New Middle East, Throughout my lifetime, the Middle East has been nearly synonymous with warfare, instability, and conflict. We have heard nearly every year of life about some conflict in this place. Just since the turn of the 21st century alone, there have been major wars fought across the territories of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Yemen that reversibly attracted the military involvements of Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and powers from even beyond the Middle East like the united states, United Kingdom, France, and Russia.
These 21st-century conflicts in the Middle East alone have claimed the lives of millions of people and forced millions more into exile and refugee status while costing trillions of dollars making the Middle East arguably the most geopolitical turbulent region anywhere in the 21st-century world.
Here is question arises why in this part of the world are always wars and conflicts taking place here?
New Middle East
The Middle East is the most geopolitically complicated chessboard in the world to really understand with dozens of different actors and competing interests all variously working against each other at some times and then working together at others but to understand the root cause of the modern Middle East`s many problems.
If we rewind the clock a little more than a hundred years ago to learn how the Middle East borders we know today came into being and why they have guaranteed more than a century`s worth of forever wars and misery for the entire world ever since for many centuries the Turkish Ottoman Empire dominated practically the entirety of the Middle East and enforced its own rule of law across the land dozens of ethnicities language and religions all compose the extremely diverse people of the Empire.
Nationalism within the Empire was always ruthlessly repressed and crushed in the name of greater imperial stability and peace. Still, the Ottoman Empire eventually entered a long period of gradual decline by the 19th century. The rising British Empire was increasingly interested in the Middle East, which the Ottomans had thoroughly dominated for so long. You see, the Middle East geographically stood in the way between the British home islands and the crown`s most important colony, India, to safeguard better British ships traveling between India and the home islands.
New Middle East, The British began gradually acquiring protectorates across the Middle East, beginning with the modern United Arab Emirates in 1820 and then expanding from there to include southern Yemen, Bahrain, and eventually Egypt itself in 1888, nearly 20 years after the Suez Canal had first been completed, which granted the British the quickest possible journey time between the home islands in India by way across the Mediterranean and the red sea the Suez canal owned by British and French shareholders despite running through Egypt was, therefore, one of Britain`s most Geopolitically valuable assets. They intended to ensure their continuous access to it.
New Middle East, the British further established protectors over Oman and Kuwait, and then in 1914, alarmed by the increasing British middling in the new Middle East and their internal affairs, the Ottoman Empire decided to join the First World War on the side of imperial Germany, and it was shortly after that when the British and the French decided that the Ottoman empire would have to be destroyed by them.
Seismico agreement.
It initially needed to be clarified what exactly would replace the centuries-old rule of the Ottomans. In 1916, British-French diplomats named Mark Sykes and Francois George Pico negotiated a secret treaty regarding how their respective governments would divide and partition the lands of the Ottoman Empire between themselves after the wars conclusion and the ancient Empires destruction and the agreement was known as a seismic agreement.
Balfour Declaration
In 1917, Britain also proclaimed the Balfour Declaration, which promised that the British government would favor the creation of a national home for the Jewish people in the land of Palestine. Finally, there was the question of because the oil was first discovered in the Middle East and a remote part of Iran in 1908 that the British subsequently dominated through their state-owned Anglo-Persian oil company.
After World War 1 concluded the victorious allies met at Versailles in 1919 to set the terms the peace and the borders of the Middle East were shifted once again the Ottoman province of Missouri was transferred from the French Zone of Influence over to the British Zone of Influence and as the Ottoman Empire was actively collapsing the Allies pressed the infamous terms of the treaty of severs upon the dying to Empire in 1920.
New Middle East, The strategically important Turkish strait was to fall under an international regime outside of Turkey’s remaining Jurisdiction. The Turkish state that was to be left over was doomed to become nothing more than an insignificant rump state, and thus, outraged by the treaty’s terms, the emerging Turkish government almost immediately rebelled and continued fighting against the Allies for the next two years the Turkish forces made significant military gains on the battlefield, they forced the Allies to return to the negotiating table again and concluded with the terms of 1923 treaty of Lausanne which replaced the terms of the previous treaty of severe and were far more favorable to Turkey.
New Middle East, The terms of Lausanne in 1923 still left many questions and problems unresolved there would be no independent state created for the Kurdish people after all for example a problem that has vexed the region for a century ever since. Today the Kurds are one of the largest stateless people in the world.
Kurdish nationalism and separatism and the desire to create an independent Kurdish state out of these areas have been a constant flash point of conflict in this region ever since.
New Middle East, the British also Smashed together the former Ottoman provinces of Basul Baghdad, and Basra into their mandate for Mesopotamia which later evolved into the state of Iraq but the problem with that was that all three of those Ottoman provinces contained very different people, and very different interests identities and beliefs the people of masul were mostly ethnically Kurdish the people of the Baghdad province were primarily Sunni Muslim Arabs while the people of the Barsa province were mostly Shia Muslim Arabs.
New Middle East, Iraq became independent from the British mandate in 1932 and emerged as a deeply internally fragmented state with a historical claim on Kuwait, it was also almost completely landlocked with only a tiny sliver of a coastline on the Persian Gulf wedged in Kuwait and Iran and if further control neither of the headwater for the two great rivers that it would rely so heavily upon for its civilization.
The Tigris and Euphrates begin further to the north within Turkey. In the north of Turkey, the French mandates were not created much better either the Lebanon province of the Ottoman empire was deliberately separated as an independent state by the French based on that province`s slight religious majority at the time but it had very significant minorities of Sunni and Shia Arabs. Meanwhile, the polyglot Ottoman Provinces of Aleppo, Beirut, Damascus, and Darazor were all smashed together to form what became Syria.
New Middle East, A stone`s throw away from the massive oil fields in Saudi Arabia it appeared quite obvious that Saddam was planning on using the Iraqis to invade Saudi Arabia next and conquer their oil fields as well which would have further boosted his control over the world`s supply of oil to nearly 45 percent of it which have made Saddam Hussein the master of global oil and given him the fuel he needed to continue with this ultimate ambition of unifying the Arab world beneath his authority and finally overturning the map drawn up by skyes and Pico.
New Middle East, The United States gathered a massive military coalition of 32 Nations and the military intervened against him during the Gulf War of 1990-1991 which ejected the Iraqi military from Kuwait and once again liberated the nation. Afterward, the United States began fully stepping into the role as the new primary security guarantor of the Persian Gulf and its oil supplies.
