A Thousand Plateaus

The meaning of Christmas challenges us more than ever, in a world that is increasingly fragmented, increasingly “nihilistic” — in the existential sense. Beyond its commercial and festive character, or even its spiritual and religious dimension, Christmas is, in principle, a hand extended toward humanity in all its flaws, its inequities, its imperfections. Without distinction. This is not about engaging in supermarket morality, nor in secularized spiritualism, but about sincerely questioning what this moment signifies, beyond immediate experience — beyond that delightful synesthesia of lights, songs, and flavors, or the joy of gifts reflected in the innocent eyes of young children. Christmas is not a celebration of withdrawal into oneself. Even though the holiday revives the familial cocoon around the fireplace and shared moments, around a table or a Christmas tree, it is not synonymous with enclosure or a return to the gregarious core. On the contrary. Since the dawn of time, the winter solstice has been an event awaited with fervor. Preparations began in spring, celebrating the flame of life within the darkness of the shadows. A majestic light of life, which first exists in sharing with others, without any difference — all others. In antiquity, on that day, social barriers were abolished, in a song of the heart celebrating altruism and a return to what defines the specificity of the human being: the sense of social service, of one’s purpose within the purpose of the other. In reciprocity, far from selfishness. That is why guests sit at the same table — not merely to reunite, but to rediscover themselves in the other, in their neighbor. This is the essence of the social bond. Christmas, in this sense, is profoundly “political” as an act of preserving society and a ritual of self-purification through the other. It is, in principle, a moment of truce, when symbolic violence is briefly suspended, revealing what has become structural throughout the rest of the year. At the end of this year 2025, marked by a disintegration of the global order likely unprecedented since the last century, this is the opportune moment to bury hatred and vengeance and to renounce violence, whatever its form or object. It is within this in-between — between the shadow of winter and the light and warmth of fire — that the harshest and most difficult inner struggle unfolds, provided one chooses not to anesthetize it through inert solipsism or Epicurean materialism. It is the ideal time for an examination of conscience, a reflection on our internal mechanisms that transform fears into moral narratives, then into closed identities; that constantly confuse survival with justice; that legitimize heroic virtue to compensate for collective irresponsibility; that allow the gradual slide of hatred from a shameful emotion into an assumed political cause. Christmas is, in a way, a stripping bare of everything that no longer holds — from the individual to the societal. In this sense, it is no coincidence that Christmas takes place in the depths of icy nights, at the moment when everyone, exhausted at the end of a year filled with responsibilities, trials, and various sufferings, struggles for survival. “The burdens are sometimes empty, but they are no less heavy,” sang Leonard Cohen. Christmas is a refuge, a manger, a place to recompose oneself away from the gaze of the world, to breathe, to dive back into the deepest parts of oneself, and to question what defines us. The sun has disappeared, and it is within oneself that it must be rediscovered — in communion with others, in a surge of hope, joy, and peace. Christmas is the epitome-moment of redemption — provided one can open one’s heart to the triptych of freedom, responsibility, and reciprocity that movement toward the other requires. It is the moment of empathy par excellence. The spirit of Christmas, beyond religions, communities, spirituality, and morality, is thus a choice of values and reference points — and beyond that, a choice of society: that of living together in difference and respect for others, and in humility. It is the moment to accept stripping oneself of the egotism conferred by power and certainty, to return to the asymmetrical doubt that makes us human — authentic, still capable of wonder, of deep self-criticism, and of expressing gratitude for what has been given to us, indiscriminately, both good and bad. On December 24–25, anger, resentment, misfortune, judgment, and evil lose their meaning. They do not fade away by magic, but through awareness. That rebirth and redemption come at this price — and that we are, despite our wounds, our torments, our flaws, our terrifying fears, invited to love, to share, and to love ourselves without judgment. And perhaps the only fundamental question still worth asking at the beginning of this catastrophic 21st century is to know what, today, still deserves to be saved beyond a profane–sacred dualism that has drifted farther than ever from that bi-directional movement between humanist transcendence and immanence. It is up to each of us to find, deep within ourselves, the answer to this question. At this stage, words are no longer of any use.

