For those unlucky enough to inhabit the region the future holds the prospect of continued conflict with little hope of a better life.

For those sitting far from the firing line future events in the Middle East are likely to have inescapable implications for security and economic wellbeing.

A good starting point for thinking about the region's outlook is the Levant, where dust began settling this week after a month of violence. Although the loss of life was tragic, this should not obscure the fact that the conflict was little more than a protracted border skirmish.

Nor should it obscure the region's bigger issues, a perennial danger when Israel is involved because of the tendency of both its critics and defenders to overstate the significance of the Jewish state's existence and conduct in the region.

Panning out from the hotspot in Lebanon and northern Israel allows a wider view. The vista that comes into focus is as unpleasant as it is messy.

The region has many serious political, security and diplomatic issues playing out simultaneously on many levels.

To say that fear, suspicion, resentment and ancient hatreds inform the posture of the players towards each other is an understatement. It is a statement of the obvious that these players pursue multiple priorities: power, honour, security and avoidance of humiliation.

Peace may also be an objective, but crucially it is only one among many and certainly not the overriding goal.

(This latter point, however obvious, is often forgotten by outsiders involving themselves in the region. They tend quickly and bloodily to be reminded of it after they have waded in. ) Adding to complexity is the nature of the region's regimes, which range from resolute secularists to Islamist theocrats, and its ethno-religious breakdown:

Shia, Sunni, Arab, Jew, Turk and Persian.

Adding to the region's fragility are almost infinite internal divisions.

Minorities abound: Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and Iran;

Copts in Egypt; a melange of groupings in Syria; a 50:50 split in Jordan between Bedouin and Palestinian Arab; and Lebanon's patchwork of frequently warring communities.

Regimes survive by using varying degrees of repression against these groupings. The maintenance of order through fear (never conducive to creating a stable equilibrium) also means that states are doubly militarised, once to face external threats, and again to quell domestic unrest.

All of this makes the dynamic in the Middle East today akin to Europe in the aftermath of the wars of religion, with a large dash of 19th century nationalism added to make the cocktail all the more combustible.

And as in Europe before peace and prosperity became the shared and overriding objective of states, a grand, solve-it-all conference in the region, as some are advocating, would be doomed to fail.

Understanding the limitations of what is achievable and prioritising objectives is crucial to containing conflict in the region and limiting spillover into the rest of the world.

Top of the list of priorities is Iran's attempts at acquiring nuclear weapons.

Persian imperial ambition has a long history.

It now threatens the balance of power in the region and, it is worth noting, this causes far more alarm among the other big players . . . Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt . . . than anything Israel does, including its excessive use of force against their coreligionists.

But because nuclear proliferation has a global security dimension the rest of the world is also involved.

As the world's leading power, the US will inevitably be central to this crisis. No one else can play the role of global policeman, as it does in Europe and Asia . . . from the Aegean to the Taiwan Straits, a big American stick and soft voice keeps conflict at bay and contains rivalries.

The US once played such a calming role in the Middle East. From the Suez crisis 50 years ago to the first Gulf War, the US slapped down aggressors and underpinned some semblance of order.

But stability and democracy are now wrongly viewed as conflicting goals by many in the US administration.

Miscalculation made on the basis of this thinking has reduced the US's capacity to supply global security by undermining the two things it needs to lead . . . moral authority and military capability.

Failure in Iraq has hugely weakened its moral authority and overstretched its armed forces, limiting the credibility of its position on Iran.

There is a growing risk that the Islamic Republic will make its own miscalculation by underestimating the seriousness of American intent. This would be a grave error. The US believes that a nuclear armed Iran would increase the threat of nuclear terrorism and trigger global proliferation. It appears ready to do whatever it takes to prevent such an outcome.

We at the Economist Intelligence Unit now ascribe a 35% probability to the stand-off ending in military intervention. The implications of this are profoundly serious: death on a large scale; more Islamist terrorism; and a real risk that oil prices well above $100 a barrel for a protracted period could cause global recession, adding tens of millions to the ranks of the jobless.

The coming escalation of the crisis over Iran's ambitions should also inform the decision facing the Irish government at time of writing of whether to deploy troops as part of a UN force in south Lebanon.

As EU governments are set to impose sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme, wandering into a region where its proxy, Hezbollah, holds sway seems highly dangerous.

Iran will be only too ready to let the Europeans know that it can punish them severely if they do sanction it, and Hezbollah will gladly do its master's bidding if instructed.

But even without the Iranian link, there is a further reason to be extremely wary about putting the defence forces in harm's way.

It appears increasingly as if the Europeans are confusing the absence of war in southern Lebanon with peace. This is naive.

Neither Israel nor Hezbollah seek a modus vivendi. Both wish to obliterate the other. There is neither a peace to make or to keep in the area.

Other European governments' commitment of forces may be well intentioned, but such intentions pave a well worn road. Ireland should not follow others down it.