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On July 8, 2026, Ankara became the scene of a strategic turning point for European and transatlantic collective defense. While President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan presiding, the opening of the 48-hour summit at the Beştepe Presidential Complex marked the official launch of what many officials and analysts are already calling “NATO 3.0.” The summit goes beyond diplomatic protocol: it reorients the Alliance’s institutional priorities in response to a range of challenges, including the protracted war in Ukraine, simmering tensions with Iran, the persistent threat of terrorism, and mounting concern over successive waves of migration. All of this comes at a time when U.S. policy is increasingly centered on the Western Hemisphere rather than Europe and the Middle East. Against this backdrop, Turkey has emerged as a pivotal player capable of mediation, regional protection, and recalibrating European and transatlantic security priorities. This summit could redefine both the means and the objectives of the Alliance. NATO 3.0: An Opportunity for Turkish Power The Alliance’s evolution is now understood through three major eras. NATO 1.0 was defined by the Cold War. NATO 2.0 by the post-9/11 interventionist era. Today, NATO 3.0 – a concept popularized by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – is redefining the priorities. The Alliance is no longer focused solely on the East, on the Ukrainian plains and Russia; it must also incorporate its southern flank. Mark Rutte, the secretary general, has repeatedly stressed that NATO must be able to manage simultaneously a continental threat in the East (Russia) and hybrid instability in the South (terrorism and migration), particularly across the Black Sea, the Middle East, and North Africa. For Erdoğan, this amounts to a diplomatic triumph: having brought his allies to recognize that Europe’s security is decided as much on the Bosporus as it is in Warsaw. Ankara’s Technological “Showcase” For Erdoğan, this summit is above all a demonstration of Turkey’s military-industrial strength. The country’s technological advances enhanced its geopolitical weight at the regional and international levels. By including an industrial forum as part of the NATO summit, Erdoğan is showcasing Turkey’s 3,500 defense companies. Turkey is no longer merely seeking to acquire military equipment – such as air defense systems or fifth-generation fighter jets – but is also showcasing its Bayraktar drones, which have proved their effectiveness in Ukraine, along with its armored vehicles and electronic defense systems. This “showcase” highlights a reality that had been taking shape for two decades: Turkey’s resurgence after a century in the shadows. However, holding the summit in Ankara has drawn sharp criticism from NGOs over the country’s domestic crackdown. More than 200 opposition figures and activists were placed in preventive detention just before the summit, underscoring the high political cost of Turkey’s stability. Turkey’s Demand for the Lifting of Restrictions Ankara has made its demands clear ahead of the summit. The first is the lifting of intra-NATO trade restrictions. Several Western countries, including the United States, France, and Germany, maintain de facto embargoes on critical components required for the production of drones and defense systems. These restrictions, imposed after Turkey’s purchase of Russian S-400 missiles and its operations against Kurdish forces in Syria, are strangling Turkey’s indigenous defense industry. Erdoğan has described these measures as unfair. Turkey’s industrial giants, such as Baykar, which manufactures attack drones including the Bayraktar, and Turkish Aerospace Industries, which produces fighter jets and attack helicopters, are critically dependent on importing specific Western engines and components. These imports are essential for delivering on their huge order backlogs and, above all, for completing the KAAN, Turkey’s fifth-generation fighter jet. The Industrial Standoff: SAFE and SAMP/T Turkey’s second demand concerns the European SAFE program, or Security Action for Europe. Backed by €150 billion, this European Union financial mechanism, created in May 2025, aims to subsidize joint arms procurement and develop Europe’s defense industries by 2030. So far, Turkey has been excluded from the initiative because it does not strictly align with European foreign policy. Erdoğan considers this exclusion discriminatory: “Europe cannot share the burden of defense while excluding NATO’s second-largest army from its defense technology budgets.” The third and most complex issue concerns the French-Italian SAMP/T missile system (Surface-to-Air Missile Platform/Terrain). This system is Europe’s equivalent of the American Patriot, whose sale to Ankara has been restricted by Washington following Turkey’s purchase of the S-400s. SAMP/T is a highly automated, next-generation mobile medium and long-range air defense and anti-missile system. Turkey wants to acquire the technology to build its own missile defense shield, known as “Steel Dome.” While Paris and Rome have made a strategic shift by opening the door to delivery negotiations, the sticking point remains industrial and technological. Ankara is seeking technology transfers and local co-production rather than merely being granted permission to purchase the system. France and Italy remain cautious, demanding strict guarantees on intellectual property rights and assurances that the system will not interfere with the S-400s. The Trump-Erdoğan Affinity Amid Congressional Deadlock The summit is also the stage for the “friendship diplomacy” between Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The U.S. president has made no secret of his admiration for Turkey’s “great leader.” This personal relationship has helped break the deadlock over the F-35 issue. Donald Trump’s imminent announcement that he intends to reinstate Turkey in the F-35 program marks a major geopolitical turning point. Excluded from the program in 2019 following Turkey’s purchase of Russian S-400 missiles, Ankara is now benefiting from a significant diplomatic thaw, illustrated by a U.S. proposal to sell engines for its KAAN fighter jet under a $700 million contract. Yet the U.S. Congress continues to maintain a legal ban preventing the delivery of the F-35s – already paid for and stored in the United States – as long as Turkey continue to possess Russian S-400 technology, which is considered a threat to the aircraft’s stealth capabilities. To overcome the deadlock, Washington is exploring the possibility of reselling Turkey’s S-400s to a neutral third party, such as South Korea. This rapprochement is reshaping the balance of power in the Middle East and Europe, drawing fierce opposition from Israel and Greece, which are urging Washington to block the sale. The Black Sea Chokepoint Ankara, guardian of the straits . Since 2022, the Black Sea has become a theater of direct military confrontation, disrupting global grain and energy corridors. As host of the NATO summit, Turkey is reaffirming its role