The history of Lebanese Shiism is too often told backwards, or worse, flattened by a teleological reading that presents Hezbollah as the natural culmination of a long religious and political continuum. Nothing could be further from the truth. Scholarly work on the ulama of Jabal Amel, on the contrary, allows us to reconstruct a very different genealogy—one rooted in doctrinal pluralism, a conscious relationship to the state, and a non-theocratic conception of religious authority. It is precisely this tradition that has been broken. Historically, Ameli Shiism developed within the framework of wilayat al-umma : a community of believers endowed with moral and spiritual autonomy, but not with a project of political domination. The choice of marja‘iyya was free and plural, often oriented toward Najaf, within a deliberately distanced relationship between clerical authority and political power. This tradition acknowledged the diversity of religious authorities, rejected doctrinal centralization, and, above all, did not seek to govern society in the name of the sacred. The rupture came with Khomeini’s invention of wilayat al-faqih : a radically new construction that cannot be reduced to a theological debate, but rather constitutes a major political upheaval. By replacing the plurality of marja‘iyyat with the exclusive authority of a Supreme Guide, by transforming the cleric into a sovereign and religion into a state ideology, revolutionary Iran broke with Najaf and imposed Qom as an imperial center. Shiism thus ceased to be a diverse religious tradition and became an instrument of geopolitical projection. In Lebanon, this graft did not occur on virgin soil. Lebanese Shi’a have always adhered to the project of the state, in line with the Ameli logic of inscription within a given national space. But since independence—and even earlier—they have been socially and economically marginalized, kept on the periphery of development, and subjected to local feudal authorities who spoke in their name without ever emancipating them. This structural marginalization partly explains why, as early as the 1950s and 1960s, a segment of the community turned toward secular parties hostile to the confessional system, such as the Lebanese Communist Party and its syndical and intellectual offshoots. The emergence of Imam Musa al-Sadr marked a decisive rupture. He embodied an uprising against social injustice and marginalization without breaking with the state as the ultimate horizon. His project was profoundly Lebanese—in the broad, non-ideological sense of the term—even as it remained open to regional dynamics. He sought neither to Islamize Lebanon nor to detach it from its pluralism, but to fully integrate Shi’a as citizens in their own right. It is precisely this position—neither submissive nor instrumentalizable—that explains his disappearance, at the moment when another, radically antagonistic project was emerging: that of the alliance of minorities, anchored in regional authoritarian logics. After him, the Amal Movement gradually shifted, under Nabih Berri, into the Alawite sphere through its alignment with the Assad regime. Hezbollah went even further. From the early 1980s onward, it led Lebanese Shi’a in direct opposition to their Ameli heritage, uprooted them from the logic of the state and territory, and inserted them into that of wilayat al-faqih , turning Lebanon into a mere functional space serving an Iranian project. The community was thus satellized rather than represented. Secular, liberal, or simply Lebanese-oriented Shi’a were systematically marginalized: through tailor-made electoral laws, intimidation, forced exile, or assassination—from Mahdi Amel to Lokman Slim. This domination unfolded under Syrian and then Iranian occupations and was accepted, realpolitik obliges, by the international community, which from the 1990s onward had no difficulty accommodating Hezbollah, despite its past, its activities, and its true nature. In the face of this hegemony, the Lebanese-oriented Shi’a project survived only in isolation, carried by a handful of major intellectual and religious figures such as Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine, Hani Fahs, and Mohammad Hassan Al-Amin, among others. All defended a clear vision: Lebanon as a definitive homeland, the state as a finality, coexistence as a horizon, and the rejection of any identity fixation based on majority status or privileged community. This school has been marginalized for far too long. It is time to stop trying to appease or save Hezbollah. The challenge is no longer tactical; it is strategic. What is needed is the emergence of a new Shi’a elite—modern, non-traditional, freed from external tutelage, having pledged allegiance to Lebanon, and to Lebanon alone, and having renounced any logic of domination over other communities. But this demand cannot be unilateral. One cannot ask Shi’a to stop behaving as a tribe in search of guarantees and privileges if the other communities do not also put their own house in order. The Shi’a question is not exclusively Shi’a. In Lebanon, the affairs of each community are the affairs of all. There are no exclusive zones and no partial security perimeters. There is only one national security perimeter: Lebanon, within its borders, its project, and its vocation. The solution to the Shi’a question is Lebanese. It lies in transversal parties and movements capable of breaking the communal, sectarian, and tribal framework, without external allegiance. Still, this requires thinking in strategic terms rather than in terms of immediate electoral gains, in a country obsessed with deadlines and power balances, to the detriment of its future.

