This phase must be understood as temporary. It is bound to end, whether through more use of force or the other party coming to accept the need to negotiate. As for narratives of unrest and crisis, they are amplified by hostile actors that support this immoral, and indeed brutal, assault.
The Gulf states have demonstrated that they can manage war at all levels, reflecting a capacity to apply the philosopher Edgar Morin’s concept of "crisis management."
Humanity has learned that the question of "crisis" resurfaces with every challenge that demands a balance of strength, rationality, and decisiveness.
It is easy for an enemy to create crises, and the real challenge is managing them. That is precisely what the Gulf states are doing, through firm, rational, and pragmatic diplomacy at every level.
Time and again, creating crises has led those behind them to their destruction. This is the path Iran is now taking by turning its missiles and military capabilities against states seeking development, peace, and social vitality.
The dynamic, developmental Gulf states understand that no crisis can be managed successfully without containing the sentimental charge and slogans that surround such events.
Rather, sober, clear-sighted leadership is needed. That is the approach of the Gulf states. Calm calculation in the face of turbulent events and suffocating crises to facilitate solutions. Failing to do so only fuels further escalation, which is precisely what hostile powers and gloating enemies seek.
Returning to Edgar Morin, his book "On the Concept of Crisis" unpacks the term and traces its evolution and transformations. A crisis is not necessarily evolutionary: one must grasp the existing situation, though a crisis has the potential to evolve and can lead to transformation at its emergence.
To understand this, we must abandon the idea that evolution is a continuous process. Every development arises from events or incidents - disruptions that generate deviations, that, in turn, become tension trajectories within a system and lead to disorganization or reorganization of varying depth and intensity.
Crisis is a field of evolution; it is a kind of laboratory for studying evolutionary processes. We live in societies of constant, rapid evolution. However, he adds that we can distinguish between the two concepts, because a crisis is not continuous; it is time-limited with a "before and after." A crisis, in the strict sense, is always defined in relation to periods of relative stability; otherwise, the idea of crisis dissolves and becomes synonymous with evolution.
This conception of crisis can be broadened to encompass not only wartime crises - the most extreme form - but also the intellectual, economic, and social complications that accompany them, which Morin addresses in different chapters. With every new event, we are confronted by two dilemmas:
The first is the moral frame we give the crisis, as we have seen in the not-so-distant past.
The second is how to frame the post-war phase. We cannot deny that the effects of the Gulf War persist to this day: economically, intellectually, and socially. Crisis management cannot succeed without containing emotionally charged nationalist thinking and obsolete rhetoric.
In sum, the will to power is the foundation of security. The Gulf states have played a strong role in deterring aggression. The key difference between yesterday and today is the emergence of a need for academics, intellectuals, and educators to sharpen our discourse around the dangers of alarmist narratives that undermine state security circulating on social media and other platforms. This is a moral duty. It is necessary for overcoming crises and grasping what "war" means.
