America Has Been Demoted (Part Two)

Yes, the multipolar transition is happening. It's underway and it will proceed. There's not another way for things to go. But everyone who's happy about multipolarity and understandable that everyone is happy about it, but don't overlook the risks, the actual risks. The risk isn't that the transition is gonna fail.

The risk is that the transition will succeed, but it will succeed on terms that are preset by a national capital and not by our own people. The OCJFC is not dismantling American hegemony because they oppose concentrations of power, consolidation of power. No. It's the exact opposite. The OCGFC represents the biggest concentration of power.

The biggest consolidation of power that the world has ever seen. They don't have a problem with concentrated power. They have a problem with being constrained themselves by any state including The United States. So their preferred outcome for the transition would be for example, a bricks integration that creates new dependencies rather than genuine sovereignty. That's what they wanna see, new dependencies.

They wanna see infrastructure corridors that generate debt obligations. Debt obligations structured through the same legal frameworks and the same arbitration mechanisms that made the structural adjustment reforms so effective of the IMF. They wanna see digital payment systems that replace swift dependency with another dependency with dependency dependency upon an alternative platform. Okay? Different controllers, same logic, conditional access.

They wanna see a world that has been formally decolonized at the level of political sovereignty, but remains substantively colonized at the level of economic and financial dependency. It looks different, but it functions the same. This is what they wanna see. But there's a window. We have a window of opportunity.

It's a transition window because the geopolitical space that the a national OCGFC's managed retreat has created for us, this space is genuinely available for non western institutional and a West non western economic systems to be built in the global South. Alternative payment systems, alternative diplomatic platforms and so forth, alternative trade settlement mechanisms and so on, alternative legal frameworks. And this is happening already. This is already happening. And it's happening with implicit a national OCGFC tolerance because they see that these mechanisms facilitate the transition that is required, but their intention is to control those mechanisms that we're creating.

Once the once the transition is complete, they still wanna be on the top. So the the the countries that use this window to build genuine sovereign capacity, genuine productive capacity, food security, energy security, energy sovereignty, build educational institutions that generate indigenous knowledge, build financial systems that serve their own populations. Those actors, those are the actors, those are the states, those are the countries who are gonna arrive at the post transition order in a qualitatively different position, in a better position. And the countries in the states and so forth and the communities that participate in the transition without building any genuine sovereignty, well, they're gonna find themselves inside of a new dependency. A new dependency that in some respects is gonna be even harder to escape than the previous one because this dependency is gonna be dressed in the language of multipolarity and in the language of South South cooperation.

So you're not gonna be even ready. You won't even be thinking about it as colonization and it will be colonization. So I would say this to the, Muslim majority countries and to the countries in the global South more broadly, and I would say it to anyone who is trying to navigate this transition with their sovereignty intact and who wants to end, get to the other side of this transition with their sovereignty intact. The end of the American unipolar order is not a victory for us in and of itself. The the just the weakening of America, even though America has caused tremendous and extraordinary harm to our people, that in and of itself is not a game.

What we do with the conditions and the circumstances and the opportunities that have been created by the demotion of America will determine whether or not it becomes a genuine gain for us or not or whether we're just gonna transition from one form of subjugation into another form of subjugation. So one of the first things that we need to do, again, to the Muslim world and to the countries in the global South, analytically, need to update yourself. You need to stop reading American behavior through either the nationalistic surface narrative that they offer you or the liberal institutional narrative that they offer you. Both of these are noise. You need to look at the factional interests that are operating underneath.

So when American policy looks incoherent to you or when it seems like they are simultaneously pursuing contradictory objectives, then you know that what you're seeing is the competition between the private sector, actors that control, the American state. But those private sector actors operate within a a nested hierarchy. So you should be able to read their behavior. And if their behavior is more readable, then it's more it's more easy to navigate and it's even potentially possible to manipulate and exploit that behavior. And then the second thing that I would say is that you have to understand that the the the the window of opportunity, like I said, the window of opportunity during this transition, this it's open now, but it's not gonna remain open indefinitely.

The space that is currently existing for us to build genuine dedollarization and develop sovereign financial systems and so forth, trade frameworks that don't embed dependency conditions upon our people. That space is available now in a way that it has not been available for decades. It may not be available again for decades after this if we don't use it now. So use it now. And then the third imperative is structural.

