Since the early 1920’s, the Middle East has been a region that has been synonymous with warfare, instability, and conflict. For most, the Middle East has been a perennial theater of war throughout their lifetime, regardless of the year they were born.
In the 21st century alone, there has been several wars fought across the territories of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Yemen that have drawn in regional players like Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey, as well as global powers such as Russia and the United States.
These conflicts 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. Why is this part of the world the way it is? Why are there constant wars and conflicts taking place here and will it continue for many more decades to come?
The answers to those questions are complex because the modern Middle East is the most geopolitically complicated chessboard in the world, with dozens of different chess pieces and competing interests all variously working against each other.
The “Sykes-Picot” agreement between the French and the British empire, an agreement that would mark the beginning of the border divisions across the Middle East, was a treaty between France and Britain to divide the Ottoman Empire into French and British colonies. The borders carved during the agreement represent the modern countries of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine. While dividing the land, Mark Sykes and Francois Geroge Picot did not consider the different ethnicities, languages, religions, or even geographical advantages for their colonies, but instead based it upon the older Ottoman division which had been created, which also had little to no regard for the diverse people living within their land.
The actions taken by Sykes and Picot have caused massive consequences that have reverberated down the decades ever since, an example would be the minority Sunis in Iraq during Saddam’s reign governing a majority Shia population during the early 2000’s. Issues such as these have caused a large division and hatred towards one another across the Middle East which still fuels war to this day.
The discovery of oil during the 1940s and 50s fueled the border crisis as countries such as Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Syria and Saudi Arabia gained vast amounts of power which led to the eight-year war between Iraq and Iran, two nations that contain vast amounts of oil which they used to fund their military campaigns.
European and U.S. interest over the discovered oil further divided the countries. For instance, Iran and Saudi Arabia use their oil to influence today’s world by funding proxy wars across the Middle East to push their own agenda.
Could these issues have been prevented? It’s unlikely that it would have been completely avoided, as the vast amount of ethnic people, different religions, and the different languages that are scattered across the Middle East would always have conflicts with each other, and the discovery of oil, with the added western influence makes the Middle East stuck in an endless cycle of war.