The Iranian party, Hezbollah, has never been a territorial resistance. It has been a militia of spatial expansion, using territory as an argument for legitimacy. It is time to acknowledge this, once and for all. Since its inception, Hezbollah has lived with a fundamental division: it is simultaneously the armed wing of an imperial project—that of the Iranian Wilayat al-Faqih as defined by Imam Khomeini—and an actor that claims to embody the “resistance” to liberate a national territory. “Space” first: that of the Shiite ummah, from Qom to Beirut, structured around a Supreme Leader whose decisions, in matters of war and peace, are binding. Then there is the “territory”: that of South Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and the disputed borders, where the party presents itself as a bulwark against Israel and the guardian of a national cause. This dichotomy is not new. Upon its establishment in 1984, under the guise of “resistance to the Israeli occupation,” Hezbollah began by eliminating a significant portion of the national resistance movement stemming from the Lebanese left—Mahdi Amel and his associates. It established itself on the margins: the Bekaa Valley, South Lebanon, and the southern suburbs of Beirut. There, it built a sprawling social infrastructure financed by Iran, and later supported by Assad’s Syria within the framework of the “alliance of minorities.” Even then, the logic of space prevailed: the party saw itself as the vanguard of an axis, far more than as a mere territorial actor. Between 1990 and 2000, this dynamic became partially territorialized. Hezbollah is leading the armed resistance in a South abandoned by the state, while gradually inserting itself into the heart of the system: participating in the 1992 municipal elections, the 1996 parliamentary elections, and then in the government from the 2000s onward. The Israeli withdrawal of May 2000 provided it with a territorial baptism: it could claim the liberation of a portion of the national territory, to widespread applause, while retaining its weapons outside the state's monopoly on legitimate violence. "Resistance" then became the key to remaining a militia in a state whose mechanisms it was beginning to systematically infiltrate. After the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005 and the Syrian withdrawal, the party crossed a threshold. It took over from Damascus's tutelage, aligned itself with the Mar Mikhaël alliance and the Aounist movement—a meeting of the two suburbs, south and north—and embarked on a veritable campaign to absorb the state. The July 2006 war provided it with a "divine victory" for domestic consumption: it reactivated its territorial legitimacy at the very moment when Resolution 1701 began to limit its military maneuvering. Two years later, in May 2008, it besieged the Siniora government and launched a punitive expedition to Beirut and the Mountain, before wresting from Doha the blocking minority of the government: the quintessential instrument of a supranational veto power legitimized… in the name of "resistance." From 2008 to 2015, prevented from openly conducting operations in the South by Resolution 1701, Hezbollah definitively shifted its center of gravity to space. It becomes the backbone of the Tehran–Damascus–Baghdad–Sanaa–Gaza axis. It intervenes in Syria to save Assad, in Iraq alongside Shiite militias, and in Yemen with the Houthis, all while supporting Hamas. Lebanon is reduced to a mere link, a logistical platform, a corridor for a regional project. The da'wah of resistance, in the sense highlighted by Michel Seurat, is now directed solely toward the investment of the mulk, the center of power. Imperial space absorbs national territory. It is this imbalance that October 7, 2023, shatters. By launching an operation that draws the entire Iranian axis into a high-intensity confrontation with Israel, Hamas precipitates the hubris of the system. Driven by territorial logic—not wanting to "abandon" Gaza, preserving the myth of the "unified resistance"—Nasrallah is forced to open a northern front. But the disproportionate Israeli response, military attrition, the gradual destruction of the party's leadership and infrastructure, and the internal Iranian crisis revealed the fragility of the structure. The fall of Assad in Syria and the closure of supply routes changed everything: the axis itself began to crack. The alliance of minorities collapsed, technically if not symbolically. Where it had reigned supreme over a disintegrated state, Hezbollah found itself brought to its knees. Its totemic figures—Nasrallah, Safieddine, and other mythical military leaders—were eliminated. The space collapsed, the territory reappeared. A new American tutelage locked down Beirut airport, a governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon (BDL) close to Washington was appointed, and a president from the military was elected with explicit international support. The barely veiled prospect of leading the country toward some form of arrangement with Israel. Too weakened for a direct confrontation, the party is retreating to its only remaining resource: its territorial rhetoric. It has suddenly recast itself as the guardian of sovereignty, the defender of borders, accusing the state—which it has methodically emptied of its substance over two decades—of passivity in the face of the enemy. Hence the current paradox: after fragmenting Lebanon's territorial continuity by multiplying "security perimeters," gray zones, and controlled routes, Hezbollah now invokes the state's "failure" to mask its own impotence. It is covertly sabotaging attempts to restore public authority—from the airport to the seafront and including urban symbols—while publicly demanding