as the sovereign guardian of the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits under the 1936 Montreux Convention, using this authority to restrict access for warships from non-Black Sea states. This posture is forcing the Alliance to rethink its naval presence and placing Ankara as the indispensable guardian of a strategic, highly sensitive, and closed maritime basin. The MCM and collective defense in the Black Sea . Faced with the growing militarization of Crimea and the deployment of Russian coastal missile systems, NATO established a trilateral force – Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria – which has been operational since July 2024: the MCM, or Mine Countermeasures Black Sea Task Group. Its primary mission is to secure the Black Sea against drifting mines and the sabotage of critical maritime infrastructure. Turkey plays a central role within the group, carrying out regular rotations to protect the Alliance’s eastern flank while respecting the Montreux Convention, an essential framework for maintaining balance and avoiding open escalation with Moscow.

The visit that President Emmanuel Macron began on Monday evening in Damascus, accompanied by a large ministerial delegation and the heads of major French companies, took on particular significance in the current context — one that goes well beyond the conventional scope of routine official visits. However, it was overshadowed by a serious security incident… On the political front, Mr. Macron's talks with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa marked Syria's return to the international community in the post-Assad era. A comeback that is both political and economic in nature. The two heads of state announced the restoration of diplomatic relations between the two countries, which had been severed following the massacres carried out by the Baathist regime against its own population during the civil war that erupted in 2011. The economic significance of this visit cannot be overlooked either, especially as it reflects a clear convergence of interests between the two countries. France is positioning itself prominently within the enormous reconstruction and development process that Syria urgently needs after decades of destructive state control. President al-Sharaa demonstrated full awareness of this, advocating for an "economic partnership with France" which he sees as a precursor or model for a broader partnership with the European Union. In this context, both heads of state emphasized the need for Syria to once again become an "energy hub" in light of current international circumstances. On his personal X account, President Macron summarized the essence of his visit in these words: "A new partnership between Syria and France, for a new era." Syria's return to the community of nations — anchored in the need for socio-economic development and, above all, the establishment of a central state that stands as the antithesis of militia rule beholden to a regional hegemonic power — does not appear to sit well with those seeking to keep the entire Levant region mired in chronic instability and endless, open-ended conflict. This desire to cause harm materialized in the form of a double bomb attack in the immediate vicinity of President Macron's residence. The Élysée chief had left the area to head to the Syrian presidential palace, where President al-Sharaa was awaiting him, about fifteen minutes before the two explosions occurred. According to the latest toll, the blasts killed one person and wounded around thirty others, including four Syrian gendarmerie officers and the deputy minister of Tourism. The attack, condemned by President Joseph Aoun (who is expected in Washington on July 21) and by Saudi Arabia, did not disrupt the French delegation's schedule in any way. Escalation at Hormuz Pure coincidence, or carefully orchestrated timing? The double bombing in Damascus coincided with a resumption of attacks by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps against vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz without complying with the Pasdaran's conditions. Iranian forces targeted three ships along this vital waterway within twenty-four hours on Tuesday, including a Qatari liquefied natural gas tanker and a Saudi oil tanker. Qatar reacted sharply, strongly condemning what it described as an "unacceptable Iranian aggression" and calling on the Islamic Republic to immediately halt its "aggressive actions that endanger security in the Gulf." The Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the Iranian chargé d'affaires to protest the attack on the LNG tanker, which, according to some reports, is at risk of exploding as a result of the assault. Late in the evening, the Iranian Foreign Ministry described Qatar's reaction as "bewildering" and "contrary to the principle of good neighborliness"! A senior American official stressed on his part that Iran had violated the terms of the memorandum of understanding signed between the United States and the Islamic Republic, noting that the Revolutionary Guards attacked a third merchant vessel late Tuesday afternoon. The official indicated in this context that American forces shot down several Iranian drones over the Strait of Hormuz. The question remains whether, in response to the violation of the memorandum of understanding, the United States will or will not launch airstrikes against Iranian military positions and infrastructure, and what the scale and scope of such strikes might be… Late in the evening, Reuters reported remarks from an American official who stated that 'the United States in no way accepts Iran's behavior in the Strait of Hormuz, and there will be consequences'… Consequences that were duly announced shortly thereafter: the Treasury Department announced the reinstatement of economic sanctions on Iranian oil, and around midnight (Levant time), CENTCOM declared it had launched 'powerful strikes' against the Islamic Republic in response to the attacks on vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. Against this backdrop of mounting tension, two further developments in recent days have highlighted the escalatory climate that the Revolutionary Guards and the hardline wing of the Iranian regime appear intent on pursuing: the renewed belligerence of the pro-Iranian Houthi militia in Yemen toward Saudi Arabia; and the fierce hostility — accompanied by insulting remarks — publicly displayed by demonstrators at Ali Khamenei's funeral toward Iran's president and foreign minister, who were accused of adopting positions that are too accommodating toward the United States. The so-called hardline current within the regime is increasingly staking out aggressive positions in the ongoing standoff with the Trump administration. Does its behavior reflect a deliberate attempt to torpedo any potential deal with Washington? At the same time, will the head of state continue to maneuver and prioritize the 'diplomatic' path, despite the escalation being driven by the Revolutionary Guards and an attitude that is all too often arrogant — bordering on insolent — toward the United States and its leadership?

