed into service to justify the communal punishment of 92 million Iranians, with White House spokesperson Anna Kelly claiming: “The Iranian people welcome the sound of bombs because it means their oppressors are losing.”

The balance of power in the Middle East – and to a degree the world – is in flux. Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have failed to achieve their goals. The Iranian regime has survived a five-and-half week war which has, paradoxically, devastated it materially and strengthened it strategically. Its control of the Strait of Hormuz and continued ability to fire missiles and drones across the Gulf at key installations in the Arab oil states – Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates and Oman – have made it the dominant power in the Gulf. Trump’s inability to subdue Iran is given greater global significance by his grandiloquent boasts of complete victory over a prostrate Iranian enemy begging for a ceasefire.

The priorities of the three players in the wars in Iran and Lebanon – the US, Iran and Israel – will become clearer in the US-Iran peace talks in Islamabad this weekend, if they take place. But their relationship with each other and their allies is often misunderstood. Israel has escalated its........

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