The Geopolitical Autopsy: Seven Different Theaters, Same Diagnosis

In Part I, we introduced Malek Bennabi—the man, the oeuvre, and the five conceptual weapons that constitute his analytical grammar: colonizability, the civilizational triad, globalism, the ideological struggle, and the pipeline of betrayal. We now deploy those weapons against the burning dossiers of our era. Seven theatres. One diagnosis. The same text, written fifty years ago.

I. The Axis of Armed Colonizability: Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen

Afghanistan: Two Trillion Dollars for Nothing

Bennabi stated it in 1960: a military power can win every battle and lose the civilizational war if it ignores the internal dimension of resistance. The United States spent $2.3 trillion in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021. Result: the Taliban recovered power intact following the most humiliating withdrawal in American military history. This is not primarily a military failure. It is a civilizational collapse—the empirical proof that brute force cannot substitute for ideas.
American globalism in Afghanistan was an attempt to transplant an exogenous political model into a society whose internal logics had never been understood. This is what Robert Nicholson wrote in his 2021 post-mortem: the West failed because it was “driven by a noble desire to see humans as equal and interchangeable beings for whom faith and culture are ‘accidents of birth’— but these accidents are non-negotiable truths for hundreds of millions of people who would rather die than abandon them.” Bennabi had said this in different words sixty years earlier.
His 1956 formulation in L’Afro-asiatisme remains the most exact description of the structural aporia of every exogenous military intervention : “The crisis in which the world still struggles stems from the fact that, outside the road that leads to a dead end, no other road seems to exist but one leading to yet another.” From Kabul to Baghdad, from Tripoli to Sana’a, that aporia has not moved.
The key distinction Bennabi makes is between globalization as an economic process—the circulation of goods, capital, and persons, which he regards as potentially positive—and globalism as a political project of normative domination, the requisition of universal language (democracy, human rights, and rule of law) to serve particular imperial interests. One can export institutions; one cannot export idées-forces (key ideas). That is why none of the countries “liberated” by force between 2001 and 2023 produced a durable democracy.
Bennabi had also perceived, from the late 1950s, the internal fragility of the Soviet bloc. In 1972—at a moment when the USSR appeared at the zenith of its military power—he predicted its inevitable decline, comparing it to the collapse of the Qarmatians who had menaced the Abbasid state before disintegrating. The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the dissolution of the USSR (1991) gave him, eighteen years after his death, a dazzling posthumous confirmation. The structural logic was the same: a system that exhausts its key ideas without renewing them does not collapse from external pressure; it collapses from the interior void.
In 1972, a year before his death, Bennabi formulated the following:
“We see opening in our epoch considerable events. These reasons push us to liken this last third of the twentieth century to a river nearing its mouth into the sea, swollen by the convergence of all its tributaries descending from the high mountains of the hinterland—a period of history in which all the tributaries converge, with everything this implies in psychological, social, political, and scientific consequences.”
That river is where we now stand. Afghanistan is one of its most turbulent tributaries. And its waters, as Bennabi foresaw, do not flow back.
Iraq: The Inverted Triad
The 2003 invasion of Iraq is, for a reader of Bennabi, the textbook case of globalism operating at maximum destructive capacity. Under the double cover of “human rights” and “democratization”—the two universals of Bennabi’s globalism—a Western coalition dismantled a state, looted its museums, eliminated its intellectual class, dissolved its army, and deliberately sowed a sectarian civil war whose embers still burn today.