And that's the hardest one. That's the hardest one because it requires being honest. It requires being honest about the internal conditions within Muslim majority states, Muslim majority countries, and countries in the global South and global South economies that make genuine sovereignty difficult to achieve regardless of the external environment. I'm talking about elite capture. I'm talking about a compadore collaborator class.

I'm talking about educational systems that produce administrators for the global economy rather than builders of sovereign development. I'm talking about financial sectors that are mere extensions of international capital rather than instruments of domestic investment. You understand me? Structural sovereignty. None of these things are gonna be addressed by the multipolar transition automatically.

The a national OC GFC are quite comfortable working with the collaborator class of elites in a multipolar world, the colonizer collaborators. That class of people has always existed in colonization, and they need to be completely expunged from our societies. Genuine sovereignty requires a combination of external conditions and internal transformation. The external condition is already improving. That's already being taken care of.

The multipolar transition is already happening and it's creating a real space for us. But the internal transformation, the displacement of the collaborator class and the collaborator institutions and the building of genuine productive capacity, the building of and the development of knowledge frameworks within our countries and within our societies that serve our communities rather than serve our colonizers and our extractors. That needs to be worked on. That's something that we have to do. No shift in the global order is gonna do that for us.

BlackRock's not gonna do that for us. BRICS isn't gonna do it for us. And then the fourth is epistemological. The fourth thing is epistemological and this is the most fundamental of all. The unipolar order was not just maintained by military force and by financial systems.

It was maintained by a system of ideas, a system of psychological colonization telling you what development means, telling you what good governance is supposed to look like, telling you what what forms of social organization are modern and which are backward. They were telling us all of this. Who has the right to narrate history and whose narrative counts as factual and as truthful. That system of ideas is also in transition, but the institutions that carried that system of ideas, the universities, the think tanks, the media institutions, the NGO ecosystem, the credentializing system and so forth. Those are not gonna be dismantled by geopolitical multipolarity.

We need active, conscious, sustained counter construction that we do ourselves. We have to build the capacity to narrate our own reality, to produce our own analysis, to evaluate events through our own frameworks that center on our own interest and our own historical experience. And that's what we're trying to do, alhamdulillah, at Middle Nation, a step towards epistemological sovereignty, the refusal to accept imported frames, imported definitions, and imported understanding. The insistence upon reading the world through lenses that we have built, that we own, and that serve our analysis rather than someone else's agenda. That serve our interests rather than someone else's agenda.

So America has been demoted. Understand this. They have been demoted. The evidence for that is structural. The demotion is already complete at the level of the underlying reality even if it is still incomplete at the level of institutional acknowledgment, but it has already been completed in real terms.

The constraints on American power are compounding and they operate simultaneously from outside and from within America. The factional logic of the capturing private sector is legible. It's, predictable once you understand it. You have to you have to try to, map it and read it and understand it and operate accordingly. And as I say, the transition window is open.

The transition window is open, but it will close. So what we do with that window or what we do during the period of that window, that interim, that's the question. And the answer to that question is not primarily geopolitical. It's about us. It's about us.

It's about whether we build in this period the sovereign institutions, financial institutions, intellectual, productive, educational that will allow us to arrive at the post transition as genuine actors rather than as participants in someone else's redesigned dependency, redesigned updated colonization. The world is being reorganized, and that reorganization is not our gift. This is a challenge. The same way that America didn't win anything just because everyone else collapsed, that resulted in them being the global superpower, but they didn't do it through achievement. They didn't do it because they defeated their rivals.

Well, now our rival, the one who has been the rival for the global South, the rival of the Muslim world for all these years, America, they are in decline, they are receding, they are collapsing. That's not a win for us. That's not something that we have won. That's just something that that they have done to themselves. So now the question is what are we gonna do for ourselves?

Now that that collapse of the American system is underway, What are we gonna build for ourselves? Just because America is leaving the global stage, that doesn't mean that our countries are now gonna be perfect and wonderful and that we're gonna succeed. Now we just have the opportunity to succeed that has been denied us for all this time. The question is whether or not we're gonna use this opportunity. So, yes, the demotion of America is a good thing for us.

It's the removal of a boot from our necks. But once that boot has been lifted, that's when you have to show now. You have to show what you have been prevented from doing all this time that that boot has been on your neck. You understand? What you've been prevented from building, what you've been prevented from creating, what you've been prevented from achieving.

