*This article was published in the Trending Events periodical, issued by Future for Advanced Research & Studies - Issue 10, May 2015.

There is an attempt by eight Arab countries, using all possible means including military operations, to restore order, regime and national identity to the "the Arab World" (Arab Nation). The attempt ongoing in light of various assessments of the prospects of success where several influential Arab states fissured, whereby their territories were taken over by extremist militias, their borders collapsed and were breached by regional powers operating under ancient banners of imperial illusions and dreams that are highly "provocative" for regional states that are still holding together. The present problem is that threats now are at the heart of the Arab region and the enemy is now within.

It is evident that this attempt is critical simply because the involved countries are in fact defending their own existence without being driven by theories. This reminds us of "Strategy of Action", a book by French military strategist André Beaufre (1966), which he authored because of what he described then as a serious Byzantine debate at the French Institute of Strategic Studies. He maintains that if you want to achieve something in spite of others, then the only way for you is to act.  This is particularly so when deterrence fails to achieve its goals. That is why a detailed look into  the Saudi-led coalition's decision to launch airstrikes against the forces of the Houthis and former President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, makes one ask when and how the picture would be clear.

The picture, however, reveals that restoration of a part of "the Arab regime" is being attempted this time through inevitable operations conducted by a "coalition of the willing", whose members are directly targeted by threats. According to this approach, a framework or a context would be looked at later based on what is achieved on the ground. Here lies the difference between what has occurred and the proposals presented by a traditional school for holding an “Arab Summit” to make the decision to wage a war. Yet it is theoretical frameworks that overwhelmed all previous attempts to restore the “Arab regime”.

The widespread history of the Arab regime appears to be a chronology of attempts to search for theories rather than to back the truths, despite the fact that reading it retrospectively proves something here. Consider the literature on the circumstances of establishing the Arab League, and the fact that there was an ongoing intra-Arab Cold War during the heyday of pan-Arab nationalism where two geographically-distant Arab states were united and the central state of that union was defeated by another regional power. In spite of this defeat, an extraordinary Arab summit held in Khartoum to back the defeated state despite all the intra-Arab political differences.

The march went on to see Arab states joining hands to wage the 1973 War during which differences emerged between Arab allies before the great intra-Arab division took place in the late 1970s because of “politics”. Later on, a major Arab state occupied its Arab neighbor and yet another incomprehensible great division among Arabs took place in 1990 before a major international power occupied this Arab occupying state in 2003 and the Arabs intensified their attempts to save it despite the fact that it was designated as an evil state. Then the Arab Revolutions in several states in 2011 followed, during which the region saw these same states breaking up. Of course, the trends described hurriedly in the above two paragraphs cannot explain with certainty what is going on in the region, but they at least indicate the following:

1. The Arab World was born in a crisis and continues to exist in crisis.  Almost all the regional states agree on, are content with and even want to persist with crisis, albeit being flawed, as if being flawed was one of its features. This is because the “Arab framework” is where these states feel they are in their element, no matter how weak or liable to criticism this framework is.
2. Arab states used to diverge and converge all the time in multi-lateral alliances, coalitions of the willing and strategic axes. All of us remember expressions like “confrontation and support”, “steadfastness and confrontation front”, “with or against”, and “coalition of resistance”. However, most Arab states were sensitive towards neighboring regional parties.
3. The most serious of all coalitions were those created against a regional party, or even an Arab party that attempted to disturb the existing balance of power, to be more specific, by seizing control of territory, resources or power through the use of coercive force.

Granting all the above, the chronic problem was how to find a plausible or realistic framework that transcends the idea that Arabs are merely a cultural entity so as to put the “pan-Arab project” strategically on the map of the region. And despite the existence of the Arab League, the rest of the world often considered this region as “an ancient Middle East” or a “Near East” where some western government institutions and think tanks added “North Africa” to its name. Even in the United Nations, Arabs are treated as “a group of Arab states”. Projects to create regional bonds and concepts keep coming out, and they range from Middle Eastern and Mediterranean to the Greater Middle East and the “Orient”. Here, the following three points have to be made:

1. Arab academia have attempted to find a pan-Arab framework through emphasizing the existence of a “regional-nationalist regime” whose interactions indicate the existence of what deserves to be scientifically termed as “regime”, or the existence of a comprehensible framework of pan-Arab national security that faces specific threats and common challenges. The academia also attempted this through field studies emphasizing that Arab public opinion can understand a basis for establishing pan-Arab unity with conditions, or through a trend that emerges in the aftermath of massive collapses to explain the crises of the Arab World and its future. However, because of real problems in understanding the reality within such frameworks, some even started to talk about disengagement between “regionalism” and “nationalism” of this regime, but the problem still persists.
2. Nationalist ideology was not able to find an acceptable and "comfortable" framework to fit the Arab World. The notion of Arab nationalism has long appeared to be associated with socialist policies (in terms of economy), a single-party system (in terms of politics), and face problems in tackling the idea of a nationalist state or national interests. All the while, the largest Arab "nationalist" capitals always have had a problem with the Arab Gulf states. Eventually, or to be more specific, starting from 1900, all parties publicly acted as states and disregarded even the preservation of the "Arab form" while opposing multi-lateral axes and regional cross-border alliances started to emerge.
3. Special-mission groups formed within the framework of the Arab League with the aim to reset and re-regulate joint Arab action that has previously failed to go beyond and bypass the traditional frameworks. In these groups, modified ideas were introduced with realistic foundations for a "practical" Arab regime that is based on the following: national interests - which is the case in most regions around the world -, reliance on sectors performing specific functions, less-formal consultative frames to manage that action, contribution of the private sector to intra-Arab interactions and membership in regional states, and even reliance on "coalitions of the willing" while temporarily setting aside the idea of unity or union. The majority of these frames could not be passed or approved.

However, it is now clear that the quest for a framework as a necessary precondition to restore the Arab World has come to a halt due to pressures that have led to a rising trend in embracing "strategy of action", where the Arab region started to face serious threat to what remains of common security and vital interests, at least in the case of the states that were still cohesive and holding together. The most notable pressures came from the following:

1. For some states, Pan-Arabism started to be severely affected, even before the Arab Revolutions broke out, but the trend has escalated and has produced practical consequences. Good instances of this trend are the debates on Iraq's constitution in 2003, the clashes which led to the division of Sudan, and the discussion involving the rise of minorities within states, particularly in North Africa, the question of national identity, especially when these minorities have foreign connections and extensions. Eventually, issues related to power and the state where Arab identity is one of the challenges continues to be debated.
2. Islamists posed the question of state identity immediately after gaining control in several states in the aftermath of Arab revolutions. The Islamist movement’s plans and scope went beyond the relevant states to the region. At conferences held by nationalist movements from states suffering domestic convulsions, some of their leaders considered Political Islam as the first source of threat to the pan-Arab project, despite an inclination by some members of these movements to understand the general tendency and direction of these movements. Although this has relatively diminished, movements in Political Islam still constitute an issue.
3. The spread of ultra-extremist religious movements transforming from terrorist organizations into armed militias seizing control of territories, resources and population, that threatens pan-Arabism in the region not only by introducing infeasible ideas about an Islamic caliphate and creating a bad climate in the region, but also by causing massive cracks in the structures and security of states. That is, pan-Arabism relies on the existence of states that are capable of protecting the security of their citizens, developing their economies, ensuring that their people lead a normal life.
4. Regional parties’ intervention in Arab states' internal affairs and the creation of proxies, agents and extensions within Arab states with the aim of controlling them is made clear in Tehran’s statements about seizing control of several Arab states through the forces that currently oppose the state and its authority. Another example is Turkish President Recep Tayyib Erdogan’s conceptions about the Ottoman Empire which were about to be realized through alliances with political Islam movements. These expansionist trends in the region’s neighbors now represent the most serious sources of threats to the possibility of regaining the region.

On a final note, what happened is in fact that the group of states forming the coalition of Operation Decisive Storm - Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco - decided to take action to address the multiple sources of threats facing the security of Arab states. In doing so, their actions are based on the perception that they will not allow the Arab region to fall into the hands of extremist movements or that of regional powers. This coalition will also do its best to bolster the capabilities of crumbling countries to restore their power through realistic balances. Due to the seriousness of this issue, the use of armed forces through pragmatic frameworks has been on the table all along. And if the question of whether this coalition will ever be able to take back the Arab World will ever remain under analysis, and then the scenario of “others” controlling the region is, put simply, gone.