The destruction of Baghdad in 2003 echoes, across eight centuries of long duration, the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 that Bennabi cites as the founding trauma of what he calls the post-Almohad decline : the moment when Islamic civilization lost the key idea that had sustained it and entered a structural condition of colonizability. History does not repeat. It stutters. And Baghdad stuttered again.
What Bennabi would have identified with surgical precision is that the real destruction of Iraq lay not in its buildings but in the deliberate annihilation of its ideological capital: the systematic targeting of universities, hospitals, and cultural institutions; the forced exile of 40 percent of its professional class; and the dismantling of all state infrastructure. This is the inverted triad: no man capable of action, no soil that belongs to its inhabitants, and no time—because a society without institutions cannot inscribe itself in duration. The deliberate eradication of the conditions for any future renaissance.
Lebanon: Organized Paralysis as a Mode of Government
Lebanon is, for a Bennabi reader, the most perfect laboratory of what he calls “structural colonizability”—not because it lacks talent or intelligence, but because its political architecture, the institutional confessionalism inherited from the French mandate, has organized paralysis as a mode of government. The state cannot decide; the society cannot cohere; each crisis is absorbed by the same system that produced it.
The September 2024 pager and walkie-talkie attacks that killed 32 people and wounded more than 3,250 illustrate with clinical precision what Bennabi called the invisible war : the war that is never formally declared but methodically deconstructs a people’s capacity to defend and to reproduce itself. The physical infrastructure of an entire movement was targeted not with bombs but with the infiltration of everyday objects—the war of ideas has become the war of things.
From 1982 to 2024, Israel bombed Lebanon on at least eighteen distinct occasions. The Arab world’s response each time: verbal condemnations flowing through the pipeline of betrayal before being absorbed into diplomatic silence. Between October 2023 and November 2024 alone: 3,445 Lebanese died and 400,000 were displaced. Bennabi would not have been surprised. He would have asked the same question he asked in 1962: where are the ideas that should have made the Arab world an actor rather than a spectator of its own catastrophe?
But he would also have noted the other side of the Bennabi paradox: that it is precisely from this devastated Lebanon that emerged, in the last decades of the twentieth century, one of the most formidable key ideas the Arab world has produced since independence. A colonizable society and a society of resistance are not mutually exclusive; they are the two faces of the same unresolved equation.
Yemen: The Paradox of the Humiliated ResistingYemen is the most implacably Bennabi-like case of the early twenty-first century. A country of 33 million inhabitants, one of the poorest in the region, has been devastated since 2015 by a proxy war in which regional and global powers test their weapons on civilian bodies: between 150,000 and 377,000 dead according to ACLED, 4.5 million displaced, and an infrastructure reduced to ruins.
And yet, it is from this very devastated population that the Houthis launched, between October 2023 and April 2024, more than 160 drones and missiles toward Israel and toward the warships of the most powerful navy in the world. This is not a military paradox. It is a Bennabi paradox: where there is an idée-force—however contested, however instrumentalized—a people without an army can resist a navy.
Bennabi had conceptualized this as the reification of man: the colonial system transforms populations into objects of foreign policy, into bodies counted in statistics, into collateral damage. The resistance of the reified is always underestimated by those who produce the statistics. Yemen demonstrated that a colonizable people in the material sense—without an economy, without a modern state, and without sophisticated weapons—can generate a non-colonizable resistance if it possesses a conviction.
The question Bennabi would put to Yemen is the same he put to Algeria in 1962: will this resistance remain purely reactive, exhausting itself in survival—or will it produce, in the crucible of the ordeal, the ideas of a renaissance? The distinction between surviving and civilizing is the whole of Bennabi’s program.

II. Iran: The Millennial Civilization Against the Hegemonic Order

28 February 2026: Operations Roaring Lion / Epic Fury: bombs fall on Tehran. Bennabi would turn the page—he had already written on it.
Iran is, in Bennabi’s civilizational topography, a case of remarkable complexity. It is a civilization of more than five thousand years, bearer of a ʿasabiyya—in the Khaldunian sense that Bennabi makes his own—of exceptional robustness: a capacity for collective cohesion under pressure that has survived the Arab conquest, the Mongol invasion, the Ottoman pressure, and decades of Western sanctions without dissolving.
The 1979 revolution was, whatever one thinks of its political content, one of the rare revolutions of the twentieth century borne by an indigenous idée-force: not imported from Moscow, not borrowed from Washington, not a copy of a foreign model—but constructed from the civilization’s own intellectual and spiritual resources. This, in Bennabi’s grammar, is the definition of civilizational resistance as opposed to a mere defensive reaction. Defensive reactions exhaust themselves. Civilizational resistances transform the ordeal into capital.
What American globalism cannot tolerate in Iran is not the nuclear program as such—Israel has possessed nuclear weapons for six decades without equivalent pressure—but the ideological autonomy the program symbolizes. A state that refuses imposed schemas, constructs its own doctrine of defense, and declines integration into the Western normative system represents an existential challenge to the hegemonic order regardless of its domestic policies. It demonstrates that the order is not universal. It is particular.
The 2026 war against Iran —whatever its military outcome—confirms the Bennabi analysis: globalism does not negotiate with civilizations that possess an idea of themselves. It attacks them. The civilizations that survive the attack do so by the force of their internal resources—spiritual, cultural, intellectual, and scientific—before doing so through their missiles.
The question Bennabi would put to Iran is the one he put to Algeria after independence: Is this resistance colonizable or civilizational? A colonizable resistance mobilizes purely defensive forces and exhausts itself in survival without producing the ideas of a renaissance. A civilizational resistance forges, in the ordeal, the conditions of its own renewal by activating its productive forces—intellectual, moral, scientific, and educational. Only the second endures beyond the generation that bore it.
Iran’s answer to that question remains open. But its very capacity to survive a war that no Arab state has dared to confront directly suggests that the ʿasabiyya is there. Whether it will be transformed into a civilizational program—into science, into institutions, into ideas exportable beyond the borders of ideology—is the question of the century.