And like I say, there's no time to lose because the truth of the matter is that that American boot can very easily and will very easily be replaced by the boot of a national capital. So if you don't want that boot on your neck, then you have to stand up. You have to stand up. You have to make your plans and you have to make your strategy and you have to fortify yourself. Because we don't want a world that just looks different, you know, on the surface.

We don't want a world where we have new institutions, new blocks and so forth, new platforms. But underneath all of that, we have the same logic, the same logic of extraction, the same dependency, you know, the same the same system just administered by different hands. So like I say, the question is what are we supposed to do? What are we supposed to actually do about it? How are we supposed to actually use this transition window?

Well, that answer has, I think, two dimensions. Because just like I talked about with America, you have the, you know, the external constraints and you have the internal constraints. You have external conditions and you have internal conditions. You have the the external positioning and you have the internal transformation that I'm talking about. And neither one works without the other.

This needs to be done in concert. Now, I talked about the two factions of the OCGFC. The the a national faction and the nationalistic faction. And I said that the the nationalistic faction, I said that they are still and they are still operationally dangerous. But like I said, they operate within certain limits.

There's a ceiling on what they can and cannot do. And that ceiling is defined by the interest of the a national faction that's above them. So every country needs to identify where they sit vis a vis both of these factions. Countries that fall inside of the corridor of permissible aggression by the nationalistic OCGFC, those are countries where the anational OCGFC have no significant stake. They have no portfolio exposure, no infrastructure investment, no co investment with the sovereign wealth funds and whatnot.

You understand? They have nothing to lose if the nationalistic faction makes moves against them. They have no contributive role in the transition, in managing the transition. That makes a country vulnerable. That's what makes a country vulnerable in 2026.

Not just military weakness. Not just military weakness, but economic irrelevance to the people who set the ceiling and who set the the limits and the parameters of nationalistic OCGFC aggression. So the first imperative of external positioning is to make yourself too expensive to destroy. You understand? Give the a national OCGFC a stake in your stability, not a controlling stake, a manageable stake.

Just enough that destabilizing your your country destabilizing your country damages their portfolios, damages their returns, and complicates their repositioning in your region. When that's the case, the nationalistic faction of the OCGFC isn't gonna get the green light to attack you because the people above them have something to lose. You understand? So you have to understand these dynamics. This is exactly what The Gulf States have been doing.

They've been doing it and they've been doing it quite intelligently. Saudi Vision twenty thirty isn't just an economic development program. It's a strategic recruitment program of a national capital into Saudi Arabia's stability and Saudi Arabia's success. And in fact, the whole region's stability and success. When BlackRock has billions of dollars deployed in Saudi infrastructure, when they have major western asset managers co invested in vision twenty thirty projects, when the sovereign wealth funds of the Gulf Of The GCC are deeply interlocked with the investment portfolios of the global financial elite, then Saudi Arabia is no longer a target.

The GCC is no longer a target. It's a partner. Okay. It's an imperfect, contested, and conditionally respected partner, but a partner. An indispensable partner.

You understand? The UAE has done the same thing. They've been doing it for even a longer period of time and arguably more comprehensively. Dubai isn't just a financial hub. It's a it's a very deliberate architecture of mutual dependency with global capital.

You can't destabilize The UAE without damaging an enormous web of international financial interests that runs through Dubai. That's not an accident. That's a strategy. They did that on purpose, and it has worked. It's worked for them.

Never mind what's happening now with Iran doing what they're doing with the with the attacks and whatnot. That's not gonna be allowed to spin out of control. Believe me, that's not gonna be allowed to spin out of control for precisely the reasons that I've mentioned. Because there's a ceiling, there's an escalation ladder, and there's a ceiling, and that's set by a national capital. Now don't misunderstand this because you might think that this is just a more sophisticated form of dependency, this relationship with a national capital.

You might think that dealing with the a national OCTFC means that you're just trading one master for another. And yes, it can be. It can be that way. That is what can happen if you do it wrong. Because the truth is the only difference between strategic leverage and dependency is just one thing.

There's just one thing, which is whether or not you can retain overriding state authority to set the terms. Whether the state holds the power to define what is permissible and what is not permissible regardless of how much capital has been recruited. You understand? The state has to be strong. The state has to be able to determine whether the relationship that you have with a national capital serves your national project or if it redirects your national project to serve that relationship with a national OC GFC.