that this same state assume the responsibility for confronting Israel. Having been the primary factor in the country's territorial and political disintegration, it is now attempting to hide behind the fiction of the state to survive the collapse of its imperial space. The quintessential caricature of this decline is the Raouche Rock affair, the Tarpeian Rock, the ultimate stage of Hezbollah's "sound and light" demise. This is not merely tactical duplicity; it is an ontological fracture. Hezbollah does not know how to lose because it does not know how to be a purely national actor. As long as it is the local embodiment of a spatial project—metaphysical, ideological, imperial—it can justify its difference, its arsenal, its exceptional status. The day it reverts to being a purely territorial force, subject to the rules of mulk, to sovereignty, to accountability, it ceases to be itself. For Hezbollah, recognizing the primacy of the state means admitting that "Resistance" is nothing more than a slogan. And that it is now just one party among many, responsible for its record of death, ruin, and chaos. In this sense, Hezbollah can never be transformed into a simple political party. It must disappear, however ruthless that word, that idea, may be. The future of Lebanon is at stake here today. Solutions imposed from the outside have always failed because they stumbled against a local elite obsessed with the art of compromise, of "at the same time," of mutual nibbling away: appeasing the militia without acknowledging its logic, praising the state without giving it the means to exercise its sovereignty. But experience since 1967 is unequivocal: there is no state without a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, nor any territory without continuity. Sovereignty cannot be perpetually treated as a variable to be adjusted. The real fault line today no longer opposes "Resistance" and "foreign agents." It divides those who accept Lebanon as a political territory, with a state that alone decides on war and peace, and those who want to maintain it as a mere foothold in a sectarian, regional, or imperial power structure. As long as this ambiguity persists, Hezbollah will continue to play both sides, hoping that time, or a change of power in Washington or Tehran, will one day restore the illusion of its former grandeur. But the country's time is not that of the militia. Lebanon can no longer afford to waver between space and territory. It must, once and for all, choose to exist as a state—or accept being nothing more than the exhausted stage set for a decaying empire.

Holy Father, at the moment when you are about to set foot on the soil of Lebanon and Turkey, on the threshold of this wounded Levant that was once one of the cradles of believing humanity, we dare to write to you. The aim is not to add one more voice to the concert of protocol speeches. That would be of absolutely no interest. Empty formulas, glittering but soulless, you will hear in abundance during your visit. This letter asks of you something at once simple and vertiginous: to take up the torch. The torch of Francis. That of an integral humanism which strove, against all odds, to grasp the Gospel in its most naked form: the dignity of every human being, fraternity as the only possible horizon of politics, religion freed from identitarian idols. Beyond words, your predecessor performed acts that, seen from here, carry the weight of historical turning points: – the al-Azhar congress on citizenship and living together; – the Abu Dhabi Declaration, a true “preamble to the preamble” of human rights, where God and human dignity cease to be set in opposition; – the visit to Najaf, to Ayatollah Sistani, a gesture of immense significance within a Shia world that Iran had sought to confiscate in the service of an imperial project; – the encyclical Fratelli Tutti , which sets against the globalisation of hatred a civilisation of fraternity. All of this, Most Holy Father, already composes a new “Holy Alliance,” as the immense scholar Antoine Courban noted. Not the one of thrones and cannons, certainly, but that of the consciences which refuse holy wars, whether waged in the name of God or in the name of those “political religions” that deify the nation, the race, the tribe, the party. Your journey to Lebanon and Turkey is inscribed within this heritage. Yet it comes at a moment when the world, and our region in particular, seems to be toppling toward the exact opposite: the age of walls, of borders and identitarian fractures, of populisms feeding on fear of the other. Of Putins, Orbáns, Le Pens, J.D. Vances and their more or less avowed imitators, who manipulate the cross as a banner of separation, who mock the culture of mediation and of bridges built to reach toward the other. And unfortunately, they are currently winning audiences. Hatred has always been a powerful engine of History. It is here that Lebanon enters the scene. John Paul II said it in a formula that has become almost a cliché, therefore almost inaudible: “Lebanon is not merely a country, it is a message.” Yet this message is not mystical; it is political in the noblest sense. It says that it is possible to organise a polity where one does not first ask the other who he is, from which rite, which confession, which tribe, but how he can participate, with all the others, in a shared public space. Like the spirit of convivencia of Andalusia in former times. In the last century, this wager took flesh in what was called “Greater Lebanon.” It was an act of audacity. Certainly not a “historical error,” as today’s opportunistic advocates of partition claim. A fragile promise, and certainly not an anomaly to be corrected. Far from being the cause of our