III. The Gulf: Luxury Colonizability

Bennabi had formulated the pathology of the rentier society with troubling clarity, decades before the oil monarchies had taken their current form. In his civilizational triad, the Gulf states embody the maximum disequilibrium: a plethora of things (oil resources, sovereign capital, pharaonic infrastructure); an abundance of persons (demography and the systematic importation of foreign talent); and a poverty of ideas—the structural absence of critical thought, an independent press, an autonomous university, and an endogenous cultural production.
This is not a moral judgment. It is a clinical one. The Gulf is a living demonstration that wealth without ideas does not produce civilization: it produces Dubais—architectural performances erected by migrant workers under conditions documented by every human rights organization on earth, giant commercial cathedrals in intellectual deserts, and air-conditioned kingdoms that purchase the world’s arts, sciences, sports, and minds precisely because they cannot generate them in sufficient numbers from within. Bennabi would call this luxury colonizability: cultural and intellectual dependence dressed in the garments of material sovereignty.
When dynastic interest enters the equation, the pipeline of betrayal functions at maximum capacity. The Abraham Accords, the sustained normalization with a state bombing Gaza, and the $400 billion in American armaments purchased in a decade. The Arab soil is there, the Arab man is there, and the time is there. But the idée-force that would transform this raw accumulation into a civilization is absent. And in the absence of that idea, others will supply it—as they always have, in every cycle of Bennabi’s civilizational history.
Here Bennabi’s analysis intersects with Ibn Khaldun’s: the ʿasabiyya of the Gulf states has been dissolved by prosperity. The Bedouin solidarity that built the Arabian kingdoms has been replaced by a dependent comfort that outsources every essential function—defense, construction, finance, medicine, education—to foreign operators. This is the Khaldunian cycle in its modern form: the luxury that dissolves the cohesion that made the conquest possible.
IV. The West and the Declining Hegemon: Bennabi’s Premature Autopsy
Bennabi is not anti-Western. The distinction is not semantic: it is constitutive of his entire project. He is anti-globalism—anti the particular disguised as the universal. He admires Descartes; he recognizes the debt of medieval Islamic civilization to Western science and rationality; he advocates, from the 1930s onward, an Islamic-Christian dialogue in the tradition of the great statesman Emir Abdelkader, who led the resistance against the French invasion of Algeria (1832-1847). His intellectual formation is European as much as it is Arab-Islamic. He is, in this, the antithesis of identitarian withdrawal.
But he sees in the West, after the two world wars, a civilization that has exhausted its spiritual motivations without having produced new ones. The Sartrean existentialism he comments on with precision is not a philosophy of the Renaissance: it is a philosophy of after-catastrophe—of after Auschwitz, of after Hiroshima, of the collapse of the idea of progress. A civilization that can no longer project itself into the future with a sense of purpose has, in Bennabi’s clinical vocabulary, entered a crisis of motivation.
This is what Fukuyama diagnosed in his own way—without having read Bennabi—when he conceded in 2022 that liberal democracy was not self-evidently triumphant. This is what Trumpism reveals structurally: not a new empire on the march, but a hegemony defending itself by destroying the multilateral rules it had itself established. The desperate sign that an order no longer has the confidence to maintain itself through persuasion.
The multiplication of proxy wars, simultaneously unresolvable; the inability to close any of the conflicts ignited over twenty-five years—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran; the de-dollarization process , the expansion of BRICS , and the fracturing of the “rules-based order” : all of this confirms what Bennabi wrote in 1956 in L’Afro-asiatisme on the inevitability of Western hegemonic retreat and the emergence of a multipolar world.
His 1956 formula on the Islamic-Western relationship retains all its force:
“Islam will borrow technique from the West once it has accomplished its cultural revolution. But Islam — by virtue of necessary complementarity — will make the West discover the spiritual dimension of the problems of man. It will make it understand that for a spiritual problem, an exclusively socio-economic solution is ineffective.” Malek Bennabi, “L’Afro-asiatisme,” Cairo, 1956
This is not a prophecy of victory. It is a program of reciprocity. Bennabi’s West is not an enemy to be defeated but a partner to be brought to its senses—as Islam, in the mirror, must bring itself to its own. Two civilizations in a crisis of motivation; one diagnosis; one prescription: the recovery of key ideas that transcend the management of things.
In this respect, Bennabi wrote, “The new civilization must be neither a civilization of a proud continent nor that of a selfish people, but of a humanity pooling all its potentialities.” And while recognizing the transformative power of the European fact in the world, he called on Europe—[the West in today’s jargon]—to integrate itself into the global conscience that its civilization has created. To that end, he saw the task of “Afro-Asianism” [the Global South] as consisting in “helping Western man to reach this dimension to which its conscience has not yet arrived.” Bennabi then expressed his conviction that history will continue to be made with Europe: “For good as for evil, its choice still has a global importance (…) We must not let Europe fall back on its axis, withdrawing from the world to sulk at humanity, which it can no longer dominate. It is necessary to show [the West] that its security does not depend on power but on the development of its conscience in the dimension of others and of its genius in harmony with current trends and a higher human interest.”

