A Peace to End All Peace

The subtitle is The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East and the author is David Fromkin (1989).

I first heard about this book back when I read the daisy chain of Doug Casey publications, with reference to it as some great exposition on why the Middle East is constantly on the precipice of war and decay.  And the basic point that the author makes, simply by reporting over and over on how European powers simply assumed that their values and mores would stick in the region, is that the maps were redrawn to reflect a foreign perspective without much consideration for the local populations.  Moreover, in deposing the Ottoman Empire, the age-old imperial order that the region had grown accustomed to, and to replace it with the European model of secular states (a structure that itself took fifteen-hundred years to take hold finally on the Continent), was to throw any balance out of whack.  And much of it was driven by the “Great Game”, that is the pursuit of European powers to thwart any Russian designs on Asia, manifested in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 that carved up the Middle East well before the War had been won.  This agreement, in concert with others that followed, created guiding mandates for the world after the War that simply took for granted the realities on the ground between native groups, much less any changes that had occurred simply in the progression of war.  None of these issues went away, and the legacy of these prior mistakes are still evident for all to see.