Over the course of two and a half centuries, the United States has achieved what no other nation has accomplished in modern history. From a peripheral colony on the fringes of the British Empire, it rose to become the world’s foremost economic, military, and cultural power. From the wheat and corn fields of the American Midwest to the automobile industry, the personal computer, the Internet, Hollywood, television, jazz, rock music, contemporary art, social media, fast food, and blue jeans, an entire civilizational model gradually took shape, turning the “American Idea” into a model with which the world identified for 250 years. History, however, teaches that greatness is never a permanent condition. Empires rise and eventually recede when they fail to renew the foundations of their strength. Today, the United States faces an existential question: can it lay the foundations for another two and a half centuries of global leadership, or is it entering the phase of decline that has overtaken so many great powers before it? History offers three particularly illuminating examples. The Byzantine Empire enjoyed immense wealth, remarkable scientific advancement, and a highly educated population. Yet it weakened itself by showering privileges upon the elite while granting sweeping tax exemptions to the wealthy, ultimately triggering financial collapse and eroding its capacity to govern. Spain, meanwhile, saw the riches of the New World pour into its coffers, yet squandered the opportunity to build a productive economy by deepening social inequality. Had those resources been invested more wisely, the Industrial Revolution might well have begun there before it reached Britain. Britain’s own decline, by contrast, came not through sudden collapse but through the gradual loss of the technological leadership it had established during the Victorian era with the steam engine, textile machinery, the railway, and the telegraph, as the world’s principal centers of scientific and engineering innovation shifted toward the United States and Germany. It is in this light that the philosopher George Santayana’s famous observation seems more relevant today than ever: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The lesson shared by these historical experiences is unmistakable. Whenever a nation allows its institutions to weaken, social inequality to widen, and its universities and research centers to lose their vitality, it gradually begins to forfeit its place in the international order. That also means the United States has every opportunity to remain prosperous by the time it celebrates its five-hundredth anniversary, provided it confronts these challenges. Despite maintaining its technological and economic edge, America’s current crisis appears to be more internal than external. Public confidence in political, judicial, and media institutions has steadily eroded, accompanied by a growing conviction that the system no longer serves all citizens equally. It was in this climate that Donald Trump emerged, presenting himself as an outsider capable of “draining the swamp,” capitalizing on popular anger and the rise of populist currents. At the same time, social and cultural divisions within American society have deepened along racial, religious, and economic lines, making national consensus increasingly difficult to achieve. The framers of the Constitution, in The Federalist Papers (1787-1788), designed a political system capable of accommodating diversity and disagreement. Yet what once served as a safeguard for liberty has gradually evolved into a form of polarization that now threatens the system’s ability to generate consensus and preserve stability. It is as though a vast trap had slowly closed around American society. This helps explain why the United States appears to be drifting toward a more authoritarian direction and into what might be described as a post-scientific society. At the heart of this crisis lies an old cultural and moral question concerning the very nature of the American Idea. From its inception, the United States has been shaped by a permanent tension between the values of the Enlightenment and rational inquiry on one hand, and religious faith together with moral tradition on the other. Two influential thinkers embodied this debate. John Dewey, identified here with political realism, believed that democracy could ground its public morality in reason, education, and human dignity, and that universities were capable of cultivating responsible citizens. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, associated with pragmatism, adopted a more pessimistic view. He argued that human nature could never easily free itself from selfishness and racism, and that society therefore required a moral framework capable of restraining power and competing interests. Despite their differences, both thinkers agreed on one essential point: society requires a shared moral framework capable of protecting the public sphere and providing common ground for resolving political conflicts. Yet that common foundation has steadily eroded with the rise of populism, the declining regard for public service and ethical reflection in favor of media-driven emotionalism, and the spread of the moral relativism that Allan Bloom famously examined in The Closing of the American Mind . As a result, political authority has become increasingly inclined to attack the press, universities, and intellectual elites instead of reinforcing their role as pillars of democratic debate. America’s divisions no longer revolve solely around political disagreement. They now extend to the very definition of truth itself. Each camp has constructed its own version of reality amid declining trust in institutions, the weakening of traditional political parties, the growing influence of money in politics, and the shift in campaign financing away from party organizations toward wealthy donors and pressure groups, diminishing the parties’ ability to structure and regulate political life. Ironically, American history itself offers a striking counterexample to these developments. In the summer of 1754, the young George Washington committed serious military mistakes during the Battle of Jumonville Glen, and his recklessness helped ignite the French and Indian War. Yet that defeat became a defining moment in