“You are sorrowful because a radiant star of hope once shimmered in the sky of your life, filling your eyes with light and your heart with joy. Then, in the blink of an eye, it vanished – you sought it and found it not. Had you been more restrained in your hope, your grief would not have strayed so far. Had you looked more deeply at what still lies before you, you would have seen a fleeting glimmer that you mistake for a radiant star. There, its rising would not dazzle you, nor would its setting shatter you.”
Quoted in a Friday issue of the Arabic Al-Ahram, these words by the late Egyptian literary master Mustafa Lutfi Al-Manfaluti remind us that shock is often self-inflicted. It arises not when reality changes, but when long-held illusions, born of a flawed reading of reality, finally collapse.
Across many episodes of history, law has served merely as a tool, wrapped in the language of justice, yet quietly serving other purposes – political, economic, military, or all at once. It is easier to stir the emotions of the masses by invoking noble ideals that conceal aims that are far less noble or entirely unrelated to nobility.
Few causes appear more noble than the fight to free the enslaved. In this context, US President Abraham Lincoln’s words are widely cited as proof of moral conviction. “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” he said. But that is only part of the story. The American Civil War is partly remembered as a moral battle over slavery. While that framing is not incorrect, it is incomplete.
At its heart, the Civil War was about slavery but not just in a moral sense. It was a battle between two fundamentally different economic systems. The North was moving towards industrialisation, relying on wage labour and expanding internal markets. The agricultural South, by contrast, depended heavily on enslaved labour to sustain its vast cotton economy and accumulate wealth.
Regardless of Lincoln’s personal moral evolution, his overriding objective was always the preservation of the Union. In a letter dated 22 August 1862 addressed to Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, who had urged him to take a firmer stance on abolition, Lincoln made his position unmistakably clear.
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that,” he said.
This statement makes clear that emancipation initially emerged as a strategic necessity. It was aimed at dismantling the economic and military backbone of the Confederacy not as a purely altruistic act but as a calculated instrument of war.
The United States later led the effort to codify modern international law amid the geopolitical pressures of the Cold War and the transformations of decolonisation. The former Soviet Union was not merely a military rival; it was, more fundamentally, an ideological one. The confrontation, therefore, had to be waged across multiple fronts, with ideology at its core.
The legal and institutional order the United States promoted was consistent with its internal convictions, yet it was projected globally not as a universal ethic, but as an instrument of hegemony. Those who mistook this architecture for a radiant star of moral commitment were shocked by the language of the recent US 2025 National Security Strategy and by the unfolding events in Venezuela.
Those who saw in the rule of law nothing more than a fleeting glimmer, veiling interests and power, were not surprised and expected more of the same.
THREATS AND INTERESTS: The NATO alliance is often spoken of as though it were a permanent family bound by shared convictions. In reality, it is a coalition of interests, brought together by a common threat.
Like all interest-based coalitions, it shifts as circumstances change. As the US geopolitical analyst George Friedman has noted, Russia entered the war in Ukraine expecting a swift, overwhelming victory and one that would secure the country within weeks. Instead, it found itself trapped in a costly and exhausting conflict, bleeding resources, suffering heavy losses, and shaken internally by events such as the failed Wagner Group mutiny.
“After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests,” the 2025 US National Security Strategy says.
Venezuela’s recent leadership crisis illustrates how law may be instrumentalised to achieve political ends. Constitutional provisions on presidential absence were construed to preserve executive continuity without immediate elections, with judicial validation supplying the necessary legal form.
To say so is not to express grief over a broken world or despair at the absence of justice. It is a warning that the language of moral purpose frequently conceals the priorities of power. US President Donald Trump is no champion of the Iranian people, nor have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions ever been guided by concern for the welfare of the people.
One of the clearest historical illustrations of this logic is found in what has come to be known as the Yinon Plan, a 1982 essay by Israeli journalist Oded Yinon entitled “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties” published in the Hebrew journal Kivunim (Directions) by the World Zionist Organisation.
The text is striking because of its bluntness. It does not disguise its objectives behind humanitarian rhetoric or abstract legal ideals. Instead, it proceeds from a cold strategic premise: that Israel’s long-term security and supremacy do not depend on peaceful coexistence, but on the fragmentation of the surrounding region into weak, sectarian, and mutually hostile entities.
Whether or not the plan was ever adopted as official policy, is beside the point. Its value lies in what it reveals: a strategic worldview in which chaos is a tool, sovereignty is negotiable, and the language of law and order is secondary to the primacy of power.
Moments such as these make it unmistakably clear that Arab and Islamic coordination alongside a renewed commitment to African integration is no longer a matter of choice or diplomatic luxury. It is a strategic necessity in confronting rapidly shifting realities and pre-engineered scenarios of chaos deliberately designed to fracture states, exhaust societies, and hollow out sovereignty from within.
Egypt is fully aware of the nature of this moment. It is already confronting its pressures firsthand, not as a distant observer but as a central actor in a region under systematic stress.
This awareness is reflected in the recent white paper issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs called “The Principle of Strategic Balance in Egyptian Foreign Policy,” which reaffirms strategic balance as a principle of survival. x
Egypt reads the present moment clearly, understands the logic driving it, and rejects the illusion that states fall by accident. Those who remain unshaken are those who understood the logic of events before collapse became visible.
The writer is a lawyer.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 29 January, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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