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Throughout all of our lifetimes, the Middle East is a region that has been nearly synonymous with warfare, instability, and conflict.

You've heard nearly every single year of your life about some kind of conflict going on in this place, regardless of when you were born, because conflicts have been raging here without a pause for nearly the entirety of the past century.

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.

This invariably attracted the military involvements of Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the 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 geopolitically turbulent region anywhere in the 21st century world.

But why is this part of the world the way that it is? Why do you always hear about wars and conflicts taking place here, and why will you probably continue hearing about wars and conflicts taking place here for the rest of your life?

The answers to those questions are complex because the modern 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 in order to understand the root cause of the modern Middle East's many problems, you only have to 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, languages, and religions all compose the extremely diverse peoples of the Empire that at one point spanned from Hungary to Yemen.

The Ottoman Empire had regions within it, but it had no tolerance for nations and nationalism within the Empire of any kind was always ruthlessly repressed and crushed in the name of Greater Imperial stability and peace.

But the Ottoman Empire eventually entered into a long period of gradual decline by the 19th century, the rising British Empire was growing increasingly interested in the Middle East that the Ottomans had so thoroughly dominated for so long.

The Middle East, you see, geographically stood in the way between the British home islands and the Crown's most important colony, India, in order to better safeguard British ships traveling between India and the home islands, the British began gradually acquiring protectorates across the Middle East, beginning with the modern United Arab Emirates in 1820, and then gradually 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, and they intended to ensure their continuous access to it by forcing Egypt into the status of a protectorate.

The British further established protectorates over Oman and Kuwait, and then in 1914, alarmed by the increasing British meddling in the Middle East and their internal affairs, the Ottoman Empire took the decision to join the First World War on the side of Imperial Germany.

It was shortly after that when the British and the French decided that the Ottoman Empire would have to be completely destroyed by them, but it was initially unclear what exactly would take the place of the centuries-old rule of the Ottomans.

In 1916, British and 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 war's conclusion and the ancient Empire's destruction.

The agreement became simply known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement and basically went as follows: this zone would fall under direct colonial British rule, this zone would in time become an independent Arab state under British influence, this zone would fall under direct colonial French rule, this zone would in time become another independent Arab state, but under French influence, this zone would be given to the Russian Empire, while the region of Palestine in Jerusalem, with its immense religious significance, would be placed under some kind of as of yet unspecified international administration.

These initial political lines that the British and French diplomats drew across the Middle East for the future of the region in 1916 paid little attention to the complex real borders of the Middle East, various religious beliefs, languages, and ethnicities, but the lines were also not just arbitrarily drawn either, well, not based on ethnicity, language, or religion, or really even geography.

In many cases, the lines were instead based upon the older Ottoman internal divisions that they had created, which also had little to no regard for ethnic or religious boundaries and their vast ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse empire where nationalism and separatism was never tolerated.

The British zone initially encompassed the Ottomans provinces of Baghdad and Basra and parts of Deir ez-Zor and Damascus, while the French zone initially encompassed the Ottomans provinces of Mosul, Deir ez-Zor, Aleppo, Adana, Beirut, and Lebanon, while the international Palestine area was based on the province of Jerusalem itself that reported directly to the Ottoman capital.

This was the map that Sykes and Picot drafted their own new lines atop of in 1916, rather than any detailed ethnic, linguistic, or religious map of the region, resulting in massive consequences that reverberated down the decades ever since.

The initial terms of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement were then even further complicated by several other British wartime promises, guarantees, and assumptions in order to encourage an Arab revolt against their Turkish overlords.

Many British officials guaranteed that they would favor the creation of a large unified Arab state across the Arab lands following the end of the war.

At nearly the same time, though, 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.

and then finally there was the question of oil. Oil had been first discovered in the Middle East in a remote part of Iran in 1908 that the British subsequently dominated through their state-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later evolve into the British Petroleum or BP company that we know of today.

But Iran's oil at the time wasn't considered enough. World War One was proving to everyone involved how critical oil was becoming as a strategic resource to fuel the new machines of war, from battleships to airplanes.

And the United States was at that time by far the world's largest producer and supplier of oil.

America therefore provided the British Empire with most of their oil needs, but America's president at the time was also Woodrow Wilson, a man who was staunchly opposed to the concept of empires in the post-war world, including Britain's.

So believing America to be a potentially unreliable provider of oil to their empire in the future, the British government was at the time highly incentivized to acquire influence and control over as much of the Middle East nearby to Iran as possible, where they believed the potential future massive oil deposits would be later discovered and owned by them, providing Britain with a critical oil it would need to fight through whatever conflict would come to them next.

After World War One 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 Mosul 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 Sèvres upon the dying Empire in 1920, the terms of which made even the Treaty of Versailles that was pressed upon Germany seem fairly generous.