his personal development. From it he learned discipline, caution, flexibility, and self-restraint, qualities that later enabled him to lead the newly founded republic. The episode demonstrated that failure is not the opposite of leadership but one of the conditions that makes mature leadership possible. Many observers believe that the United States is now moving along the opposite path. The growing erosion of institutional independence, the weakening of checks and balances, and the expanding role of the executive branch in both the economy and public administration reflect a conservative nationalist tendency that is redefining neoliberalism in the service of a more centralized state. These developments coincide with profound global transformations marked by the restructuring of supply chains, intensifying competition for capital and talent, and strategic rivalry over technology and energy in a world steadily evolving toward multiple centers of power. The United States is no longer the world’s only major actor. China has firmly established itself as an economic and technological powerhouse, the European Union is striving to preserve its strategic weight, Russia seeks to reassert its spheres of influence, and India continues its rise as an emerging global power. As the international system becomes increasingly fragmented and competitive, American influence can no longer be taken for granted as it was in the aftermath of the Second World War. Two hundred and fifty years after its independence, the United States still possesses the assets needed to renew its global role. Yet that renewal cannot rest on military power alone. It requires stronger institutions, reduced inequality, restored confidence in democracy, and the revival of the American Idea as a project grounded in the common good, faith, and the rule of law. The destiny of nations is shaped not only by their wealth or their armies, but also by their enduring capacity to reexamine themselves before history rewrites their ending. The world’s attachment to the United States has never rested solely on its status as the greatest military power. Before anything else, it was attached to an idea. From the Declaration of Independence onward, the American project was never simply about building a new state. It sought to create a political, cultural, and economic model that would redefine modernity itself. From that idea emerged a succession of transformations that reshaped the world, to the point where American influence often extended far beyond America’s own borders. The question today is therefore not whether the United States remains the world’s leading power, but whether it still possesses the moral and institutional foundations that once inspired the world to believe in the appeal and enduring promise of the American Idea. Perhaps the greatest challenge lies in the rapid erosion of those very foundations. Politics has increasingly become an exercise in emotional mobilization rather than reasoned judgment. Public debate has fallen captive to populism, while universities, the media, and the institutions traditionally responsible for cultivating the political elite, including increasingly hollowed-out political parties, have steadily lost their role as places where a shared understanding of truth can be forged. The disagreement dividing Americans no longer concerns only which policies to pursue, but the very definition of reality itself, arguably the deepest fracture any democracy can face.

This essay explores the figures of crisis and catastrophe, from ancient cosmologies to the lived experience of the world’s upheaval. Bringing together the Greek, Biblical, and Indian traditions with the thought of Jan Patočka, it examines how civilizations have conceived disorder, collapse, irreversibility, and even the very possibility of action when meaning itself begins to falter. Published here as a series of seven essay-chapters, the text follows a demanding yet essential thread: to understand whether catastrophe is a sudden rupture, a slow disintegration of the world, or the deepest truth of our age. What follows is the fifth part. From Tohu va-Bohu to Sodom: A Critique of “Political Science” The first eleven chapters of Genesis replay, as though in cascading succession, the struggle between structure and dissolution, between creation and rupture. Man leaves the Garden: a crisis of the bond. Cain kills Abel: a crisis of fraternity. The Flood: a cosmic catastrophe. Babel: a crisis of language and of the collective. At every stage, it is tohu va-bohu that creation represses without ever causing it to disappear. When Abraham appears, he enters into this history of crises. He is not its survivor; he becomes its witness, indeed its respondent. Before him unfold once again familial and political fractures, famine, sterility, war, and sacrifice. Yet only once does the full face of catastrophe stand revealed: the divine punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah, as though all the tohu va-bohu of origins, contained since Bereshit , were there to find its final conflagration before contracting around a single man, Abraham, and a promise. The world was born from a disaster internal to God’s own work. Tohu va-bohu is its scar, the visible trace of a primordial disorder that the Word contained without ever abolishing. Before the world was spoken, it wavered. The earth was not nothingness; it was formless, trembling, still awaiting the Word that would summon it into existence. The Eternal did not create the world out of emptiness, but out of trembling. For creation does not erase the abyss; it domesticates it. This tohu va-bohu is not evil; it is the field in which God experiences Himself as Creator, a potentially inhabited chaos. Thus, between Nothingness and Being stretches the zone of beginning: there the divine Word traces its frontier and, from that which resists, brings form into being. Reality opposes its weight to Creation; God does not deny it, but orders it. And ever since, the world has remained fragile: at every moment it may come undone and fall back into its original chaos. Here the mystery of tohu va-bohu reveals itself: Creation is never complete; it begins anew with every breath. The world is sustained not by its own strength, but by the faithfulness of the Word that maintains it in being. Thus