dramas, Lebanese pluralism has been their victim, when the culture of connection was replaced by the culture of exclusion, when citizenship was betrayed by warlords, their militias, their foreign patrons. We must re-read, now more than ever, Samir Frangieh — the only genuine visionary of the past two decades, who loved Lebanon in full knowledge of what made it unique in this world: its living together, its deep desire for radiance and peace. This was not a political choice. Samir saw in Lebanon a human model of civilisation against barbarism. Today, some, within the Christian community itself, wish to settle accounts with that wager. Exhausted, wounded, terrorised by wars, occupations, economic crisis, they no longer see in Lebanon anything but a “historical error,” and in Christianity anything but an identity to be fortified. They dream of sectarian federalisms, of homogeneous cantons, of alliances of minorities under the protection of new tsars who “defend Christian values.” At the very hour when the alliance of minorities is itself in full agony, drained of substance, reduced to what it has always been: the ruins of a hegemonic project and a collective enslavement to tyranny in the name of an illusory and fallacious protection. They have forgotten that every time the Christians of Lebanon retreated behind walls, they lost; and that every time they engaged in a project larger than themselves, they weighed far beyond their numbers. Youakim Moubarak, Nasrallah Sfeir, Youssef Bechara, Michel Hayek, Samir Frangieh, and so many others, have carried another vision: that of a “Church of the Arabs” in dialogue with Islam to renew the Orient together; that of a Lebanon-message in which the role of Christians is not to be protected as a frightened minority, but to guarantee the common space, to “weave and reweave the bonds” between the components of the country and the region. Most Holy Father, if we write to you, it is not for you to come and flatter our nostalgias or bless our fears. It is so that you may help us, through your word, to disarm them. We need you, from Beirut as from Istanbul, to state clearly that the future of the Christians of the East lies neither in the arms of new Caesars, nor in the fantasies of the fortress, nor in the dreams of autonomous ghettos, but in the struggle for a unitary, civil state founded on citizenship, guarantor of the freedoms of all — of a Middle East at last united in the peace of brothers, the kind capable of moving mountains. We need you to recall, with the quiet force of Francis, that: – to speak of “minorities” rather than citizens is already to accept the fragmentation of the political community; – to sacralise identity against equality in rights is to betray both the Gospel and the inheritance of human rights; – to invoke Christ in order to feed hostility toward the foreigner, the refugee, the different, is to desecrate the cross, not to defend it. We need you to show, through gestures and words, that Bucharest, Budapest or Moscow — and indeed Washington in its current state, and Tel Aviv — cannot become, for the Christians of the Levant, substitutes for Rome; that identitarian, closed, xenophobic Christianity is not an acceptable variant of Christianity, but its mortiferous caricature. Your passage through Lebanon can be, for us, an examination of conscience. You will find a country drained of its blood, a dismembered state in quest of a reconstruction that remains at this hour improbable, if not impossible, in the shadow of the militia and of political appetites; a society tempted by cynicism or despair. You will find Christians divided, some fascinated by the sirens of sectarian protectionism, others so weary as to wish to leave. But you will also find, often in the shadows, a multitude of women and men who continue, day after day, to embody the culture of connection: teachers, physicians, activists, priests, imams, journalists, ordinary citizens who, without grand speeches, live together as one breathes. These are the ones who must be confirmed. Most Holy Father, we ask you to take up the ideas laid down through al-Azhar and Abu Dhabi, extended by Fratelli Tutti , and to apply them explicitly to Lebanon; to say that this country is not a “Christian reserve” to be saved at the last moment, but a fragile laboratory of citizenship to be saved for everyone; that one cannot defend the Christians of the Levant by sacrificing precisely that which justifies their presence: a certain art of living with the other. We do not ask you to take sides with this camp or that faction. We ask you to take sides with the only cleavage that matters: the culture of connection against the culture of exclusion; integral humanism against identitarian nihilisms; Lebanon-message against Lebanon-ghetto. If, from the height of your ministry, you were to confirm this choice, you would give to the Christians of Lebanon — and, with them, to their Muslim fellow citizens — beyond simple comfort, a renewed responsibility. That of becoming once again, not the frightened guardians of an enclosure, but the artisans of a common space where, at last, “all peoples form a single community,” not through the erasure of differences, but because each one accepts that the dignity of the other limits his own fear. Then perhaps, in this ravaged Levant, your visit could be one of those rare moments when history hesitates, when one chooses between the temptation of the citadel and the risk of the bridge. It is that risk that we beseech you to encourage. From Lebanon, in the heavy night of our time, we write to you with this single certainty: either we shall be brothers, or we shall be, for one another, the permanent temptation of the enemy, and the artisans of our own disappearance.

