We don’t know what will happen and we don’t know what to do about it

THERE is so little we can predict or know. Will there be another Scottish referendum? Will black-and-white gingham be big this summer or hang limply on the sale rails in late August? Will an asteroid destroy all life on Earth next Wednesday? We never see the big ones coming, like the crash of 2008. David Cameron – lambasted in a committee report last week – was obviously in no doubt that the EU vote would go his way and was as ill-prepared for defeat as a man whose parachute fails to open. And not only can we never see what’s coming, we don’t know what to do about anything either. The Syrian conundrum is like the scene at the end of The Italian Job with the bus full of gold teetering over a precipice. Go after the gold and you go over the edge with the bus. Get the hell off the bus and you lose the gold. It’s a lose lose situation. The only possible outcomes are different kinds of disaster. Hit out at Assad and we help IS and risk a confrontation with Putin. Leave Assad alone and the civil war continues.

As the former US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld said in 2002: “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

He was laughed at for his Alice-inWonderland logic but he was right. Which is why the sight of all these world leaders – most of them rather new to the job as it happens – buzzing about trying to sort out Syria and Russia in a hurry does not inspire confidence. The law of unintended consequences was painfully obvious in the wake of the Arab Spring. Heaven knows what will unfold next.

Meanwhile Kim Jong-un threatens the US fleet with a good nuking. He’s what you call a known known. Known to be nuts.