Scripture begins: “The earth was tohu va-bohu , and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:2). As the narrative advances toward the announced punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah, it never explicitly names tohu va-bohu , yet its shadow becomes perceptible: fire and brimstone, overturning and sterility. What emerges is not chaos itself, but its memory; not creation unraveling, but the world recalling what it had been before it was ordered. To annihilate Sodom is to effect a regression toward the pre-Genesis, toward that “pre-creational beginning” where light had not yet divided the darkness. The plain of the Jordan, once exalted as the “Garden of the Lord,” undergoes an ontological metamorphosis: it becomes a desert of bitumen, a land of absolute barrenness. Here we witness chaos in its fullness. It is the withdrawal of the divine presence, giving way to a world undone. Sodom reenacts, as an inverted mirror, the paradox of Genesis: where blessing had ordered life, Judgment establishes emptiness. The use of the Hebrew verb hafakh (“to overturn,” “to upend”) to describe the city’s fall designates not merely an archaeological ruin, but a subversion of the cosmic order. What the Word had structured, the passage from chaos to order, wrath restores to the formless. Abraham stands upon the breach, between the cosmos that still endures and the returning chaos. His question, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?” is a metaphysical cry: can the Demiurge consent to seeing His own work become Tohu va-Bohu once more? The destruction of the cities of the plain is a reactivation of primordial emptiness, a “joyful de-creation” from which only the Patriarch’s prayer succeeds in distinguishing a return to absolute nothingness. Sodom is not merely destroyed; it is ontologically dissolved, returned to the cosmic draft, to primordial chaos, where light still hesitates to exist. Abraham saves humanity from total annihilation, not through the sheer force of prayer, but because he reminds God that a world requires a minimum of coherence. “I look upon the earth, and behold, it is Tohu va-Bohu ; and to the heavens, and their light is gone.” (Jeremiah 4:23) The vision of the prophet Jeremiah echoes the Sodomitic apocalypse. Here, the language of primordial chaos is no longer merely a cosmogony, but the very grammar of Judgment: when humanity corrupts the Covenant, the earth loses its foundation and once again sinks into the undifferentiated state of the first day. To think catastrophe, to think disaster: this is where the human passion for philosophy, mythology, and religion has never ceased to test itself. Two visions confront one another while simultaneously responding to each other: one cyclical, in which crisis and catastrophe are the pulsations of a cosmic respiration; the other linear, in which time advances toward a telos and eschatology becomes the necessary passage between crisis and fulfillment. Within this second regime, history replaces the cosmos: the end is no longer a beginning anew, but a revelation. From that moment onward, eschatology becomes immediately political, and political science, at its deepest level, is nothing other than an applied eschatology. In order to exist, every political project must invoke its own idea of catastrophe: an end to be averted, a disaster to be named. Whether it be the collapse of capitalism, ecological breakdown, or the dissolution of collective identity, politics is often grounded in this anticipation of the worst, not in order to accept it, but in order to provide itself with the very necessity of action. The tragedy of modern political science lies in its constant effort to repress, or at least conceal, its own eschatological background. By constituting itself as an empirical and rational discipline, devoted to the analysis of facts and to methodological neutrality, it sought to purify itself of every form of teleology. Yet, as Eric Voegelin demonstrated, modernity did not destroy religious structures of thought; it “immanentized” them. [1] What once belonged to transcendent salvation became a historical process: politics became the substitute for soteriology. Far from being abolished, eschatology was translated into the promise of progress, the utopia of reconciliation, or the horizon of complete autonomy. Hans Blumenberg, in response to this reading, saw in this immanentization not a corruption of theology but a legitimate reappropriation: modernity would thereby endow itself with its own narrative autonomy, relocating the myth of the end onto the plane of the human project. Yet this “self-assertion” ( Selbstbehauptung ) of reason, by denying the sacred from which it nevertheless proceeds, has had the effect of rendering the symbolic foundations of political action invisible. [2] Modern political science has remained dependent upon the aspiration to transfer to humanity the prerogatives of creatio ex nihilo once reserved for God. The merit of reflecting upon primordial catastrophe, that of Tohu va-Bohu and its recurrences, whether they appear implicitly in the narrative of Sodom or explicitly in Jeremiah’s prophecy, is to reveal that the God of the Old Testament creates not ex nihilo , but ex confusione . Creation is not the emergence of being out of nothingness, but an act of differentiation, of bringing order to a pre-existing reality. Chaos, therefore, is never abolished; it remains the latent matrix of being, always capable of re-emerging in different forms: catastrophe, judgment, or the loss of meaning. This Biblical Tohu Bohu corresponds, under a different regime of temporality, to the phase of return to the unformed within the cyclical temporality of Indian thought: the moment when name and form ( nāma-rūpa ) dissolve into the undifferentiated principle ( avyakta , “the unmanifest”). Tohu Bohu evokes chaos before creation; pralaya , by contrast, designates chaos after creation, that into which the world folds back at the end of each cosmic cycle ( kalpa ). In both cases, it is not a question of nothingness, but of a liminal state: form disappears, yet remains in potency. Within Biblical thought, Tohu Bohu represents a metaphysically negative disorder: it stands in opposition to light and to the creative Word; it is that which God contains, orders, and holds at