Yinon argues that the world was witnessing a new epoch in history without precedent, which required both the development of a fresh perspective and an operational strategy to implement it. The rationalist and humanist foundations of Western civilization were in a state of collapse.[14] The West was disintegrating before the combined onslaught of the Soviet Union and the Third World, a phenomenon he believed was accompanied by an upsurge in anti-Semitism, all of which meant that Israel would become the last safe haven for Jews to seek refuge in.[15] The Muslim Arab world circling Israel had been arbitrarily sliced up into 19 ethnically heterogeneous states by imperial powers, France and Great Britain,[16] and was just a 'temporary house of cards put together by foreigners' - the notion that pan-Arabism was a house of cards doomed to collapse had been already argued by Fouad Ajami some years earlier[17] - composed of mutually hostile ethnic minorities and majorities, that, once disintegrated into, in Ahmad's interpretation, feudal tribal fiefdoms, would no longer challenge Israel.[18] Centrifugal factors would give rise to a dynamic of fragmentation that, while highly perilous, would offer Israel opportunities it had failed to exploit in 1967.[16]