It's an existential fight.
Mr Kenyatta described the issue as "an existential fight for us" and welcomed a united stance on security.
Mazen's dilemma reflects the latest upheaval in Iraq, as its existential fight against Isis approaches a second year.
Nor could he share a platform with the class enemy, the leader of the Tory party, even in an existential fight for Britain's place in the world.
The campaign then was for legal, social and economic equality, to be sure, but the existential fight was never for the freedom to be as self-interested and testosterone-maddened as the average man.
Instead, the effort to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda has supplanted the Cold War as the existential fight propelling a new generation since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 (although its seeds were sown much earlier).
Whereas many Americans have in recent years seen the "war on terror" as an existential fight that overshadows all else, the Europeans and Chinese talk about terrorism as just one item in their leaders' in-trays.
In this crisis, Bashar has managed to convince the wider Alawite community that this is an existential fight for them, too; that if his regime falls, they will be cut to pieces by a vengeful Sunni majority.
And that's who Sharon is, who he was as a young man, and I think that right now, with him at the helm, it's not a fight, it's an existential fight.
It reflects every major fault line that has defined the Middle East for the past half-century and has drawn in local, regional and global actors, many of whom see this as an existential fight that they cannot afford to lose.
Ordinary people can imagine the erosion of their social surroundings in everyday terms of stories and images that are fed to them in an exaggerated form, of an existential fight between us and them over who owns even the minutiae of life: where we live, the languages we speak and, in the case of the halal certification "debate", what we eat.
