The Making of the Modern Middle East

TL;DR

The modern Middle East's endless conflicts stem directly from the arbitrary colonial borders drawn by Britain and France after World War I, ignoring ethnic, religious, and linguistic realities.

Key Points

• 1.The Ottoman Empire suppressed all nationalism across its vast multi-ethnic territory. Spanning Hungary to Yemen, it enforced unity through repression, leaving no established national identities when it collapsed — creating a power vacuum the colonial powers would fill arbitrarily.
• 2.The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement secretly divided the Middle East between Britain and France. British diplomat Mark Sykes and French diplomat François Georges-Picot drew lines based on old Ottoman administrative provinces, not ethnic, religious, or linguistic boundaries, guaranteeing future instability.
• 3.Britain made three contradictory wartime promises that directly caused future conflicts. They promised Arabs a unified state, promised Jews a homeland in Palestine via the 1917 Balfour Declaration, and sought to control oil regions — all mutually exclusive commitments.
• 4.The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres was replaced by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne after Turkish military resistance. The harsher Sèvres terms — which would have created independent Kurdish and Armenian states — were abandoned, leaving the Kurds stateless, a problem persisting to this day with 40 million Kurds divided across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
• 5.Britain created Iraq by merging three incompatible Ottoman provinces. Mosul (Kurdish), Baghdad (Sunni Arab), and Basra (Shia Arab) were forced into one state, while Kuwait was artificially separated from Basra, giving Iraq a historical claim Saddam Hussein later used to justify his 1990 invasion.
• 6.France's mandate borders were equally dysfunctional, creating Lebanon and Syria with deep internal contradictions. Lebanon was separated based on a Christian majority that soon became a minority; Syria merged Sunni Kurds, Sunni Arabs, Alawite Shia, and Christian Assyrians. France also ceded the Hatay province to Turkey in 1939, a territorial dispute Syria maintains to this day.
• 7.Oil discoveries across the region almost always fell in areas of religious or ethnic minorities, guaranteeing conflict. Iraq's oil lay in Kurdish and Shia areas, not the Sunni Baghdad center; Saudi Arabia's oil was in Shia-majority eastern regions; Syria's oil was in Kurdish northeast — creating structural grievances within every state.
• 8.The 1948 Arab-Israeli War established Israel but left 700,000 Palestinian Arabs as refugees. The UN's 1947 partition plan gave Jews 62% of the land despite Arabs outnumbering Jews two-to-one; Israel then seized an additional 60% of the proposed Arab state, with Jordan annexing the West Bank and Egypt taking Gaza — no Palestinian state emerged.
• 9.Gamal Abdel Nasser's secular Arab nationalism became the dominant postwar ideology challenging Sykes-Picot. Coming to power in Egypt in 1954, he nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 — repelling a British-French-Israeli invasion with US and Soviet backing — and briefly merged Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic in 1958–1961.
• 10.Israel's decisive Six-Day War victory in 1967 fundamentally reshaped the region's territorial map. Israel occupied the Golan Heights (Syria), West Bank and East Jerusalem (Jordan), and Sinai Peninsula and Gaza (Egypt), later annexing East Jerusalem in 1980 and the Golan Heights in 1981, creating disputes that persist today.
• 11.The 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution completely transformed Middle Eastern geopolitics overnight. The Ayatollah Khomeini replaced the US-backed Shah, creating a Shia theocracy that sought to export revolution to Shia populations in Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Yemen — making Iran the primary enemy of Israel, the Arab monarchies, and the United States simultaneously.
• 12.The Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) was driven by Saddam's fear of Shia revolution spreading to Iraq's Shia majority. Saddam, a Sunni Arab, invaded Iran to seize the oil-rich Arab-majority Khuzestan province; Saudi Arabia and Kuwait lent him tens of billions of dollars to keep him as a buffer — the origin of the Saudi-Iranian cold war — but the war ended in stalemate with 500,000 dead.
• 13.Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and near-approach to Saudi Arabia triggered direct American military intervention. Controlling Kuwait doubled Iraq's oil reserves to nearly 20% of the world total; had he taken Saudi fields, he would have controlled 45% of global oil. The US-led 32-nation coalition of the 1990–91 Gulf War expelled him and restored the Sykes-Picot map.
• 14.The US-Iran relationship deteriorated through a series of compounding betrayals spanning decades. Britain and the CIA overthrew Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh in 1953 to protect oil profits; the Shah's authoritarian rule with Western backing fueled revolution; the 1979 hostage crisis of 52 Americans and the failed Operation Eagle Claw rescue led to total diplomatic severance that persists today.
• 15.Sunni Islamist movements like al-Qaeda and ISIS emerged as a third challenge to the Sykes-Picot order. Rejecting both secular Arab nationalism and Shia Islamism, ISIS briefly erased the Iraq-Syria border in 2014–2015 — the very line drawn in 1916 — declaring a caliphate, representing the latest in a century-long series of attempts to overturn the colonial map.