Middle East Geopolitics
The Line on the Map That Was Never Meant to Last
Almost every major conflict in the modern Middle East traces its roots to a secret agreement drawn up in 1916 by a British diplomat and a French one, neither of whom had ever set foot in the region they were dividing.
The Idea
In May 1916, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot signed a document carving the Arab provinces of the collapsing Ottoman Empire into British and French spheres of influence. The borders they sketched — often straight lines running across desert and mountain with no regard for the ethnic, tribal, religious, or linguistic communities living there — became the template for the modern states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. What makes this genuinely remarkable isn't simply that outsiders drew the lines. It's that both men knew the arrangement was provisional, a wartime bargain between competing imperial appetites, never designed as a durable framework for self-governing nations. Yet those provisional lines hardened into something treated as permanent, and the communities cut by them — Kurds split across four states, Shia and Sunni populations lumped together or severed from kin — have lived with the consequences ever since. The deeper idea here is about how contingency becomes structure. A rushed diplomatic compromise, made in secret, ratified by no one who actually lived in the region, ended up shaping the political imagination of an entire part of the world for over a century. Understanding the Middle East today without knowing this history is a bit like trying to understand a family without knowing about the argument that split it — the surface dynamics make no sense without the original rupture.
In the World
To see the Sykes-Picot logic at its most brutal, look at the Kurds. Numbering somewhere between 25 and 35 million people, they are the largest ethnic group in the world without a state of their own — a direct consequence of how the post-Ottoman borders were drawn and then reinforced by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which finalised the carve-up after the British abandoned an earlier promise of Kurdish autonomy. Kurdish communities ended up distributed across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria: four different governments, four different official languages, four different legal systems, and often four different levels of repression. When ISIS declared its caliphate in 2014 and swept across northern Iraq and Syria, it was Kurdish fighters — the Peshmerga in Iraq and the YPG in Syria — who proved most effective at resisting it on the ground. But the United States, which relied on those fighters militarily, couldn't formally back Kurdish political aspirations without alienating Turkey, a NATO ally deeply hostile to Kurdish autonomy on its own soil. That three-way bind — military partner, stateless people, hostile neighbouring government — exists almost entirely because of where Sykes and Picot put their pen in 1916. The contradiction hasn't resolved; it has simply been managed, expensively and imperfectly, ever since.
Why It Matters
Knowing this reframes how you read almost any news story about the region. When you hear about sectarian conflict in Iraq, or the impossibility of a stable Syrian state, or why Kurdish autonomy is such a geopolitical minefield, you're not looking at ancient hatreds or cultural inevitabilities — you're looking at the downstream effects of specific decisions made by specific people under specific pressures over a century ago. That's not a counsel of despair; it's actually clarifying. It means these situations are human-made, which means they are, at least in principle, human-solvable — even if the path is long and the obstacles are real. It also sharpens your scepticism toward any political map. Borders feel permanent because they are enforced, not because they are natural. Recognising that the lines on the map are choices — choices made by people with interests — is one of the more useful things geopolitics can teach you about power.
A Question to Ponder
If the borders of the Middle East were redrawn today to reflect how communities actually live and identify, what new problems might that create — and would they be better or worse than the ones the current map produces?
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