Yet they have been playing with fire for years, so it is no surprise that their latest clash has quite literally sparked a conflagration in one of their capitals.
And the European Union, which came together in reaction to the bloodshed of the 20th century, is looking more fractious and riven by incipient nationalism than at any point since its formation.I have drunk and seen the spiderTwo precautions would help prevent any of these flashpoints sparking a conflagration.
A sudden shift in the wind can spread the flames to the house next door, sparking a conflagration, "like the world has never seen".
Moreover, internal Fed estimates of the total losses likely to be suffered on subprime mortgages were roughly equivalent to a single day's movement in the stock market, hardly enough to spark a financial conflagration.
But Jerusalem's holiest site remains explosive.Dig deeper: Conflict over Jerusalem's holy sites may spark a wider conflagration (Nov 2014) Binyamin Netanyahu must resist the dangerous campaign for Jewish prayer-rights at Muslim holy sites (Nov 2014) It will be hard to turn a ceasefire into a more durable settlement (Aug 2014).
But the killings of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza, which are exhaustively reported and not euphemised away as "collateral damage" by the global Muslim media, have created a general volatility, in which seemingly local acts can, as the Danish cartoon controversy proved, immediately spark a worldwide conflagration.
Real Madrid coach Jose Mourinho, self-described as "the special one," is setting fire to Spanish soccer with dangerous fireworks that some fear may spark a bigger conflagration on the parched tinder of that fractured entity called Spain.
Updated at 1.56pm BST 1.50pm BST Bashar al-Assad may be asking himself what has changed as he studies the EU's arms embargo announcement, writes Simon Tisdall: What has changed is that the two-year civil war is ever closer to fulfilling predictions that it will spill into neighbouring countries, principally Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Turkey, and spark a regional sectarian conflagration.
The appearance of the book has sparked a similar conflagration.
It is paradoxical, people here say, that someone entrusted with fire prevention had sparked a huge conflagration.
