You've heard the expression "crossing the Rubicon," but you may not know the history.
In the Roman Republic, the Rubicon marked the border of Italy (read: the Home Counties/Eastern Seaboard), where it was illegal to garrison troops. In 49 BCE, Julius Caesar ran out of lawful ways to—wait for it—avoid prosecution for corruption stemming from his first term as Consul, and the Senate denied him the governorship of Cisalpine Gallus (read: the Midlands/the Midwest) which would have also granted him immunity. So he and his XIII Legion crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome to force the Senate to make him Dictator of Rome. It worked out for Caesar, but not for the Republic.
The ensuing civil war killed a good fraction of the Roman population and conclusively ended the Republic. Then just days before the end of that conflagration, Caesar had his unfortunate accident in the Senate. This led to Caesar's great-nephew Octavian becoming Emperor shortly thereafter, starting a 400-year slow-motion disintegration of Roman civilization. And the distraction of all this prepared the ground in Judea for a fundamentalist sect to break off from Judaism and go on to bury the 1500-year-old Greco-Roman religion in the archaeological dust.
The relevance of this history to current events is left as an exercise for the reader.