bay. In Indian thought, by contrast, pralaya and avyakta designate states of pure potentiality: disorder does not stand in opposition to order; it constitutes its necessary reverse. Thus, in both traditions, disorder is never external to order, but rather its very condition. To think Tohu Bohu together with pralaya is to recover the point of equilibrium at which every cosmology, whether theological or philosophical, reveals itself to be inseparable from the political: to govern the world is always to strive to preserve a fragile order poised upon the edge of primordial chaos. To think Tohu Bohu together with pralaya is to perceive that disorder is not an accident of the world but its deepest dimension, the region where the possibility of meaning is endlessly reenacted. If every cosmology remains inseparable from the political, it is because it always entails a particular way of situating oneself before this depth: to preserve an order is already to negotiate with a ground that forever exceeds it. Modernity, however, sought to break this primordial pact. By separating the political from both the eschatological and the cosmological, by dissolving the former into administration and reducing the latter to the mathematics of numerical law, it displaced reflection from the question of origin to that of mastery. Governance aspired to become a science of calculation, forgetting that it had once arisen from a relationship to the abyss rather than to certainty. Yet whenever order begins to unravel, whenever crisis becomes the ordinary texture of the world, this repressed cosmological background resurfaces: politics rediscovers that it proceeds not from sovereign will, but from the fracture itself, from the vertigo of the groundless ground. And what if political modernity had mistaken the very nature of the drama? What if it had sought to ignore the depth of the indeterminate, of the undecidable, that place where decision itself loses its bearings? To say that crisis must be resolved, is that not already to misunderstand the fact that it no longer comes to an end? That it extends itself as the condition of the world, as the atmosphere of every present? Perhaps this is the true mark of all modernity: its essence is not novelty but prolongation; it has endured for millennia as a slow passage through the Kali Yuga, an Iron Age extended to the scale of consciousness. Notes [1] In The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), Eric Voegelin develops his central thesis of the “immanentization of the eschaton.” Modern ideologies, while presenting themselves as rational and historical, reproduce structures of salvation inherited from religion by transferring them into human history itself. The promise of transcendent redemption is thereby transformed into a political project of total reconciliation, historical progress, or ultimate emancipation. This interpretation nevertheless differs from those of Carl Schmitt and Karl Löwith. For Schmitt, political modernity remains structured by secularized theological categories, sovereignty, decision, exception, but the emphasis lies above all on the formal continuity between theological and political concepts. For Löwith, the modern philosophy of historical progress constitutes a secular transposition of Christian eschatology into the philosophy of history. Voegelin radicalizes this diagnosis: he sees in modernity not merely the survival of theological patterns but a “gnostic” reactivation of the promise of salvation, whereby humanity claims to accomplish within history what once belonged to transcendence. The problem therefore lies not simply in the secularization of religious concepts, but in the transformation of politics itself into an instrument of soteriology. Voegelin nevertheless tends to adopt a strongly pathologizing interpretation of Gnosticism, understood as a disorder of the spirit and a will toward self-deification leading, in his view, to the modern forms of totalitarianism. The immanentization of the eschaton thus appears as the catastrophic attempt to accomplish within human history a redemption that once belonged to transcendence, at the price of falsifying reality and closing experience to the order of being. By contrast, Jacob Taubes, while sharing Voegelin’s diagnosis that eschatological structures persist within modernity, refuses to regard them as either a mere spiritual error or a political pathology. In Occidental Eschatology (1947), eschatology is conceived not as illusion but as one of the deepest motors of Western history. The apocalyptic becomes the revolt of spirit against the tyranny of “the world as it is,” against every attempt by politics to establish itself as a definitive order. Taubes thus rehabilitates the revolutionary figure, from Paul the Apostle to Karl Marx, by way of Thomas Müntzer, as the bearers of an eschatological power of separation and judgment, keeping alive the flame of krinein against the closure of the established world. Defining himself as an “archaeologist of the apocalyptic,” Taubes is less concerned with restoring a transcendent order than with the negative force of messianism: a permanent power of destabilization preventing politics from closing upon its own idolatrous self-sufficiency. Where Voegelin seeks to restore a separate transcendence in order to reorder the city, Taubes sees in the revolutionary impulse the legitimate persistence of a hope irreducible to the finitude of politics. A politics deprived of every eschatological horizon would then risk becoming nothing more than the administration of nothingness. See Occidental Eschatology , especially Part II. [2] Hans Blumenberg argues that modernity inherited medieval and eschatological questions, such as the meaning and end of history, to which it was compelled to respond through heterogeneous means, most notably the idea of Progress. This structural displacement gives rise to the optical illusion of a substantial continuity with religion. Blumenberg designates this functional mechanism as “reoccupation” ( Umbesetzung ): new conceptual frameworks occupy systemic positions left vacant by the collapse of the theological order without thereby constituting its derivatives. See The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, translated by Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 65-71.

