Right, so that was Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan there, saying Iranians are no strangers to the region’s politics. Iran’s involvement is needed now. This is not exactly the outcome Benjamin Netanyahu had in mind for the Middle East is it?

That’s a rotten turn of events, please do get your tiny violins out to play him a jaunty tune. Perhaps someone might want to hand Bibi a stress ball before he starts chewing the furniture. Well let’s slap some context on all this first. Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan have of course just signed a collective defence pact in Mecca, and that in itself was not a sudden development. Riyadh and Islamabad already had a mutual defence agreement in place as of September of last year, agreeing that an attack on one would be treated as an attack on both, so broadly echoing Article 5 of NATO. Türkiye, alwa ...