International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies (IFIMES)[1], based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, regularly analyses developments in the Middle East, the Balkans, and other regions worldwide. In this analysis entitled “Strategic Mythology and Rational Critique,” General (Retd.) Corneliu Pivariu, a member of the IFIMES Advisory Board and founder and former CEO of Ingepo Consulting, examines strategic mythology as an often invisible yet decisive link between ideas, power, and political survival in the contemporary international system.
“Russia seeks continuity, China seeks recognition, the United States seeks validation — and the global order will be decided by the myth that withstands reality.” - Corneliu Pivariu
Strategic mythology represents the ensemble of beliefs, narratives, and symbols that confer meaning, legitimacy, and coherence to political and geopolitical action. Unlike religious or cultural myths, strategic myths are oriented toward the future rather than exclusively toward the past. They do not explain the world; they justify it. They do not describe reality; they guide it.
In theory, states define their strategies through objective assessments: capabilities, resources, interests, geographic position. In practice, however, this rational architecture is insufficient for mobilization. Major political projects are not sustained solely by statistical data or technical calculations; they require a psychological component: the conviction that the chosen direction is necessary, legitimate, and inevitable.
Strategic mythology is therefore the mental infrastructure of major collective decisions. Without it, institutions lose meaning; populations become cynical and apathetic; alliances fracture; national effort fragments. A state with strategies but without myth is a state with objectives devoid of soul.
Strategic mythology fulfills five core functions, regardless of historical era or political system:
The American example is illustrative: liberal democracy, the free market, and leadership of the free world are not merely public policies; they are founding myths. Likewise, in China, the myth of Reunification and National Rejuvenation is not merely the program of the Communist Party, but the foundation of its historical legitimacy.
In Russia, the myth of imperial continuity and the besieged fortress explains not only external aggression but also internal obedience.
By contrast, the European Union is experiencing a crisis of myth: it was born out of the rational logic of markets and peace, but has failed to generate a powerful narrative impulse for the twenty-first century.
In the twenty-first century, strategic mythology is no longer transmitted solely through discourse, education, and static symbols, but through an ecosystem of digital instruments that shape collective perception at accelerated speed. Algorithmic information distribution, generative AI, narrative engineering, and digital psychopolitics[2] transform myth into a continuous operational force, accessible not only to states but also to non-state actors capable of generating narratives with global impact.
Thus, major powers no longer compete solely for military or economic superiority, but for the hegemony of explanatory models: the narrative that defines the threat justifies external projection and organizes internal consensus, becoming a strategic resource comparable to traditional capabilities. In the digital age, myth is no longer merely a story, but a persistent informational architecture capable of influencing individual behavior and collective decisions without physical contact.
Through this transformation, strategic mythology acquires a new quality: it can be measured, accelerated, and automated. The distinction between mobilizing narrative and dangerous illusion becomes increasingly difficult to discern when symbolic production is massive, continuous, and self-referential. In this context, control over narrative flows becomes a form of geopolitical power in itself.
Strategic mythology becomes dangerous when it is no longer subjected to rational critique. Every myth tends to evolve into ideology, and every ideology carries an inherent self-destructive potential[3].
Modern history offers numerous examples:
Today, we observe similar risks:
Wherever myth ceases to be critically examined, it becomes dogma. And strategic dogma is more dangerous than any military threat.
A strategic myth does not survive through intensity, but through compatibility between meaning and reality. Its durability depends on its ability to adapt to crisis, to absorb defeats without identity collapse, and to maintain a coherent relationship between objectives, resources, and historical time. Myth becomes vulnerable when it refuses verification, ignores the imbalance between ambition and means, or is instrumentalized without internal corrective mechanisms.
Criteria for the strategic resilience of myth:
A durable myth does not promise victory; it promises the meaning of continued effort.
Recent history offers clear examples where strategic myth failed to adapt to reality, producing systemic ruptures. Pan-Arabism collapsed after 1967 because the narrative of unity[4] could not compensate for fragmented state interests and the absence of a shared institutional infrastructure. Post-imperial Britain endured decades of strategic indecision precisely because imperial nostalgia was not transformed into an operational identity compatible with the new global power distribution. Militarist Japan, after 1945, was forced to abandon the myth of expansion, but its subsequent success resulted from reconstructing identity around a different myth: techno-economic modernization as national destiny.
These cases demonstrate clearly that the strength of myth lies not in intensity, but in its capacity to be rewritten without losing coherence.
Rational critique is not mere fact-checking. It represents a method of intellectual protection against self-deception. In the military, intelligence, and geopolitical environment, this entails: continuous testing of operational hypotheses; confrontation with alternative scenarios; measurement of disproportions between objectives and resources; elimination of unvalidated emotional narratives; verification of data and sources; identification of cognitive blind spots[5].