One year to the day, Bashar al-Assad collapsed, dragging down with him half a century of dynastic tyranny, disguised as modernist “secularism” and as a bulwark against chaos. Good riddance. Good riddance to a regime that turned Syrians into the raw material of an industry of terror, in the name of a pseudo-Arabism grafted onto the so-called “alliance of minorities,” alternately handed over to Iran and Russia, and, ultimately, so convenient for Israel. Good riddance to a power that transformed the Alawite community into both a human shield and a commercial asset, and that survived only by incarcerating “God Himself” in the underground hell of Saydnaya. Good riddance, too, to the comforting fiction according to which barbarism was the price to pay to avoid something far worse: chaos, Islamism, a war of all against all. Syria paid the highest price to prove that the worst option was him. The opening of the prisons, the exposure of the regime’s “black sites,” acted like a delayed electric shock. Many who still clung to denial or to self-serving nuance finally confronted the monstrous nature of this system—unless they were afflicted by moral blindness, a scourge sadly transversal across eras and cultures. Syria discovered that it had not merely lived under a dictatorship, but inside a fully assumed concentrationary universe, where fear was not an exceptional instrument, but the very grammar of power. The families of the disappeared received—alongside proof of the horror—the atrocious confirmation of what they already knew: their dead were not “collateral damage,” but the fuel of a regime. No one will mourn Assad. Not even his allies, who abandoned him before his fall. Not even his army, which did nothing to protect him. Assad belongs to the mass grave of History—to put it plainly, to its garbage dump. Into this void stepped another name: Ahmad al-Sharaa. The former warlord, ex-Jolani rebranded for the chancelleries, became in record time the face of post-Assad Syria. He traded fatigues for a suit, the lexicon of the fatwa for that of “reconstruction” and the “national pact,” shortened his beard and adopted a tie—yet never fully erased the memory of what he once was, despite all efforts. For the international community, Jolani’s metamorphosis into Sharaa enabled a sleight of hand: no longer dealing with a genocidal pariah, but with a “presentable” president. The question was no longer what he represented for Syrians, but what he allowed others to settle and close. In the same movement, Syria reopened to the world after half a century of autarky serving a mafia family draped in the costumes of the Alawite community and a hollow Arabism. At that level, so much the better. The gradual lifting of economic sanctions, the return of investments, Damascus reopening to liberalism—all of this represents a major step. For a country drained dry, ruined by war, corruption, and the combined predations of militias and foreign patrons, the mere sight of returning capital, reopened air routes, cranes on the horizon amounts to a silent revolution. But it is an economic revolution still suspended, in the long term, from a political question: who benefits from this opening, and under what conditions? One can only hope that, for once, it will be the Syrian people. Yet a somber shadow looms over the picture. More than somber: sinister. For this opening to the world has not been accompanied by a genuine democratic transition. Neither the new Constitution—hastily stitched together to secure the permanence of the new power—nor the bloody treatment inflicted on the ground upon Alawite, Druze, and Kurdish minorities signals a clean break with past logic. The façade has changed, the vocabulary has evolved, but old reflexes remain. Sharaa has not managed—if one puts it mildly—thus far to address Syrian territorial unity and pluralism otherwise than by reverting to the old reflex: brute force. The security apparatuses have not been truly dismantled; transitional justice remains a slogan; unspoken red lines continue to tightly frame political speech and freedom of organization. Militias operate with impunity where sovereignty is supposedly being restored. The shabiha have merely changed sides. Granted, the transition is difficult. Sharaa did not inherit a state, but a field of ruins: zones under foreign influence, de facto autonomous enclaves, a mosaic of militias that have not all disarmed, a hypertrophied informal economy, a society exhausted and traumatized. He was endorsed by the international community in exchange—no doubt—for a more or less avowed adherence to the Abraham Accords—what Assad could not offer openly but practiced under the table. The implicit message is clear: you are recognized on the condition that you enter the regional arrangement as it stands, with its compromises, hypocrisies, and red lines. Iran and Russia have been replaced, for the new master of Syria, by a Saudi-Turkish Sunni umbrella, overseen by the international community and, above all, by Washington. Is this a good thing? The future will tell. In any case, once again, no one will mourn the murderous remnants left by Khamenei and Putin on Syrian soil—while praying that history does not repeat itself under Syria’s new geopolitical configuration. Israel, for its part, distrusts a strong Sunni regime that might one day revive the Palestinian cause: in this worldview, the enemy is first and foremost the Sunni. Other minorities are downgraded when needed, instrumentalized when useful. Crude Machiavellianism. Tel Aviv is preemptively enforcing a de facto buffer zone in Syria, exploiting part