Editorial – New conflictual order

«All the art of war is based on deception” , used to say Sun Tzu in the 6th century BC. This teaching is still relevant today, given the enormous power of social media, artificial intelligence, deep fakes, and more. The battles currently being fought in Iran, in the Gulf, and in the Middle East in general are not just military confrontations. They are also information wars. They are battles of narratives and psychological confrontations.
In this type of conflict, where geopolitics, ideologies, religious and ethnic dogmas intermingle, the first battle is that of the narrative. Each of the belligerents attempts to impose its own narrative, to mobilize public opinion (or to exploit it, sometimes against the national interests of their own countries, in the name of transnational ideologies)…
It is not a question here of reducing the ongoing conflict to a simple communications war.. The challenge for the various belligerents is to calibrate their attacks and responses so that deterrence is effective without leading to total conflagration and fulfilling the prophecies of a third world war. Especially since in this type of complex conflict, escalation is rarely intentional; it is often accidental.
It should not be forgotten that major powers, such as China, have no interest in seeing this conflict drag on, with devastating repercussions on energy supplies and the risk and the risk of running out of fuel for the global economy.
By combining armed conflict with information warfare, emotional volatility is exacerbating that of the energy markets. Beyond the military prism, the profound shocks will also be economic. In this new conflictual order, energy resilience and information sovereignty are strategic imperatives, enabling us to weather the storm without damage, rather than suffering it passively.