Yes. It's a minefield. It's absolutely a minefield, and it's very dangerous. But you have no choice. You understand?

You have to navigate that minefield. You need to know this. There is no other game in town. There's no other game in town. You know, it's like those ships right now that are navigating the Hormuz right now.

They're turning off their transmitters. They're trying to avoid detection. There's nothing else you can do. The external situation is what it is. The International OCGFC exists.

This huge non state economic actor that owns and controls the state power of America, the state power of the West, they exist. You can ignore them if you want to, but that's not gonna make them ignore you. You understand? If you don't handle that relationship in some kind of way, if you don't navigate that relationship, if you don't figure out how to deal with them, they're gonna crush you. It's that simple.

It's that brutal. They exist and they are predatory and you are in danger and you have to protect yourself by one way or another way. But the good thing about it is that we know what their incentives are. We know what their incentives are. We know what their motives are.

We know what drives them and that makes it easier to deal with them. Getting it right is not easy. I didn't say it's easy. It requires a strong state, like I say, a state that is both strong and savvy. You need the a national OCGFC to have skin in your game.

Without that, you're exposed. An exposure in this sort of an environment is a death sentence. It's a death sentence. Well, you might as well put the chains on yourself. You might as well set your own house on fire.

Look, you have to have the ability to negotiate with them when they make you an offer that you can't refuse. You have to be able to negotiate your way out of that line of fire. Ask Libya. Ask Iraq. Ask any country that found themselves inside the corridor of permissible aggression when they had no countervailing relationships to constrain what was done to them.

This has never been as true as it is today. America is an extortion racket. Everything is transactional. This is the reality that our countries are dealing with. This is the reality that our countries are trying to navigate today.

And if you don't understand this, then you will misunderstand everything that is happening in the world today, in the Muslim world, the global South, and everywhere else. The wolf is at your door. You understand me? There's a wolf at your door. I'm not saying fear him, but I am saying, no, he's there, and make your strategy responsibly.

Because for instance, look at the At The Gulf involvement in conflicts across the Muslim world, in in Sudan, in Libya, in Somalia. Right? The UAE and Saudi Arabia, they've got their hands in all of those things, in all of those situations, and it's not always clean. And people see that, they see what they're doing, and they revert to what they've been trained to revert to. Always interference, it's destabilization.

It's the the regional powers acting on their own interests at the expense of weaker states. It's exploitation and so on. Arab colonization and what have you. And yes, certainly, some of what happens genuinely deserves criticism. Absolutely.

But understand the context. Understand the context. Think about what the alternative actually is. Because the alternative the alternative to Gulf involvement in those conflicts is not a clean, peaceful, self determined resolution. You're in the dream world.

The alternative is a vacuum. And a vacuum in this environment isn't gonna stay empty, it's gonna get filled by the nationalistic OCGFC, by the o the OCGFC and their contractors, by western backed proxy forces, by IMF restructuring programs that arrive with their peacekeepers in tow, by NGO ecosystems that are gonna embed western institutional frameworks into the post conflict settlement, and they'll call it reconstruction. They'll call it peace. We've seen this time and time again. We know exactly how it ends.

We know exactly how it goes. Just a rebranding of colonization. So when Saudi Arabia and The UAE are present in these conflicts, negotiating with the different factions, cultivating relationships across the whole political landscape in this or that country, maintaining economic leverage over this or that actor, you know, over multiple actors in any in any given conflict. What they're doing, whatever their specific motives may be, what they're doing is keeping that conflict inside a regional framework. They're the ones who are in the room.

You understand? They're the ones who have relationships on all sides, which means that when a settlement comes, when a settlement is arrived at, they are the ones who are in a position to broker that settlement, not the West. That matters enormously. A settlement brokered by regional actors, even imperfect actors, even ones who have their own interest in the outcome. Okay?

They're not angels. I didn't say they are. But it's still structurally very different from a settlement that's gonna be broken by the West or by Western controlled institutions. It's completely different. The terms are different.

The dependencies that it creates are different. The institutional frameworks that it embeds are different. Who controls the reconstruction, the post post conflict reconstruction, that's different. And all of that all of that flows from whoever is in the room. Whoever is the one who's in the room.