The terms of the previous seismico agreement between Vernon and France would remain intact. With the Russian Empire now gone, a huge independent state of Armenia was to be carved out of Northeastern Anatolia.

Another independent state for the Kurdish people was to be further carved out of Southeastern Anatolia.

Italy was to seize control over several of the Empire's Aegean Islands. Greece was to annex much of Eastern Thrace and a chunk around the city of Izmir on the Anatolian Mainland.

Both the area around the strategically important Turkish Straits 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.

After the Turkish forces made significant military gains on the battlefield, they forced the Allies to return back to the negotiating table again and concluded with the terms of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which replaced the terms of the previous Treaty of Sevres and were far more favorable to Turkey.

Finally, the borders of the modern Middle East as we roughly know them as today were set in ink, but 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 the century ever since today.

the Kurds are one of the largest stateless people in the world, numbering some 40 million strong, with their own separate ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identity, but divided between the borders of what became Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, where in all four countries they are minority groups and have often been subject to persecution and discrimination.

Kurdish nationalism and separatism and the desire to create an independent Kurdish state out of these areas has been a constant flashpoint of conflict in this region ever since the British also smushed together the former Ottoman provinces of Basul, Baghdad, and Basra into their mandate for Mesopotamia, which would later evolve into the state of Iraq, but the problem with that was that all three of those Ottoman provinces contained very different people with 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 Basra Province were mostly Shia Muslim Arabs.

Even further, what became Kuwait had also been a formal part of the Basra Province under the Ottoman Administration until the British showed up and transformed it into a protectorate of theirs.

After World War One, the British legally separated Kuwait from the Boss right Province and from Iraq, and they kept Kuwait as their own protectorate until the 1960s, which in the end would give the Iraqi state a decent historical claim to Kuwait that would eventually be acted upon by Saddam Hussein's invasion in 1990.

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 between Kuwait and Iran, and it further controlled neither of the headwaters for the two great rivers that it would rely so heavily upon for its civilization, the Tigris and Euphrates, both of which begin further to the north within Turkey.

The French mandates weren't 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 of Christians at the time, but it had very significant minorities of Sunni and Shia Arabs and Druze Arabs as well.

Meanwhile, the polyglot Ottoman provinces of Aleppo, Beirut, Damascus, and Deir ez-Zor were all smushed together to form what became Syria, putting large numbers of Sunni Kurds, Sunni Arabs, Alawite Arabs, and Christian Assyrians and Arabs all into the same country.

And then in the 1930s, the Turkish government began pressuring the French to seed over the Syrian province of Alexandretta owing to that province's large Turkish community.

Fearing that if they did not yield to the Turkish demands, that Turkey may join in an alliance with Nazi Germany, the French relented and pushed out Alexandretta from the Syrian mandate as the independent state of Hatay in 1938.

Then the following year in 1939, the independent Hatay state held a highly controversial referendum on annexation into Turkey that was passed, resulting in it entering Turkey as the Hatay Province.

And ever since then, the government of what would later become Syria has continually claimed the Hatay province as rightfully Syrian territory under Turkish occupation.

And even further, the headwaters for the Euphrates River that runs all across Syria begins up in Turkey as well, meaning the Turkish built dams on the Euphrates and the Tigris present direct challenges to both Syria's and Iraq's supplies of water, leading to further sources of potential conflict between Iraq and Syria on one side and Turkey on the other.

Lebanon became independent from the French mandate in 1943 and Syria in 1946, and Syria immediately emerged with territorial disputes with Turkey over Hatay and territorial claims to the whole of Lebanon, based on the French decision to artificially separate it based on religious demographics, while being itself a deeply internally fragmented state along sectarian and ethnic lines, just like Iraq and also Lebanon.

Then all of these political divisions created by the Allies' map making between 1916 and 1923 were even further exacerbated by the future discoveries of oil and gas across all of these brand new countries.

Oil was only first discovered in Iraq in 1927, years after the borders had already been drawn and settled, marking the first major discovery of oil in the Arab world.

Future initial discoveries of oil were made in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia a decade later in 1938, and then much later in Syria, in the United Arab Emirates in 1956 and 1958 respectively, but the locations of where the oil and gas reserves were to be discovered across all of these new countries in nearly every single case would ensure generations of nearly continuous conflict over them.

Within Iraq, oil was discovered across the former Ottoman provinces of Basra and Mosul, home to the Shia Arab and Sunni Kurdish communities, but hardly any oil at all would be discovered in the central Baghdad province that was primarily home to the Sunni Arabs.

Even further, an overwhelming 90% of all of Iran's oil reserves would simply be discovered within the Iranian province of Khuzestan, which encompasses an exposed flat plane on the western side of the Zagros Mountains that otherwise largely forms the rest of Iran's westernmost borders and even further Khuzestan was primarily inhabited by Shia Arabs rather than the Shia Persians who made up the majority of the rest of the country.

