APRIL 25 IN THE AGE OF PERMANENT WAR: POWER, FAITH AND THE FRACTURE OF THE GLOBAL ORDER
Cristina Di Silvio
The international system is no longer experiencing episodic crisis, but a structural condition of permanent instability in which war, energy, security, and political legitimacy overlap as simultaneous dimensions of the same global space.
In the Middle East, conflict has taken on a continuous form, marked by strategic attrition and an increasing integration between military capability, territorial control, and pressure on civilian infrastructure. War no longer appears as a discrete event, but as a system that absorbs economy, society, and time.
In Gaza, where United Nations estimates indicate over 1.7 million displaced people and widespread damage to essential civilian infrastructure, the prospect of restoring structured political governance appears suspended. When elections are mentioned, they represent not an ongoing process but a symbolic tension toward the reconstruction of an absent order. Democracy, in this context, becomes an ethical horizon rather than an operative institution.
In southern Lebanon, UNIFIL operates with approximately 10,000 peacekeepers along an unstable line of contact, where international interposition is increasingly confronted with intermittent deterrence and progressive limitations on stabilization capacity.
The Strait of Hormuz remains one of the key nodes of the global energy order: around 20% of global oil and significant volumes of liquefied natural gas pass through this corridor. Geopolitically, it is not merely a maritime route, but an instrument of global energy power, where geographic vulnerability translates directly into systemic instability.
In Europe, the debate on security, energy, and defence reflects the ongoing transition of the post-1945 order. At the summit in Cyprus, there is a growing awareness that stability is no longer guaranteed by existing institutional architecture, but by continuous adaptation to great-power competition.
Strategic divergences among European actors reflect this transition. Emmanuel Macron frames the moment as a need for European strategic sovereignty. Donald Tusk reaffirms the centrality of NATO as the core of collective defence. Giorgia Meloni emphasizes energy security as a foundational pillar of political and economic stability.
NATO, founded on Article 5 and the principle of collective deterrence, is now operating in a phase where cohesion is no longer automatic but subject to internal political tensions and increasing strategic differentiation. Security is becoming a negotiated function rather than a fixed architecture.
Global military expenditure exceeds 2.2 trillion dollars annually, driven by nuclear modernization, cyber capabilities, and multi-domain systems. Contemporary warfare is increasingly an integrated system involving energy, information, infrastructure, and industrial production.
On the moral and philosophical level, the crisis of the present reactivates an ancient question regarding the limits of violence and the possibility of a shared ethical order. The reflection of Pope Francis has consistently emphasized the centrality of the human person in conflict, through the assertion that war is a “defeat for humanity.” This position is embedded in a broader Western ethical tradition, from Augustine of Hippo to Thomas Aquinas and the doctrine of “just war,” extending into modern philosophical thought.
In Kantian philosophy, peace is not a natural condition but a rational and juridical construction among states. In Hannah Arendt’s analysis, the relationship between violence and power reveals how the destruction of political space coincides with the erosion of collective responsibility, transforming war into a radical form of depoliticization.
The historical reference remains the Second World War, which caused over 60 million deaths and led to the construction of the post-war international order based on the moral and legal principle of “never again.”
The Liberation Day represents the historical rupture from that system of total war and the foundation of the contemporary European democratic order, built on the rejection of systemic violence and authoritarianism.
Today, however, that paradigm is under increasing strain: peace no longer appears as a consolidated condition, but as an unstable equilibrium within a permanently competitive global system.
April 25 thus becomes both a historical and conceptual threshold: a memory of liberation from total war and, at the same time, an interrogation of the present, in which order, security, and political legitimacy are no longer given but continuously renegotiated.
The distance between the moral architecture of the post-war world and the contemporary dynamics of power defines not only a geopolitical fracture, but a deeper and quieter one: the fracture between lived history and the shared consciousness of its meaning.