These are not externally created conflicts, you understand. These are internally created conflicts that have external players taking sides in those internal conflicts. And those players now are from our own people, not from the West. Because look, it's gonna be one or the other either way. It's gonna be one or the other.

If it's not our people, it's gonna be them. If it's not our people, it's going to be them. These are the only choices. These are the only options. There is no option of everybody mind their own business and leave a country to resolve their conflicts in their own way.

That's not an option. That that option does not exist. If our people are not there, America will be there. If our people are not there, The UK will be there or France will be there and so on. The West will be there, the IMF will be there, so on and so forth.

You understand? China brokered that Saudi Iran normalization, not because China is a neutral party with no interest in the region, but because China was present, because China was engaged, because China had built relationships with both sides. And that resulted in the most significant diplomatic realignment in The Middle East in decades. On terms that did not embed western institutional dependency. Okay?

That's what regional engagement produces when it works. Even messy contested interest driven regional engagement still produces better outcomes for us than the alternative. We are the ones who are engaging with the actors in these conflicts. That means that we will be the ones to negotiate the settlements that end these conflicts. We will be the ones to contain them, and we will be the ones to resolve them.

Not the West, not western institutions, us. And you have to understand what that means. That's not nothing. That's everything. Wallahi, that's everything.

So when you evaluate Gulf involvement in Sudan, in Libya, and wherever else, you evaluate that through a western framework and you reach the conclusion that for example the The United Arab Emirates is behaving badly and they should be condemned and they should be pressured and they should be should be isolated and what have you. I'm sorry to tell you, you are not being principled. You're being useful. You're being useful to the people who want our states to be weakened, who want our states to be stripped of their regional influence, who want our states to be pushed out of the rooms where the settlements will be negotiated. No.

You're undermining the consolidation of Muslim power in Muslim lands. Your sincerity, no matter how sincere you are, your sincerity doesn't change that function. You can be completely sincere and still be completely wrong about what you are functionally doing. Look, the frameworks that the colonizers, that the westerners gave us, to evaluate the behavior of our own governments and our own regional powers, those frameworks were not designed to serve our interests. They were designed to manage us for their interests.

You understand? And one of the primary things that they manage us into is internal opposition to the exact institutions that for all their flaws represent the only realistic base from which genuine sovereignty can be built. Genuine sovereignty can be built and can be defended in this moment in time. This is the epistemological trap, and it's a very sophisticated one because it works through your conscience. It works through your heart.

It works through your conscience, not against your conscience. It makes collaboration with external pressure feel like you're being principled. It makes undermining your own state feel like accountability. Somehow you can actually convince yourself that you can ever achieve justice by siding with the West against the Muslims and by calling upon America, subhanallah, to intervene in the Muslim lands, to intervene in Muslim issues. Well, no, that just makes you a mouthpiece for the colonizers.

Yes. It does. Just a mouthpiece for the colonizers even if you have deluded yourself into thinking that you're speaking on behalf of the oppressed Muslims. No. We have to be clear eyed about this.

Wanting better governance is fine. That's perfectly legitimate. But the question is what's the path that actually leads there? How do we actually get there? And the path that runs through weakening your own state, the path that runs through inviting external pressure and collaborating with the forces that are openly hostile to your country's sovereignty, well, that path has never once, not once produced better governance in any country.

It produces Libya. It produces Iraq. It has produced nothing but destruction. It's produced populations that are genuinely defenseless. That's all they ever produced.

Defenseless against not just their own imperfect governments, but against everything. So like I say, if you're gonna negotiate with the a national OCGFC and you must, then you're gonna need a strong state. You're gonna need a savvy state. You're gonna need a state that can make itself irreplaceable. So let me talk about the internal dimension that I mentioned.

Because the external strategy only works if you have strong state capable of executing things on their own terms. And this is where most of the global South countries and most of the Muslim majority countries face their real constraint. Not external pressure alone, but internal institutional weakness that makes them unable to really properly hold the terms of engagement with external capital. Makes them unable to prevent the collaborator class from forming and from operating freely in their societies and in their economies. Makes them unable to build real sovereign institutions Even even even while the the transition window makes it possible to build them.

They don't have the capacity or the capability to build them. So what is the state that you need? The state that you need, what does that actually look like? It's not necessarily a large state. It doesn't have to be large.