CONTINUING IN PART III

For Bennabi, the seven theaters examined in this installment—Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, the Gulf, and the West—were each case files in a larger indictment. But one dossier he treated differently. He returned to it obsessively across five decades. He called it the most consequential question in the modern history of Islam — and, by extension, in the modern history of the world. This will be dealt with in Part III: “Palestine: The Original Wound and the Accomplished Prophecy.”

About the Authors:

Amir Nour is an Algerian researcher in international relations and author of several books, including “The Monstrosity of Our Century: The War on Palestine and the Last Western Man” (Clarity Press, Atlanta, USA, 2026).
Laala Bechetoula is an independent Algerian journalist and geopolitical analyst, writing regularly on contemporary wars and the geopolitics of the Islamic world for Countercurrents, Global Research, Mondialisation.ca, Réseau International, Le Quotidien d’Oran, and Sri Lanka Guardian.

the reviewer

Malek Bennabi, “Perspectives algériennes” (Algiers : ENAG, 1964 ; repr. 2004), pp. 140–150. Bennabi analyzes how military victory without prior ideological preparation produces a social void that the colonizer reoccupies in new forms after formal independence.
Costs of War Project, Brown University, “United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9/11 Wars Through FY2022”, September 2021. The figure of $2.313 trillion covers direct war spending in Afghanistan only; broader estimates including veterans’ care reach $6 trillion.
Robert Nicholson, “The Unconquerable Islamic World”, The Wall Street Journal, 19 August 2021.
Malek Bennabi, “L’Afro-asiatisme” (Cairo : Maél, 1956 ; repr. Algiers : Dar El Bay’a, 2006), p. 11. The preface is dated 6 November 1956 — four days into the Suez Crisis, which Bennabi explicitly connects to the structural aporia he is describing.
Bennabi, “Le problème des idées dans le monde musulman” (Algiers : El-Bay’a, 1970), pp. 55–62. On the distinction between globalization and globalism as a political program vs. a philosophical ideal, see also: “Mondialisme” (Algiers: Dar El Hadhara, 2004), pp. 17–30.
On the USSR’s internal fragility as perceived by Bennabi from the late 1950s: Malek Bennabi, “Naissance d’une société” (Cairo, 1962; repr. Algiers: Dar El Bay’a, 2006), pp. 210–220. Bennabi’s comparison with the Qarmatian collapse appears in “Vocation de l’Islam” (1954; repr. 2006), p. 121.
Malek Bennabi, cited in Rached Ghannouchi, “Bennabi et la question de la renaissance” (lecture, Institut Supérieur de Théologie, Tunis, 1985 ; repr. in Bennabi Studies, n° 3, Algiers, 2001, pp. 44–45). The passage on the “tributaries of history converging” is from a 1972 conference in Algiers.
Seymour Hersh, “Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib” (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Robert Fisk, “The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East” (London: Fourth Estate, 2005). Iraqi civilian deaths 2003–2011: “Iraq Body Count database, annual report 2011” (100,000–200,000 range).
Bennabi, “ Les conditions de la renaissance ”, op. cit., pp. 120–130. The concept of “post-Almohad man” designates the individual formed in civilisational decline after 1269 (fall of the Almohad dynasty): incapable of initiative, structurally reliant on external frameworks. Bennabi traces the pathology through eight centuries.
On the deliberate destruction of Iraq’s institutional and intellectual infrastructure after 2003: Naomi Klein, “The Shock Doctrine” (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), chaps. 16–17; Ali Allawi, “The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 189–215.
On the September 2024 pager and walkie-talkie attacks: UN Human Rights Office, “Preliminary assessment”, October 2024. Lebanese casualties October 2023–November 2024: Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2025”; OCHA: “Lebanon Situation Report”, December 2024.