Rational critique does not attack myth; it balances it. It does not destroy legitimacy; it tests it. It does not weaken the state; it strengthens it.
The world’s major military and intelligence institutions operate on the principle of dual architecture: myths motivate, analysis validates.
When critique is absent, strategy becomes mystical. When critique dominates entirely, strategy becomes sterile.
For Romania, this theme is more than academic; it is vital. The country lives in a permanent tension between a mythologized past and an insufficiently conceptualized future. Four narrative blocks define the Romanian space:
All four have served psychological functions. But none can sustain a strategic project in the twenty-first century.
Romania needs a new type of founding myth: a realistic one, role-centered, anchored in multipolarity, translated operationally into public policies, and supported by rational critique.
Such an equilibrium would allow the transition from identity to strategy, from memory to projection, from survival to construction.
For Romania, the challenge is not the absence of myths, but their inability to become operational instruments. The myths of vulnerability, latent exceptionalism, geopolitical fatalism, and postponed rebirth have provided psychological coherence during periods of discontinuity, but they cannot generate a strategic project in a multipolar world. Romania needs a narrative that does not explain why we were what we were, but why we must become what we can become.
And above all, it needs a political class capable of generating this narrative.
This rewriting does not imply denying the past, but integrating it into an active form of strategic identity: civilizational continuity as a resource, geographic position as an opportunity, institutional memberships as multipliers, and historical memory as a reservoir of national energy. An operational myth does not nourish melancholy; it translates potential capacities into strategic direction.
Strategic prediction becomes useful only when informed by a validated myth; otherwise, it remains a technical projection without mobilization. Conversely, myth unaccompanied by prediction becomes rhetorical stagnation. Vision emerges only from the encounter of the two: identity continuity that provides direction and critical analysis that tests the limits of the possible. In the absence of this balance, states oscillate between the excesses of irrational mobilization and the sterility of soulless planning.
Strategic mythology and rational critique are not opposites, but complements: one generates meaning; the other generates truth.
Powers that fall into the trap of mythological monologue collapse under the weight of their own illusions. Powers that worship analysis alone become devoid of energy, direction, and spirit.
Successful states are those that:
In a world where geopolitical competition is no longer solely military, but also narrative, informational, and psychological, this synthesis becomes the foundation of political survival.
Theoretically, for Romania, the challenge is not to choose between myth and analysis, but to reposition them within a modern logic. It is no coincidence that Romania’s major successful milestones were moments of synthesis: 1918, NATO accession, EU membership. In all these cases, a collective myth was supported by solid analytical construction.
Practically, the challenge is for the Romanian people to awaken from lethargy and decide what political class they wish to lead them — without forgetting the dictum, approximately quoted: those who do not fight for what they want deserve what they have.
This, I believe, is the model to follow.
About the author:
Corneliu Pivariu is a highly decorated two-star general of the Romanian army (Rtd). He has founded and led one of the most influential magazines on geopolitics and international relations in Eastern Europe, the bilingual journal Geostrategic Pulse, for two decades. General Pivariu is a member of IFIMES Advisory Board.
The article presents the stance of the author and does not necessarily reflect the stance of IFIMES.
Ljubljana/Brașov, 2 February 2026
[1] IFIMES - International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has a special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council ECOSOC/UN in New York since 2018, and it is the publisher of the international scientific journal "European Perspectives." Available at: https://www.europeanperspectives.org/en
[2] Digital psychopolitics: a term used to designate the set of techniques through which digital platforms shape political perceptions, affects, and behaviors by exploiting data and persuasive architectures. It does not operate through coercion, but through the orientation of preferences and the internalization of dominant narratives, thereby transforming individual freedom into a voluntary source of self-discipline. In the geopolitical field, digital psychopolitics functions as a mechanism for the production of consent and the management of polarization, articulating the attention economy with narrative competition and the instruments of information warfare.
[3] Any ideology contains a self-destructive potential because, through the temptation to transform a partial vision of the world into a totalizing truth, it comes to absolutize its own premises and to reject realities that contradict them. Over time, internal rigidification and the denial of critical feedback erode adaptive capacity, and what initially functioned as a mobilizing force becomes a structural limitation.
[4] On the official maps of many Arab states, which depicted all countries of the Arab world, the flag symbolizing the Arab world was placed in the capital of the respective state. This cartographic convention reflected not only the aspiration of each state to assume leadership of the Arab world, but also the internal divergences that have historically characterized it.
[5] Cognitive blind spots refer to those structural limits of human perception and reasoning that prevent the accurate observation, processing, or evaluation of certain information, even when data are available and accessible. They arise from mental automatisms, cultural and professional biases, over-specialization, memory routines, or the individual’s emotional–identity positioning, producing invisible zones of reality that the subject does not consciously take into account.
