Tariq Saeedi
A case for reordering the emotional architecture of power — “The space allotted to forgiveness and tolerance is the space denied to resentment, anger, and bravado.”
We were not trained for this. The academies, the war colleges, the diplomatic seminars — none of them put forgiveness on the syllabus. Deterrence, yes. Coercive bargaining, certainly. The calibrated use of force, of course. But forgiveness? That was left to the clergy, the therapists, the naive.
That omission has cost us more than we have been willing to count.
Consider what forgiveness actually is — not in its sentimental caricature, but in its operational reality. It is a skill. Like marksmanship or negotiation, it can be learned, practiced, and refined. It does not require the forgiver to forget, to excuse, or to pretend that harm did not occur. It requires only a deliberate decision to stop organizing one’s actions around the injury. In a person, that decision can transform a life. In a head of state, it can transform a region.
The architecture of escalation
Wars, almost without exception, begin in emotion before they begin in strategy. Grievance hardens into resentment. Resentment demands satisfaction. Satisfaction, when denied, turns to bravado — the public performance of toughness that makes compromise politically impossible.
By the time the missiles are authorized, the decision-maker often believes, sincerely, that there was no alternative. There was. There almost always is. But the emotional architecture had foreclosed it.
Resentment is not merely a feeling. It is a governing logic. It determines what information a leader finds credible, which advisers get heard, which options remain on the table.
A government organized around historical grievance will reliably interpret ambiguous signals as threats, conciliatory gestures as weakness, and negotiated settlements as defeat. It is a cognitive prison built from the bricks of the past, and it is remarkably comfortable — because it is always furnished with genuine injustices to justify itself.
Tolerance and forgiveness do not ask you to deny those injustices. They ask you to refuse to let the injustices make your decisions for you.
Concentric rings, expanding outward
Think of these capacities as operating in concentric circles, each dependent on the one within it. At the innermost ring is the individual — the minister who can acknowledge a personal slight without nursing it into policy, the general who can set aside the humiliation of a prior defeat long enough to evaluate the present situation clearly. A leadership culture that practices forgiveness internally, that permits honest disagreement without permanent enmity, produces better decisions.
The evidence from organizational psychology is unambiguous on this point.
The next ring is institutional: the cabinet, the alliance, the coalition of the willing. Tolerance here means the willingness to absorb a partner’s irritating independence, their domestic constraints, their need to be seen as co-authors rather than subordinates. NATO survived the Cold War not because all its members agreed, but because enough of them had cultivated the tolerance to disagree without defecting.
Further out lies the ring of national relations — bilateral and multilateral, between states that carry the accumulated weight of history. It is here that the argument becomes most demanding, and most consequential.
The post-war settlements that held — Western Europe after 1945, the end of the apartheid state in South Africa, the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland — shared a common architecture. They were built by people who chose, with full awareness of the cost, to make forgiveness operational. Not to perform it for an audience, but to institutionalize it: in truth commissions, in shared governance, in the deliberate construction of new common interests that gave former enemies a stake in each other’s futures.
The settlements that did not hold — the punitive peace of Versailles being the most instructive — chose resentment instead, and duly reaped what resentment always sows.
The zero-sum of emotional space
Here is the proposition in its starkest form: the emotional and political space a government occupies is finite. — Whatever portion of it is given to the cultivation of grievance, the performance of national pride, and the narrative of victimhood is simply unavailable for the cultivation of solutions.
This is not metaphor. It manifests in budget lines and calendar hours and the questions that do and do not get asked in security councils.
A foreign policy grounded in tolerance does not mean one without red lines or without the will to defend them. It means one whose default hypothesis about the adversary is that they, too, are operating within constraints, responding to incentives, and — crucially — capable of choosing differently if the conditions change. That hypothesis is not naive. It is, as a matter of empirical record, more often correct than its cynical alternative, and it opens negotiating space that the alternative permanently closes.
What practice looks like
If forgiveness is a skill, it must be practiced — which means it must be institutionalized. This is not utopian. Some governments already do fragments of it. Back-channel diplomacy, structured dialogue, joint economic commissions between adversarial states — these are all mechanisms for practicing tolerance at the institutional level, for creating repeated interactions that gradually expand the range of what feels possible. — They work slowly. They are unglamorous. They rarely generate the kind of news coverage that a show of force does. They save lives at a ratio that no military operation can match.
What would it look like to take this seriously?
It would mean selecting and promoting diplomatic personnel with demonstrated capacity for empathy and patience, not merely strategic cunning. It would mean designing peace processes that explicitly address the psychological dimensions of conflict — not as a soft add-on, but as a structural requirement. It would mean leaders being willing, at politically costly moments, to name an adversary’s legitimate grievances out loud, because that act of acknowledgment is often the first condition for the adversary to do the same.
None of this is weakness. The willingness to be surprised — to discover that the situation has changed, that a former enemy has become a possible partner — requires more courage than the refusal to look.
To Policymakers and Decision-Makers – The decision on your desk
You, reading this, have before you some version of a decision about conflict — active or latent, domestic or international, military or political. You have been presented with options by advisers who have done their professional duty and mapped the strategic terrain.
What they may not have put on the table is this: the option of deliberately withdrawing emotional energy from the narrative of grievance and reinvesting it in the construction of a future that neither side can build alone.
That option is always available. It is rarely easy. It will be criticized, by those who mistake hardness for strength and flexibility for surrender. But the record of history is clear about which emotional posture produces durable peace and which produces merely the next war.
The skill can be learned. It can be practiced. It can, with sufficient will, be made into policy. The question is whether you will add it to the curriculum before the next crisis makes the lesson compulsory. /// nCa, 23 April 2026