Kuwait, small in size, also had enormous oil reserves.

Nearly equal to the entirety of Iraq's oil reserves, and of course, Iraq contained the historical claim to Kuwait, a card that could be theoretically deployed at any time to double the Iraqi state's oil resources.

In Saudi Arabia, home to the largest share of the Persian Gulf's oil, it would be almost entirely discovered in just a small area of the eastern side of the country near to the waters of the gulf itself, within lands that were home to Saudi Arabia's Shia Muslim minority, while hardly any at all would be discovered in the Sunni majority areas.

And then in Syria, the oil was found almost entirely in the east, in the northeast of the country, in the lands of the Sunni Kurds and the Sunni Arabs, while hardly any at all was discovered in the Alawite Shia Arab lands of the West.

All in all, the oil found across the Middle East, scattered across the complicated mosaic of competing ethnic, religious, and political identities, would prove to make up nearly half of the entire world's known supply of oil, meaning that outside powers like the British, the Soviets, and eventually the Americans were all going to be permanently interested in influencing the region's events atop all of the dozens of local ethnic, religious, and political interests and actors seeking to influence events as well.

And then the British did something else in the Middle East as well, they created a Jewish state.

of their other mandate on the other side of the Middle East in Palestine in the wake of the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany and Europe, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees had been fleeing for their lives to the British mandate for Palestine, encouraged by the British government's own promises for a Jewish homeland made in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and in the process, changing the mandate's demographics, which had previously been almost entirely populated by Arabs.

As Britain prepared to release the Mandate for Palestine as an independent state following the end of World War II, the newly created United Nations released a plan for the partition of mandatory Palestine in 1947 between a newly created Jewish state and a Palestinian Arab state, and an international administration placed in control over the holy city of Jerusalem.

The plan was accepted by most of the Jewish groups, but nearly universally rejected by most of the Arab groups on the basis that the proposal was too unfair and tilted too much towards the Jewish side, despite the Palestinian Arab population at the time in mandatory Palestine being more than twice as many as the Jewish population was, the 1947 UN partition plan called for giving the Jewish state 62% of the mandate's land, while only 38% of the land would be allocated to the Arab state.

Fighting between the Arabs and the Jews in mandatory Palestine escalated, and as the British withdrew in 1948, the state of Israel declared its independence, thus starting the continuous Arab-Israeli conflict that has remained ever since.

Not one Arab country in the world would recognize Israel's existence as legitimate at first, and a coalition of mostly recently created or independent Arab states went to war with Israel in 1948.

in support of the Palestinian Arab cause, Israel ended up emerging victorious in that war and ended it in control over all the lands that the UN had assigned to the Jewish state in the 1947 partition plan, in addition to 60% of the UN proposed Arab state's land and the Western half of Jerusalem, while Jordan occupied and then annexed the Palestinian-assigned West Bank and international East Jerusalem, while Egypt occupied the Palestinian-assigned Gaza Strip and transformed it into a protectorate.

No independent Palestinian Arab state would end up emerging, and an estimated 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were exiled or became refugees, displaced from their homes, with many of them fleeing into neighboring Lebanon in an event that they referred to as the Nakba, or the catastrophe, which would gradually alter that country's demographics to being more Muslim-dominated, leading to future internal demographic conflict in that country, like the long Lebanese Civil War that would last between 1975 and 1990.

At the same time, hundreds of thousands of additional Jews would migrate towards Israel from the shattered communities left behind by the Nazis in Europe, further tilting Israel's demographics more in favor of Jews.

The defeat of the Arabs against Israel in 1948 gave way to the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, a secular Arab nationalist who dreamed of unifying all of the Arab lands in the Middle East beneath a single Arab superstate that would utilize most of the Middle East's oil as their super weapon, a super weapon that he hoped would lead to the defeat of Israel and its primary backer, the United States.

Nassar came to power in Egypt in 1954, and he would only be the first of many post-World War II Middle Eastern leaders who had set about to change the map of the region sent into place by Sykes and Pico, he railed against not only Israel and the United States, but against the era monarchies like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as well, whom he saw as corrupted and who were actively developing closer relations to the United States over their vast oil resources.

In 1956, Nassar took the fateful decision of nationalizing the Suez Canal and destroying the ownership structure over it that had been dominated by the foreign British and French shareholders for nearly a century.

The British, French, and Israelis all retaliated with war in an invasion of Egypt to try and regain colonial control over the canal, but this time both the United States and the Soviet Union alike rebuked the colonial invaders, and Egypt emerged victorious, catapulting Nassar and his flavor of secular Arab nationalism to the status of much of the Arab world's new champion.