The week is getting off to a relatively quiet start. The region’s main issues remain temporarily on hold, from the possible resumption of talks between Washington and Tehran to Israel’s withdrawal from two “pilot zones” in southern Lebanon. The pause is due in part to the official funeral ceremonies for Iran’s former Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, which conclude Thursday, as well as the NATO summit scheduled for Tuesday, July 7, and Wednesday, July 8, in Ankara. The gathering carries added significance as U.S. President Donald Trump is set to attend following months of tension with America’s European allies. Ahead of his departure for Turkey, Trump made it clear he is not backing down on Iran. Speaking at a White House press conference, he restated his priorities and renewed his threats against Tehran. “Either we make a deal or we finish the job. And finishing the job won’t be hard. I’d rather make a deal because I don’t want to hurt 91 million people,” he said, adding that the U.S. military can “knock down Iran’s bridges in one hour.” He continued in the same threatening tone: “We can knock out their electricity and power-generating plants and I would say a small part of an afternoon, every plant will be gone. And they know that. They don’t have any money now. We haven’t given them any money.” Trump also reiterated that he’s not looking for “a regime change in Iran, although in reality it is. The first regime is gone. The second regime is gone. I think the third one is more reasonable. We’ll see.” Donald Trump also reiterated that Washington intends to recover Iran’s nuclear “enriched material,” stressing once again that Iran “cannot have a nuclear weapon.” Asked about the Strait of Hormuz, which Tehran seeks to keep under its control, the U.S. president said it was “a money machine.” The United States, along with Arab states and European countries, rejects any Iranian control over this strategic maritime passage. The U.S. president also expressed his willingness to help Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky bring an end to the war, now in its fifth year. “I think we are much closer to a deal than people realize. President Putin wants this war to end. President Zelensky also wants it to end. We will be going to the NATO summit in Ankara, where this will be discussed. And I think we’re going to be able to bring it to an end.” Macron in Damascus The White House confirmed that Donald Trump will meet on the sidelines of the NATO summit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, who was due to host French President Emmanuel Macron in Damascus later Monday evening. Macron is accompanied by a number of French business leaders. This marks the first visit by a French president to Damascus in nearly 17 years. Relations between France and Syria under Bashar al-Assad began to deteriorate after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, an attack blamed on Damascus. France later severed diplomatic ties with the Syrian regime following the 2011 uprising and an attack on its embassy. The Franco-Syrian talks are focused primarily on the regional situation, which is also expected to be discussed in Washington during a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump. Although the Israeli leader says the meeting has yet to be scheduled, it carries particular weight as negotiations between Washington and Tehran continue to progress with difficulty. This is all the more notable given that Trump had, at one point, shown some reluctance to receive Netanyahu at the White House. A Relative Respite in Lebanon The diplomatic pause has also reached Lebanon, where, according to the pan-Arab channel Al-Hadath, CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper is expected to return in the coming days to present Lebanese authorities with a proposal for a mechanism for a gradual Israeli withdrawal, in line with the security provisions of the Washington-backed framework agreement between Lebanon and Israel. In this context, President Joseph Aoun reiterated the importance of redeploying the Lebanese army along the entire southern border, while stressing the need to increase pressure on Israel to withdraw from the areas it still occupies in the south of the country. “The continued occupation undermines the legitimacy of the state, prevents the deployment of the army, and jeopardizes the foundations of a just and lasting peace,” he said during a video conference with representatives of the American Task Force for Lebanon. He also said that “there can be no civil war in Lebanon,” despite what he described as “attempts by some to rekindle sectarian tensions,” in an apparent reference to Hezbollah. On the ground, the situation in Lebanon remains volatile. The Israeli military continues demolition operations in several towns in Bint Jbeil, Marjayoun, and Nabatieh, as well as carrying out intermittent strikes. An attack on Nabatieh al-Fawqa killed three people on Monday: a school principal, her mother, and their domestic worker. The Israeli military also said it had uncovered large weapons stockpiles in the village of Haddatha, where it is carrying out extensive demolitions and which it describes as an operational base for Hezbollah. It said it had destroyed “dozens of military installations” in the area and seized more than 150 weapons. It also warned residents of border villages in the south to avoid hosting displaced people from areas it considers Hezbollah strongholds. In another development, comments by the Israeli prime minister suggesting that some border Christian villages had asked to be “annexed” by Israel for protection from Hezbollah sparked strong reactions in Lebanon. The claims were immediately rejected by municipalities, mukhtars, and local figures from around 15 villages, who described them as “completely unfounded” and reaffirmed their commitment to Lebanese state sovereignty. Dissolution of Gaza Government Another major regional development has emerged: Hamas announced the dissolution of its government in Gaza, nearly 20 years after seizing power in 2007, in order to facilitate the transfer of responsibilities to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), a technocratic body established as part of talks preceding the October 2025 ceasefire. The move, which some analysts have received with skepticism, bears watching as it could reshape the Palestinian political landscape. Hamas said the decision was aimed at “depriving the occupation of any pretext” to continue the war, while reaffirming its willingness to hand over governing responsibilities to the new committee. The head of the NCAG, Ali Chaath, said the body was ready to assume its duties once the necessary resources were in place. Israel, however, appears unconvinced and is insisting on the disarmament of the Iran-backed group, as set out in the U.S.-brokered peace plan. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called the move “a ruse” designed to avoid disarmament. “As long as Hamas retains its weapons, any civilian government will, of course, operate under its directives,” he wrote on X. “Israel insists on full implementation of the Trump plan, whose core principles include the disarmament of Hamas and all other terrorist organizations, as well as the complete demilitarization of the Gaza Strip.”

