By: Abdullah Al-Omira

The world’s crisis today is not only in the abundance of wars.

There is a deeper crisis:

A crisis of trust.

A recent international survey that included more than 35,000 people in 34 countries showed that around 70% believe the world has become worse over the past year, while comfort with the leadership of major powers has declined, despite continued support for international cooperation.

The paradox is striking.

People have not lost their desire for order; but they have become less reassured by those who manage it.

They want cooperation, but they doubt intentions.

They want alliances, but they fear changing interests.

They want agreements, but the question is no longer only: what was written in them?

Rather:

Who will respect them when the cost of respecting them becomes high?

Here, we are no longer facing only a political problem.

We are facing a test of three things together:

Reality, trust, and the future.

Reality says that interests change, alliances are rearranged, and wars expose the limits of power.

Analysis says that crises do not only test states’ ability to fight; they also test their ability to honor a covenant when honoring it becomes costly.

As for the future, it asks:

Will tomorrow’s relationships be built on what was said yesterday, or on what today’s tests have revealed?

Those facts came back to me after I received a call from a friend.

He was not asking about a particular war, nor about a particular country.

He was asking about the whole world.

He said:

Do they never get tired of fighting?

Do they know nothing but destruction?

Is there no bright space in their minds for building?

Then he laughed and asked rhetorically:

Where did the gangs we used to hear about in Italy, Europe, and America go? Did they disappear, or did they move to our region?

I laughed.

The question was rhetorical; it was not waiting for an answer from me as much as it described a feeling that some methods we once thought belonged exclusively to the world of crime have become familiar in the management of relationships:

A promise is made until it is no longer needed.

An ally is used until interests change.

An agreement is respected as long as it remains convenient.

And a friend’s value is measured by how useful he is.

The problem is not that interests govern relationships; they always have.

The problem is when interest becomes a justification for discarding covenant, loyalty, and respect.

More strangely, this is sometimes presented as intelligence; he deceives you and calls it cunning, breaks his promise and calls it flexibility, uses you and then calls it management of interests.

And he thinks he has won.

Yet someone who wins a deal and loses trust may have paid a greater price than he gained.

Short-sightedness is not being unable to see what lies ahead of you; it is being deceived by what you think is a near-term gain, believing that the method that gets you what you want justifies underestimating the other side, only to discover too late that what you gained for a moment cost you more than you had calculated.

Perhaps this is why some have reduced the world to one question:

What do I gain now?

And forgotten the more important question:

What will remain for me tomorrow?

Between the two questions lies the distance separating someone who builds a relationship from someone who consumes it, and someone who creates an ally from someone who merely rents a position.

But these harsh days have one virtue:

They reveal.

They reveal who keeps his covenant when loyalty becomes costly, who remains when interests recede, who was close because he believed in the relationship, and who was close only because the road happened to pass through you.

More importantly, crises reveal the strength of trust itself; was it firmly rooted, or merely suspended from circumstance and interest?

Crises do not create the loyal or the betrayer.

They only remove the distance that had been hiding them.

That is why some losses may be delayed gains.

You lose a relationship, and gain the truth.

A mask falls, and you see the face.

Many masks have decomposed beneath the soil of the years, while others needed only one crisis to fall; meanwhile, faces that never wore masks in the first place remain, their heads held high as before.

An alliance cracks, and you learn what you should not build the next alliance upon.

Here, the issue leaves politics and enters all of our lives.

What happens between states is not far removed from what happens between people; at work, in friendship, in love, and in every relationship that promises to endure.

A covenant is not tested when loyalty is easy; it is tested when breaking it becomes useful.

This is why the world does not need more words about friendship, partnership, and alliance.

It has enough of them.

What it needs is simpler and harder:

For the word to mean what it says.

To promise, and fulfill.

To disagree, without turning into an enemy.

And for interest to end, without ethics ending with it.

This may sound idealistic in an extremely harsh age, but in reality it is a practical rule of life; markets, states, relationships, and even peace do not endure without trust.

Peace itself, in its simplest meaning, is a promise believed by two sides.

As for a world in which no one believes anyone else, it would not need a war to fall apart.

It would be enough for it to lose the covenant.

That is why there is not much to fear in the exposure of what is bad.

The fear is that it remains hidden.

After forty years of concealment, relationships rise to the surface at times and sink at others, wrapped in suspicion and dissimulation; then a few months came and revealed what decades had not.

The crop ripened, then became dry stubble scattered by the winds. And parasites appeared, trying to grow in its place, drawing from the stagnant water left in the pool of tragic years; rushing toward the same end.

But what is built on illusion may last for a long time, but it does not endure.

What is sustained by interest alone falls when the interest changes.

What remains after the storm is what deserves to be built upon.

Perhaps this is the justice of crises, despite their harshness:

They reveal people before we build upon them, and reveal allies before we entrust them with our backs.

Then the question is no longer:

Who betrayed?

Who gained?

Who lost?

Rather, the question that will determine tomorrow’s relationships:

Who remained worthy of trust after the test ended?

That is the one with whom we should build tomorrow.

And in Saudi memory, strength was never separate from ethics, nor was decisiveness the opposite of loyalty.

Among the sayings associated with King Abdulaziz - may God have mercy on him - is:

“Strength.. strength; may God not bless weakness.”

Another of his well-known sayings is:

“Decisiveness is the father of determination, determination the father of resolve, resolve the father of victories; abandonment is the father of separation, and separation the father of regrets.”

These words were not merely a description of courage in decision-making; rather, they expressed a philosophy that sees self-confidence, decisiveness, loyalty to one’s covenant, and understanding others as values that do not contradict one another, but complete one another.

True strength does not lie in exploiting the weakness of others, nor in breaking a covenant when interests change.

Strength is knowing when to be decisive, when to be loyal, when to stand firm, and when to give your word and then remain true to it.

Perhaps that is why some sayings outlive those who spoke them; because they do not merely describe a time that has passed, but establish a standard for every age that comes after.

In a world where trust is shaken, the covenant remains the true test of strength.