of the Druze minority, ensuring that the new Syrian state can never become a structured pole of resistance—and to pressure the new regime into yielding and making peace. But none of this in any way absolves the regime of massacres committed against innocent civilians on a communal basis, nor does it justify ethno-confessional score-settling on the coast. One does not wash away half a century of crimes by producing, in turn, a new cohort of martyrs. A crucial test awaits Sharaa: to definitively turn the bloody page of the Assad regime while respecting—despite colossal challenges and traps on all sides—freedoms, democracy, pluralism, human rights, human dignity and its finality, the right to life. To break with the logic of the permanent internal enemy; to understand that security is not built against society, but with it; to accept that the Alawite, Druze, and Kurdish communities are neither scapegoats nor alien bodies to be punished, but integral components of the national pact. Thus far, however, it must be acknowledged that one year on, Sharaa has not fully managed to erase either the Assad within him… nor the Jolani. And there lies the tragedy. One naturally recalls Hannah Arendt’s warning about the deepest trap in any exit from tyranny: the tyrant is overthrown, but the mental structure he patiently forged is not dismantled in one stroke. Totalitarianism is not merely a state apparatus. We are dealing with what the psychoanalyst Chawki Azouri calls the “Pinochet syndrome”—the internalization of a regime’s archaic practices into the collective psyche over half a century. Beyond the barbaric state lies regression into barbarism itself, despite the revolutionary impulse, stifled and crushed by the regime along with its symbols of civic dynamism. Assad succeeded in installing an entire mode of perceiving the world, a full pedagogy of fear, like Orwell’s Big Brother. Year after year, he instilled the idea that the other is a threat, that disagreement is subversion, that order is maintained only by force. Society eventually absorbed these patterns as second nature—to the point that the fall of the master is not enough to erase them. Syria, one year after Bashar, still bears the scars. Mistrust circulates like an old muscular reflex; the temptation of the internal enemy remains the easiest mental shortcut; the obsession with security outweighs political risk-taking; and the very idea of authentic pluralism continues to frighten a society trained for fifty years to consider difference as a breach. The tyrant is gone, but tyranny has not yet moved out: it inhabits gestures, silences, habits, survival reflexes. This, ultimately, is the real challenge awaiting Sharaa—assuming he is capable of it and, better yet, convinced of it: not merely managing the post-Assad era, but healing the interior of a society contaminated by decades of terror, re-teaching a people that freedom is not a danger and that the state is not a predator. Arendt would have phrased it differently, but the idea is the same: one truly exits a totalitarian regime only when fear ceases to be the mother tongue of politics. As long as that grammar remains intact, the country risks less a return to the old order than its reproduction under another name. One does not dismantle a concentration camp to build another.

No — the war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine cannot be dismissed as a peripheral disturbance or reduced to a mere dispute over territory, whatever the assorted Putinists would have us believe. The Russian aggression exposes a deeper fracture: a clash between two visions of the world. On one side, freedom and the rule of law; on the other, the nostalgia for an imperial order, resurrected under the guise of a mythologized “golden age,” built upon domination and terror. What unfolds today upon Ukrainian soil is nothing less than the deliberate attempt to resurrect the imperial logic of Russia and to impose it as the political paradigm of this century. The battle for the Donbas is not a local skirmish. It is a test for the whole of Europe — for its courage, its memory, and its very future. Nothing less. The regime of Vladimir Putin does not merely seek to annex land. Putin aims to restore an imperial architecture with explicit historical referents: Peter the Great, Catherine II, and the idea of a “civilizational space” sanctified by the myth of the “Russian world,” wherein peoples are not political subjects but ethnic matter to be absorbed, reshaped, or erased. Every empire rests upon the negation of law. It recognizes neither popular sovereignty, nor pluralism, nor individual liberty. Freedom is wholly alien to it — an intruder concept. This war, therefore, is directed against the very idea of Europe. For Europe is not, in essence, a territory; it is, in the minds of its founders, a manner of dwelling in the world: a certain conception of human dignity, of legality, of debate, of the equality of rights. She is the daughter of the Enlightenment and of the uncompromising rejection of terror. She was born of cooperation, forged to rebuild what the culture of exclusion and annihilation — the culture of two world wars — had destroyed. She exists only in a space where the individual stands sovereign before the State. The Russian imperial project is the precise antithesis of this: despotism justified in the name of a “vital space,” the very logic against which Europe rebuilt itself after the abyss of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Kyiv has thus become a frontier not between two nations but between two civilizational models. If