“Land in exchange for peace.” That, in essence, is the Israeli-Lebanese agreement reached in Washington between June 23 and 26 – an old formula that remains as relevant today as ever, provided the interests of the people of Lebanon’s devastated villages are placed above all else. The rest is detail. Yes, land in exchange for peace – but not just any peace. A peace achieved through placing all weapons in the hands of the Lebanese state as we know it: a parliamentary democracy, a land of freedom and pluralism. It could also be put this way: land in exchange for Hezbollah’s weapons. For contrary to what people think, the Washington agreement is a peace agreement, not a military one. It could be implemented without a single shot being fired. Hezbollah has spoken of “civil war.” But who wants a civil war? The Washington agreement would allow Hezbollah’s severely weakened forces to be replaced by legitimate, multi-sectarian state forces whose sole mission would be defensive, not offensive. Lebanon has no territorial ambitions in Israel. All it seeks and demands is respect for its borders, as clearly set out in the Washington agreement. And only there. However, Iran was able to secure a ceasefire – albeit a relative one – in Lebanon by unleashing a barrage of ballistic missiles against Israel. Yet it is unrealistic, given the forces at play, to believe that Tehran could also obtain, through threats, a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. The only outcome this dynamic could produce is a further toll of death and destruction, coupled with a risk of annexation. In short: a war of a thousand years. A capitulation agreement? Yes, in the narrow sense of the term. For the peace agreement it imposes is, at its core, as much a Lebanese demand as an Israeli one. The military escalation it brings to an end took place against the will of the Lebanese state, as a result of an Iranian decision to which Beirut was deeply opposed. Moreover, what unnecessary restrictions could it impose on Lebanon? That it forgo nuclear capability? Or having no air force? Those who designed the Washington agreement not only sought no war, but were also deeply opposed to the militaristic ideology driving Hezbollah. That ideology gave the group the illusion of waging a heroic jihad in the service of God. Yet, as has been seen, this struggle has led to slaughter and potentially irreversible destruction. Moreover, how could Hezbollah have imagined, for a single moment, that its politico-religious ideology could win over Christians – let alone the other communities that make up Lebanon? Lebanon belongs to the Arab world, not the Islamic world. Alien to Iranian ideology, peace with Israel is not foreign to the Arab world, part of which has already concluded such peace, while the rest – Saudi Arabia in particular – ties it to the emergence of a Palestinian state. The Christian community is all the more alien to this way of thinking given that it has itself paid the price for this kind of adventurism during the Crusades. It can be stated without hesitation that the right to self-defense remains sacred, but the Catholic Church has called into question the notion of “just war,” once endorsed by the Church, given the impossibility of meeting its conditions in an age of algorithms, autonomous machines, and nuclear deterrence. Today, there are no longer any “conventional” weapons. We are all familiar with Einstein’s off-cited quip about nuclear war. A campaigner for nuclear disarmament, he is said to have remarked that if a Third World War were to break out, “the Fourth would be fought with sticks and stones.” On the contrary, Eastern Christian communities, which have paid dearly for the dispossession of Palestine, now aspire to exercise their rights of access to their holy sites: Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethlehem – places where their Savior lived and rose again, triumphant over death and violence. It is in this sense that they may hope to take up the word left to them by their Savior: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” The earth does not belong to the violent, says the Lord. It belongs to those who, like Joseph Aoun, have learned from war to “hate war.” We heard him speak in this sense during his interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN. The head of state would do well to set aside airtime to explain the Washington agreement to the Lebanese population.