It doesn't have to necessarily follow a nationalization model in terms of their resources, but it requires a non bypassable state authority that has a a non bypassable state authority over the private sector. Meaning, capital can operate. Sure. It can grow. It can engage internationally and so forth.

But it cannot form autonomous relationships with external actors that run outside of the state's strategic agenda, the national agenda. It cannot align their interests horizontally with transnational capital in ways that bypass or undermine the national project or national agenda. The state holds the overriding power. That's the condition. The state has to hold overriding power.

The collaborator class is precisely what emerges when that condition is absent. When the state doesn't have that power or doesn't exert that power. When private sector actors develop loyalties and develop dependencies that cater to external capital rather than to the nation, rather than to the national project. When your business elite is more accountable to the international partners that they have than to the society that they operate in. When the most educated and most capable people in your country have oriented their careers towards integration into the global economy as it currently exists, rather than towards the construction of something genuinely sovereign, genuine alternatives to the current model.

This has to be structurally prevented. The collaborator class. Not through the suppression of private enterprise, but through the maintenance of a state that's strong enough and coherent enough and sufficiently grounded in its own national project that private actors cannot bypass it. You you understand me? The state must be the senior partner always.

And a state with that kind of authority cannot function without the human capital necessary to staff it. And that's where the real work needs to be done. Because the professional class, in my opinion, that most of the global South and most of the Muslim majority countries currently produces, they're essentially trained to serve the global economy as it is currently structured. You understand me? They're educated in western epistemological frameworks.

They're credentialed by western institutions, and they are oriented towards integration into the existing status quo system rather than construction of alternatives, rather than being interested in the construction of alternatives. Their expertise is real, but their orientation, the direction that their expertise points is outward and upward into the global system, not inward and downward into the roots of the national project, of any national project. Or you can even say regional project. So the professional class that you need is a very different kind of animal. You need outstanding technical expertise in finance, in law, in strategic economics and so forth.

The actual mechanics of how global capital works, that expertise is non negotiable. You absolutely need that. You cannot navigate the transition window without people who genuinely understand the system that they're navigating. You have to know the waters. You understand?

But alongside that expertise, they must be absolutely grounded in an ethical and an epistemological framework that is their own, that is from their own people, an indigenous worldview and a a a civilizational identity. You understand? Something that roots them and roots their loyalty vertically to the national project rather than horizontally into a a transnational capital. That rootedness can't just be a decoration like a Palestinian kefayah draped on your draped on your shoulders. It's not a cultural accessory that you just add to the package to make it look more authentic.

I'm talking about real rootedness, real rootedness. That's what keeps a highly capable person who has all the options in the world that their that their expertise opens up for them. They've got all those opportunities. But they choose to build here rather than extracting value here and living somewhere else. That's what makes the difference between a technocrat who's actually serving the nation, serving the national project, the regional project, or what have you, and a and a and a technocrat who's just passing through that time that type of work on their way to an international career.

You understand? You cannot build sovereign institutions with people whose minds are not sovereign, with people whose minds are already captured. The battle is has to be won there first. If it's not won there, it's not gonna be won at all. And then you have to look at the the the regional dimension of all of this because a single state, like I've talked about this before, even a strong one, even a well governed one, even one with a rooted and capable professional class, they still are very limited in the leverage that they have against the pressure that a national capital can bring to bear if they decide to move against you.

You understand? That pressure is too large, is too multidimensional, is too capable of finding and exploiting weak spots, weak points. But states operating cohesively as a regional block, sharing intelligence, coordinating economic policy, presenting a unified front on investment terms and refusing to be played against one another. That's a qualitatively different proposition. You understand?

The GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council, they've demonstrated the basic principle. Saudi Arabia and The UAE, they have significant leverage in their own right individually. Both of those countries have significant leverage individually. But operating in coordination with aligned sovereign wealth fund positioning and shared diplomatic relationships where they all have their ducks in a row, where they have a leverage of a completely different order, of a different magnitude. And Bridge Plus is the expanded version of that same logic.

You become collectively too large. You become collectively too interconnected, too consequential to the a national OCGFC's repositioning project that you cannot be casually destabilized. There's too much at stake. The weak link in collective sovereignty is always the same. Individual states that can be pressured, that can be incentivized, or that can be internally destabilized into breaking ranks.

One state that can be flipped. One elite faction that can be bought off. One domestic opposition movement that can be mobilized against the government or against the regional project. That's all it takes to fracture cohesion. And fracturing cohesion is their standard tool.