Robert Fisk, “Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War” (London: André Deutsch, 1990).
United Nations Human Rights Council, “Report on Yemen, A/HRC/42/CRP.1”, September 2019. ACLED estimates: 150,000–377,000 deaths attributable to the conflict 2015–2022. UNHCR: “4.5 million internally displaced”. On Houthi drone and missile operations toward Israel and US naval assets: ACLED “Yemen Conflict Monitor”, April 2024.
Malek Bennabi, “La lutte idéologique dans les pays colonisés” (Cairo, 1962 ; repr. Algiers: El-Bay’a, 2006), pp. 72–85. On the concept of “reification of man” as a tool of colonial and neo-colonial domination, see also: “Colonisabilité” (Algiers: ANEP, posthumous, 2000), pp. 33–40.
Bennabi, “Les conditions de la renaissance”, op. cit., p. 88. The formula “post-Almohad man with an idée-force”— that is, the exceptional individual who breaks with collective paralysis through conviction — appears in Bennabi’s discussion of reformist figures such as Algerian Sheikh Ben Badis.
On Iranian civilizational depth and its geopolitical implications: Ali M. Ansari, “Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Conflict in the Middle East” (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Vali Nasr, “The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future” (New York: Norton, 2006).
On the Iran–USA–Israel war initiated on 28 February 2026 (Operations Roaring Lion / Epic Fury): “CENTCOM official communications”; Jane’s Defense Weekly, March–April 2026; Middle East Eye live coverage, February–May 2026.
On the military and strategic dimensions of the Iran–USA–Israel war (Operation Roaring Lion / Epic Fury): “CENTCOM official communications”, February–April 2026; Jane’s Defense Weekly, March–April 2026; Middle East Eye live coverage, February–May 2026. For the broader civilizational framing, see footnote 30 above.
Malek Bennabi, “Le problème de la culture” (Algiers : ENAG, 1959 ; repr. 2006), pp. 103–115. On Gulf states’ spending on foreign cultural imports vs. endogenous production: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, “Cultural Times: The First Global Map of Cultural and Creative Industries”, 2015.
On the Abraham Accords (15 September 2020) and their civilizational implications: Dalia Dassa Kaye & Shira Efron, “Israel’s Dangerous New Bet”, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2021. On Gulf arms purchases: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), “Arms Transfers Database”, 2024.
Bennabi, “Vocation de l’Islam” (Algiers : ENAG, 1954 ; repr. 2006), p. 97. Bennabi specifies that the West’s “crisis of motivation” is not a crisis of resources or technique, but a “crisis of the idea of man” — the loss of a civilizational project that transcends material accumulation.
Francis Fukuyama, “More Proof That This Really Is the End of History”, The Atlantic, 17 October 2022; “BRICS Johannesburg Summit Declaration”, 23 August 2023 (expansion to six new members).
On de-dollarization and the gradual erosion of dollar dominance in bilateral trade settlements: Zoltan Pozsar, “War and Interest Rates”, Credit Suisse, 7 September 2022; “IMF World Economic Outlook”, April 2024.
BRICS Johannesburg Summit Declaration, 23 August 2023 (expansion to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, UAE and Argentina).
In this regard, read : Amir Nour, “The War on Gaza: A New Global Order in the Making?” in two parts (The War on Gaza: A New Global Order in the Making? – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization and The War on Gaza: A New Global Order in the Making? Part XIII-B – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization).
Bennabi, L’Afro-asiatisme, op. cit., pp. 34–40. Bennabi drafted this book a year before the Bandung Conference (April 1955), which he regarded as a partial confirmation of his thesis on the emergence of a “neutralist front” — a Third World bloc capable of resisting both American globalism and Soviet imperialism.
Bennabi, “Les conditions de la renaissance” (The conditions for renaissance), Editions En-Nahdha, Algiers, 1949.