Strategic Resilience and the Strike of the Pickaxe
On the road to Lake Biwa, in a conversation with a former Japanese general about middle powers and the summit between the American and Chinese poles, he said to me: “Nations do not live by power alone, but by endurance.” He was describing Japan’s policy of strategic endurance, or senryakuteki nintai (戦略的忍耐), when a state’s nerves and supply chains are tested. I told him that we need something beyond endurance. We need strategic resilience: the ability of middle powers to emerge from pressure by organizing the language of cooperation among themselves, so that they become capable of action, not merely waiting. He asked: “And what about the Arab nation?” I said to myself: the Arab nation? I had not heard that phrase in such a context for a long time.
When I reached Koyasan, Japan’s sacred mountain, I began to sense deeper dimensions to that exchange. Japan cannot be read today only through its old image. After the Second World War, its long silence appeared to some as passivity or moral neutrality. Yet it was also a disciplined system for emerging from catastrophe: a constitution restraining war, a memory afraid of escalation, and an economy that built strength through factories rather than speeches. But Japan is changing. Its security is no longer only military. It is defence, law, supply chains, energy, critical minerals, technology, and a strategic capacity not to be held hostage by others.
Here the Arab mirror appeared, as the waters of Biwako had appeared. Nations witness their transformations when they acknowledge trauma, and redefine what they fear and what they are able to do. Our problem is not only the weakness of the system, but the weakness of the language that describes the institution and its work. We have grand narratives that do not carry grand truths, and lofty communiqués that give the mind no explicit hope. When the link between language and cognition breaks, meaning is lost before politics is lost.
The Arab League has been exhausted, and with it the idea of Arab multilateral action. But the greater danger is the exhaustion of Arab strategic language itself, until it has nearly become a dead protocol and a sequence of courteous statements. There is serious unease among the Trucial Gulf states, not with Arabism, but with the old functional formula of collective work. We had hoped that something else might emerge: something that moves beyond Egypt without cancelling it, that absorbs the rising Gulf, the deferred Maghreb, and Palestine, which exposes the failure of international legitimacy. What comes after Egypt does not come against Egypt. When Egypt regains its professional calm, it becomes a condition for shaping the narrative of the new Arab phase.
This is where the particular value of Ambassador Nabil Fahmy, the next Secretary-General of the Arab League, becomes clear. A diplomat, scholar, and Mister mission-impossible, he carries the legacy of the Egyptian diplomatic institution, but knows that the age of taboos and courtesies has ended. Fahmy represents institutional hope: not the hope of the poet who closes his eyes, but the hope of the diplomat who reopens closed files with courage. Whoever does not search for water cannot admit that the well has dried.
And in the silent paths of Koyasan, where the graves do not seem like an ending, but an extension of the conversation between the living and the departed, I remembered the pickaxe.
At the trench, the scene was not soft optimism. Medina was under siege, the wind was severe, hunger was gnawing, and hearts had reached the throats. Prophetic realism did not deny the confederates or the stubborn rock. The Prophet ﷺ took the pickaxe and struck. With every blow and spark came the tidings of the opening of Syria, Persia, and Yemen. This was not an escape from reality. It was an opening in meaning before geography.
The Arab question today is not: do we have an institution called the Arab League? It is: do we still have the endurance for joint action? Can we strike the pickaxe against the rock of habit, courtesy, and empty communiqués? Hope is not naivety. It is moral courage when despair is the easier choice.
Discipline begins in Atturaif…
and in the world it is tested.
Prof. Dr. Malik Ãl-Dahlan
Professor of Law and specialist in international law; International Mediator.
Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews;
Emeritus Professor of International Law and Public Policy, Queen Mary University of London, and;
Member, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.