In 1958, a coup by military officers in Syria pledging personal loyalty to Nassar took over the country and joined it with Egypt in the short-lived United Arab Republic, which only fell apart just three years later in 1961, when another group of Syrian officers launched another coup and restored Syria again as an independent nation.

Civil War in North Yemen exploded the following year in '62 between the monarchist government there and Nassar-style Arab nationalist Republican rebels, leading to the modern Middle East's first proxy conflict.

The monarchist Middle Eastern states like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and Imperial Iran all balked at the prospect of a revolution in Yemen toppling the monarchy there and then spreading to their own monarchies, and so they all intervened militarily on behalf of the Yemeni monarchist regime, while Nassar, wanting to spread the cause of Arab nationalism and unity, massively supported the Nationalist Rebels by sending tens of thousands of Egyptian troops and copious volumes of weapons.

The war ended up turning into Egypt's version of the Vietnam War, consuming enormous amounts of manpower and resources and developing into a stalemate, greatly weakening the Egyptian armed forces in the process.

By 1967, Nassar was again threatening war with Israel over on another front, but encouraged by Egyptian defeats in Yemen, the Israelis decided to strike first.

Surprise Israeli strikes against Egyptian forces caught them completely off guard, leading to rapid Israeli military gains against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in what would become known as the Six-Day War.

Israel ended the war by occupying the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip in the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, placing Israeli forces on the entire Eastern Bank of the Suez Canal itself, which caused Egypt to shut the canal down to all maritime traffic for the next eight years.

Jewish Israeli settlers would then begin to move in and colonize all of the recently occupied territories, leading to further conflicts between the Israeli State and the Arab and Islamic worlds.

And then, crushed and humiliated by the defeat, Nassar was forced to withdraw from the war in Yemen and died shortly afterwards from a heart attack at just 52 years old in 1970.

It was also around that time that the British Empire decided that they could no longer financially maintain their commitments to security in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, and critically, all of the oil there.

In 1970, the British protectorates of Bahrain, Qatar, in the modern United Arab Emirates and the Gulf were all finally granted their independence, and without the British there any longer, the United States began taking an increased interest in the region, instead wishing to maintain the status quo and regional stability in the Gulf in order to safeguard the world's supply of oil.

In contrast to the frequent wars that were being fought over on the other side of the Middle East, the United States began encouraging their ally at the time, Imperial Iran, to step forward as the new guarantor of the region's security and to block the expansion of the Soviets from entering into the Gulf.

Massive amounts of American weapon sales were made to arm Imperial Iran for this exact purpose, a policy that would quickly backfire very badly.

But on the other side of the Middle East, Nassar's Arab nationalist successor in Egypt, Anwar Sadat, and the recently risen to power Arab nationalists in Syria, Hafez al-Assad, decided to join forces again and attack Israel in order to reclaim the occupied Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula.

Israel once again emerged victorious in that war, but fearful that they would not always be so capable of winning surrounded by enemies, the 1973 Yom Kippur War paved the way for peace between Egypt and Israel six years later in 1979, following the Camp David Accords negotiated by the Carter Administration in the United States, in which Israel agreed to dismantle all of their settlements in the Sinai Peninsula and return it back to Egypt in exchange for Egypt recognizing the legitimacy of Israel's statehood, which made Egypt the first country in the entire Arab world to ever do so.

After more than 30 years of Israel's existence, peace between Israel and Egypt had at last been achieved, but the peace was denounced by every other Arab state in the world, including most of all by Syria, which by that time was under the nearly totalitarian regime of Hafez al-Assad and his brand of extremely militant secular Arab nationalism, or Ba'athism.

Egypt was expelled from the Arab League for a decade over the peace agreement. Sadat himself was assassinated by Egyptian Islamist militants who believed that he was a traitor, and Syria began championing itself as the new primary backer of the Palestinian Arab cause as more and more Palestinian refugees fled into neighboring Lebanon.

That country's extremely diverse demographics began tilting ever more in favor of the Muslims, to the point where the Christians eventually became less than half of the overall population.

The Lebanese Christians had generally dominated the government and generally sided with Israel in the Western world, while the Lebanese Sunni and Shia Muslims generally sided with the Arab and Muslim world instead, eventually culminating in the explosion of a complex and multi-sided Civil War beginning in 1975 that would last for 15 years until 1990.

Syria would invade Lebanon in 1976 and then spent years attempting to integrate and annex the country directly into Syria, based on the separation that the French had done with their map making after Sykes-Picot.

Israel would also invade Lebanon in their attempts to fight against Palestinian forces there and secure the safety of their northern border, leading to direct Israeli and Syrian fighting in the country as well.

Why the Middle East’s Borders Guarantee Forever Wars

Why the Middle East’s Borders Guarantee Forever Wars

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