Divide and rule, we know that. It's not subtle and it's applied consistently everywhere. It's applied consistently everywhere because it consistently works, which brings everything full circle. This goes back to what I was talking about earlier. Strong states, internal cohesion with non bypassable authority over their private sectors, and a professional class that is loyal to their nation, loyal to their national projects.

These are the preconditions for collective sovereignty to be able to function because you cannot possibly build a strong regional block out of weak, fragmented, divided, internally compromised states. Collective sovereignty is the multiplier, but you need to have something to multiply in the first place. So you need strong states. So everything that I said about the external positioning, the internal transformation, regional cohesion, this all rests on one foundation and that foundation is unity. Not unity in the sense of everyone agreeing.

We're not talking about soft and squishy unity. Not unity in the sense of everyone approving of everything that is done. No. We're talking about real unity. The hard kind.

The hard kind of unity that actually costs you something, that actually requires some sacrifice from you. I need you to understand what's at stake. What's really at stake because I I I genuinely think that a lot of people don't understand it. You don't appreciate what's at stake. We're not in a period of normal political disagreement today, in 2026, where you can afford the luxury of fragmenting along factional lines or withholding your support from governments that you disapprove of or collaborating with, external pressure because you decided that this or that particular leader or this or that particular policy is bad enough to justify doing so.

No. We are in a transition window that is finite. It's finite and it's contested, and we are facing forces that are very sophisticated, that are very patient, and that have been doing this for a very long time. This is not the moment for bickering. This is not the time for that.

And And I'm not telling you that our governments are all beyond criticism and that everything and anything that they do is fine. And I'm not telling you that everything that is done in the name of sovereignty is automatically legitimate. But what I'm telling you is this, a weakened state cannot protect you. A weakened state, a fragmented region cannot protect you. A professional class that has been trained to look outward and has no loyalty whatsoever to their nation or to their national projects cannot build what you need.

And an opposition that collaborates with external players, external pressure, however principle that they believe themselves to be, they're opening the gates. And you don't get to control what comes through those gates once they've been open. Libya tried that. Syria tried that. The people who opened those gates, they also believed that they were fighting for something better.

They weren't wrong about the imperfections that they were objecting to, but they were catastrophically wrong about what would replace it. If Mohammed bin Salman falls, if Mohammed bin Zayed falls, if Al Sisi falls or whoever else, who do you think is gonna replace them? The Mahdi? No. Larry Fink is gonna replace them.

And once Larry Fink replaces them, you'll be lucky if you ever lift up your head again. Unity does not mean only standing with those who you like. It doesn't mean standing only with the people that you agree with. It doesn't mean that you only stand with the people whose conduct you fully approve of. It means recognizing the reality that you are standing against a common threat.

A threat that is structural, a a threat that is patient, a threat that does not care one bit about your internal disagreements except in so far as they can use them. And you cannot afford to let them use them. You cannot afford cracks in the walls of your fortress. Not now. Not during this period of time.

Because look, the fortress that you're protecting is not any particular government. It's not any particular leader. It's not any particular policy. The fortress that you're protecting is the possibility of genuine sovereignty itself. The possibility of arriving at the post transition order as actors rather than as dependencies.

That's what's at stake. That's what you're either protecting or surrendering with every choice that you make during this period. Yes. The world is being reorganized. It's being reorganized around us, but it's not being reorganized for our benefit.

That's not why they're doing it. But the window that that reorganization has opened is real. And what we build during the course of that window, during the this interim period, the institutions, the states, the regional cohesion, the professional class, the epistemological sovereignty, and so forth, that is what determines whether we're gonna come through this as a civilization that has reclaimed its agency or as a civilization that has just traded one subjugation for another and called it progress. Look, we've been through worse than this in our history and we've come through it. But we can only come through it united.

We can only come through it with states that hold and that do not fracture. We can only come through it with leadership that understands the moment and with populations that supports that leadership. That, populations that understand what is required of them at this moment in history. That's what is required of us now. Nothing less than that.

Nothing less than that. We are standing against the flood. You understand? We're standing against the flood, against the deluge. So lock your arms with whoever is next to you.

Just like in the sola, shoulder to shoulder, foot to foot, and don't leave any gaps in the soft. Stand together and don't let Shaitan find a single opening.