In a article graduate "the clash of emotions: fear, humiliation, hope and the new international order", published in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2007, political scientist Dominique Moisi argued that the main differences separating countries today are no longer ideological but emotional: a culture of fear in the West, which sees its political and economic hegemony threatened; a culture of "hope" in the Asian world - mainly India and China - for whom economic prospects seem more encouraging; and a culture of humiliation in the Islamic world, which in certain places turns directly into hatred.

The success of article prompted Moisi to write a long version, "The Geopolitics of Emotion," published as a book in 2009, shortly after Obama's first election victory, in a climate of unprecedented enthusiasm. For that reason, Moisi was induced to qualify his argument about the culture of fear - which today would "unite" Europe and the United States, not without significant differences - by suggesting that a ray of hope had opened up on the American front. More recently, Manuel Castells has continued the emotional analysis of social movements in his book Networks of Indignation and Hope (2012).

However, the development of the Syrian crisis forces to qualify the hopeful readings in both cases. In particular, the way in which some Western media, such as The Economist two weeks ago, have encouraged military intervention in the Syrian case, seems to suggest that, rather than having disappeared from the horizon, ideologies are now revealing their true face: the naked play of interests, qualified only by the protagonism of emotions, whether self-interested or humanitarian, as the case may be.

Thus, for The Economist ("Fight this war, not the last one", 7.IX), or for illustrious senators such as the Republican John McCain, what is at stake in the Syrian conflict is Obama's authority, the place that the United States should play in the world, and the reaffirmation of Western values. Now, for the ordinary citizen, the speech on "Western values" raised by The Economist is becoming less and less credible and persuasive. The ordinary citizen, increasingly suspicious of this class discourse, would rather say that what is at stake, first and foremost, is not the position of the United States in the new international (dis)order, but the lives of many innocent people, millions of displaced persons, thousands of war victims.

Certainly, the most elementary moral sense tells us that, in the event that the Syrian government has employee chemical weapons on its own population, it would be, by that act, automatically delegitimized: a government that cannot maintain order in a reasonable manner, simply demonstrates that it cannot govern. For in the framework of modern political theory, the meaning of reserve the "monopoly of force" to the State constitutes a way to avoid indiscriminate violence among the population, not an excuse to justify it. In the face of such acts, the international community could not remain impassive. Nor, however, do such acts alone authorize an intervention whose effects may be even more devastating.

Indeed, no one is unaware of the fact that a conflict in this region can easily escalate to global dimensions. Much less is a warlike response justified when there is neither a defined goal , nor is there clear support from the international community for such action. For "punishing" the Assad regime (as Hollande had suggested) cannot be the goal of an international military intervention; ideally, such an intervention could only make sense if it were clearly aimed at helping the Syrian people, and defined in such terms that it would be possible to precisely delimit that one has reached such a goal. But that simply seems impossible, given the internal complexity of the Syrian "people," the characteristics of any civil war, and the cross loyalties between different factions and neighboring countries.

The only certainty is that in the new world scenario, we are confronted with the limitations of modern political categories, often too simple, to understand local political realities. We are also confronted with the limitations of a merely "rational" politics, which does not take into account the emotional dynamics of conflicts, explored by sociologist Thomas Scheff, in his book Bloody Revenge. Emotions, nationalism, and war (1994).

In this new context, whose profiles still elude us, it is necessary to make an effort to understand, to deactivate the circuits of humiliation and revenge, and to rebuild social ties from the ground up: from the most elementary interpersonal relationships to the way international conflicts are managed.     

To be sure, as the BBC's Middle East publisher Jeremy Bowen has pointed out in a September 16 article , the road is not easy. But one thing must be clear: it is not wise to try to solve a crisis by provoking another, bigger crisis. It is wise to remain calm and do what we can to bring those who have lost their minds to their senses. The strength we most need today is not that of the one who calls for combat, but that of the one who asks for patience.