"In a recent 60 Minutes interview, the Israeli prime minister insisted it was misleading to say he had forced Trump into war. Both he and Trump jointly weighed the risks, but he admitted the problem of the Hormuz strait became understood as the war went on'."

This was an astonishing admission. Fatih Birol, the chief executive of the International Energy Agency, recently disclosed that in job interviews at the IEA, after asking candidates why they are applying for a job at the IEA, the second is: "What would you do if the strait of Hormuz was closed?" It was a commonplace doomsday scenario, yet the US had to improvise a response.

Equally few in the Pentagon foresaw the extent to which Iran would resort to "triangular coercion" " the attack on oil and gas facilities of the Gulf states, as well as exposed US bases.

International relations literature claims this is a relatively unstudied phenomenon whereby "a coercer who lacks direct leverage over a resilient target coerces a third party who does possess leverage over the target, and to whom the target is vulnerable, and manipulates it into a clash of interests with the target".

In short, the war might not influence the US itself, but it might get to those that could. It was the alliance of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, Egypt and Pakistan that last weekend foreclosed Trump's return to conflict. They can now hold the reins in the Middle East, and it will be the relationship they can forge with Iran, independent of the US, that matters.

They'd be absolutely flummoxed by a game of "Risk."