Ukraine falls, it will not merely be a nation that collapses; the very possibility of a world governed by international law will collapse with it — as is also the case with what Netanyahu is perpetrating in Gaza and the West Bank, for that matter. As Nicolas Tenzer writes in Our War , the Russian invasion constitutes “a total offensive against the legitimate order.” This is not a regional disturbance; it is a direct assault on liberal democracy itself. The Kremlin knows this: by crushing Ukraine, it would demonstrate that law is but a façade, and that force alone confers truth. The consequences would be universal: a global regression into the logic of empire — protectorates, vassal-states, shifting borders, silenced peoples. A return to Europe before Westphalia. Yet something graver still is unfolding: the parallel erosion of the Western pillar that, since 1945, has been the backbone of the free world. The United States — once the architect and guarantor of an international order, imperfect, often cynical, yet structuring — is now withdrawing from the stage of history. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has sealed this cataclysmic shift: a world reduced to transactions, to immediate profit, to moral vacuity. Trump, being himself, would no doubt have negotiated Munich with Hitler in the name of accounting pragmatism, chastised Warsaw for being “ungrateful” toward the Third Reich, and advised Churchill to “make peace” by redrawing a few borders. He might even have applauded Quisling for his pragmatism. Cowardice dressed up as realism — nothing older; but rarely has it been flaunted with such swagger, with such frank and carefree cynicism. What unfolded last February between Trump and Zelensky was no diplomatic mishap. It was a historic rupture, if not a moral abdication — even if Washington has since attempted to gather the shards of its strategic blunder. The message sent to Putin was unmistakable: proceed, the road is clear. The Sudetenland, redux, in a twenty-first-century edition. This American strategic withdrawal offered Russia a perilous window: if Washington retreats, Moscow may intensify its assault, convinced that Ukraine will collapse under the weight of Western indifference. What looms is not merely the defeat of a nation, but the erosion of the Western idea itself — giving way to a coalition of Empires: Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, their clienteles and their political auxiliaries in Europe and the United States. George Steiner would have shuddered in terror. It is the last door of Bluebeard’s castle now being shattered before the eyes of a world nearly bled dry — as in Palestine. The end of culture. Clairvoyant, he foresaw this in 1971: “I find derisory any theory of culture, any analysis of present conditions that does not place at its centre the mechanisms of terror which led, in Europe and in Russia, from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second, to the death — by starvation or systematic massacre — of seventy million human beings.” “Derisory” is a feeble word. “Ignoble” lands closer to the truth today. This American withdrawal has revealed what Kissinger once termed “the temptation of disengagement.” The West is suffering from an existential fatigue. It no longer believes in its own narrative. It no longer dares to defend what it claims to embody. Trump did not invent this; he is merely the hypertrophic symptom of a civilization doubting itself — doubting its bearings, its moral architecture, built precisely so that a new Hitler would never arise — a civilization sinking into a kind of Mephistophelian nihilism. And when civilization withdraws, barbarians advance. Ask Romulus Augustulus and Odoacer. Europe now stands alone — and this is no accident. De Gaulle foresaw it in the 1960s: great powers have no friends, only interests. Strategic dependence is a mortal error. Today, Atlantic solidarity rests upon the whims of a man oscillating between admiration for Putin and scorn for his allies. And Europe hesitates, trembles, calculates — as it did under Chamberlain, despite the lucidity of a few of its leaders. What remains, then? Only one alternative: to awaken or to perish; to choose to exist as a sovereign political power or to revert to a protectorate; to understand that freedom must be defended as Churchill defended it, not in the manner of the Pétains – Orbán, the Salvinis and their ilk. Ukraine today embodies what Europe has forgotten after nearly a century of peace: that freedom is a vital necessity, not a rhetorical ornament. And, above all, that men and women die so that the idea of law may endure. A civilization incapable of recognizing this is already dead. Having lost its memory, it has forfeited its reason for being — its soul. Our war — for it is the war of each of us, a moral obligation — is to uphold the symbolic and political frontier between the world of law and the world of Empire. If that frontier collapses, political humanity collapses with it. Nothing will remain to distinguish Europe from a mere geographical expression. Ukraine is, in its essence, the limes that still shields Europe from darkness. If the lock breaks, a certain idea of the world will vanish. We must say “no” to Putin and to his replicas across Europe — so long as they strive to transform the world into identity compounds subjugated to the heart and power of Empire. For it is this collective refusal of tyranny that has always allowed civilizations — despite their failings — to become more progressive, and more humane. It is, quite simply, the price of our evolution — all of us.