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The Fateful Reshaping of the Middle East
In the heart of the 20th century's most transformative period, a handful of Western politicians and diplomats gathered around maps of territories they barely understood, drawing lines that would shape the destiny of millions. Between 1914 and 1922, as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Britain and France carved up the Middle East with little regard for local realities, creating countries like Iraq, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon virtually overnight. As David Fromkin masterfully reveals, these arbitrary decisions, made in distant European capitals, planted the seeds of conflicts that continue to this day. What makes this story particularly compelling is that many alternatives seemed possible-even an alliance between Arab nationalism and Zionism once appeared within reach. The Palestinian struggle, the sectarian violence in Iraq, the Syrian civil war-all trace their origins to these fateful decisions made nearly a century ago in what truly became, as Fromkin's title suggests, a peace to end all peace.
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The Last Days of Old Europe: A World on the Brink
In the spring of 1912, the British Admiralty yacht Enchantress sailed through the Mediterranean carrying Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, his daughter Violet, and a young Winston Churchill. As they visited ancient ruins, they contemplated civilizations that had risen and fallen, though without sensing their own empire's mortality. Churchill, jealous of the Prime Minister's classical knowledge, complained that the Greeks and Romans "only said everything first." This cruise reflected the supreme confidence of European powers who assumed their dominance would continue indefinitely.
Few Europeans concerned themselves with the Middle East, then a political backwater under Ottoman rule. The region lacked the nation-states familiar today-Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia-and seemed destined to be eventually reshaped by European powers, though without urgency. Churchill, initially uninterested in Muslim Asia, would ironically play a crucial role in creating the modern, volatile Middle East.
The Middle East had become a diplomatic backwater by the early twentieth century. Though European powers assumed they would eventually "take the region in hand," there was no urgency. Most Europeans knew little about the Ottoman Sultan's or Persian Shah's empires beyond occasional reports of Armenian massacres. The political landscape differed dramatically from today's-Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia didn't exist, and most of the region rested under the "drowsy and negligent sway" of the Ottoman Empire.
This Mediterranean cruise captured a moment of imperial confidence before catastrophe. Within two years, Europe would plunge into a war that would destroy four empires and fundamentally reshape the world. The Ottoman Empire, which had ruled much of the Middle East for centuries, would collapse, creating a vacuum that European powers would rush to fill-with consequences that continue to reverberate today.
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The Great Game: How Imperial Rivalry Shaped the Middle East
The struggle for Middle Eastern control emerged from the imperial expansion that followed European voyages of discovery. Britain, though a late starter, eventually built an empire spanning a quarter of the planet. However, this global reach created vulnerabilities that Napoleon exposed in 1798 by invading Egypt. Britain's response was to prop up native Middle Eastern regimes against European expansion-not to control the region directly, but to prevent others from doing so.
This evolved into "the Great Game" against Russia, which British officer Arthur Conolly (who later died horribly in Uzbek captivity) first named and Kipling later popularized. The contest ranged from Constantinople to the Himalayas, with Britain trying to maintain buffer states protecting routes to India against Russian expansion. For over a century, Britain viewed the declining Islamic regimes of Asia as useful barriers between their Indian possessions and Russian expansion.
Britain's fear of Russia evolved beyond strategic concerns into cultural antipathy as democratic Britain engaged with despotic Russia over generations. Meanwhile, Liberal politicians began denouncing the corrupt Middle Eastern regimes Britain supported against Russia, culminating in Gladstone's thundering denunciation of Ottoman atrocities during his 1880 campaign. This created a disconnect between London policymakers and British imperial officers in the field. While Grey and Asquith's Liberal government now viewed France and Russia as allies rather than rivals, British agents stationed from Egypt to India continued viewing them as enemies based on lifetime experience countering their regional intrigues.
Despite these differences, both London ministers and field officers shared one crucial assumption: that the Ottoman Empire's eventual collapse would require European powers to fill the vacuum-an assumption that would become a driving force of history. This Great Game mentality would shape British thinking about the Middle East for generations, creating a lens through which they viewed all regional developments as part of a strategic contest with other powers rather than understanding local dynamics on their own terms.
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The Ottoman Empire: A Fragile Mosaic on the Brink
For centuries before World War I, Middle Eastern regimes had been steadily losing ground to European powers. The Ottoman Empire stood as a relic of eastern nomadic invasions from a millennium earlier. Founded by Turkish-speaking Muslim horsemen under Osman in the thirteenth century, it conquered the Byzantine Empire in the fifteenth century and expanded dramatically, eventually stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Danube with a population of 30-50 million ruling over twenty nationalities.
However, the Ottomans never truly evolved beyond their origins as a marauding war band. When conquests turned to defeats in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they lost their economic engine, having mastered war but not governance. Despite nineteenth-century reform attempts, the empire remained incoherent-a mosaic of unassimilated peoples speaking different languages, with religion providing only limited cohesion.
By the early twentieth century, the Sultan's absolute rule was more myth than reality; outside towns, local sheikhs or brigands held actual power, and the government collected only 5% of taxes directly. Foreign powers exercised varying degrees of control throughout the empire, and most observers assumed European powers would eventually take control of Ottoman domains.
Constantinople, originally Byzantium and now Istanbul, occupied a strategic location that gave it enduring importance in world affairs. Built on seven hills like Rome, it served as the Eastern Roman Empire's capital for eleven centuries and the Ottoman capital for four more. In 1914, its million residents formed a cosmopolitan mix of Muslims, Greeks, Armenians and European foreigners. The city was just beginning to modernize with electric lighting, primitive drainage systems, and some paved roads, though most streets remained muddy or dusty.
In Pera, the European quarter north of the Golden Horn, foreign embassies created isolated communities where French was spoken at diplomatic functions and Greek in the streets. Few Europeans ventured into Stamboul's narrow, dirty lanes. This physical separation mirrored the cultural and political divide between the Ottoman government and the European powers who increasingly viewed the empire as an anachronism destined for dissolution.
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The Young Turks: Desperate Search for Survival
The Young Turk leadership, traumatized by the Ottoman Empire's continuing territorial disintegration, feared their domains were in mortal danger from European predators. Having lost territories in the Balkans and to Italy, they believed the Middle East was the next vulnerable region for colonial conquest. The CUP leaders were convinced their program of freeing the empire from European control would precipitate attacks from foreign powers.
The CUP leadership wanted to modernize while rejecting European control-a fundamental contradiction in their approach. They desired European technologies but refused European ownership, creating their own postal and telegraph services while rejecting foreign offers. By 1914, the empire remained severely underdeveloped with few telephones, roads or automobiles. Transportation still relied on slow camel caravans moving at 2-3 miles per hour while foreign-owned railroads moved ten times faster at one-tenth the cost.
The CUP faced an impossible dilemma: they needed railroads without surrendering to European economic domination. Europeans already controlled nearly a quarter of Ottoman revenues through the public debt administration and enjoyed extraterritorial privileges through the Capitulations. The CUP also planned to assert Turkish-Muslim hegemony over the empire's diverse population, contrary to their earlier promises of equality, making them "nationalists without a nation" who excluded 60% of the population from their vision.
The CUP leadership unanimously agreed their most urgent priority was securing a powerful European ally to protect the empire from further territorial encroachments. Between May and July 1914, the Young Turks desperately sought alliances with three European powers: Djemal approached France but was rebuffed; Talaat turned to Russia-"like asking the chief burglar to become chief of police"-and was also rejected; finally, Enver approached Germany but was turned down by Ambassador von Wangenheim.
This desperate search for allies reveals the fundamental insecurity of the Ottoman leadership as they watched European powers systematically dismember their empire. Their eventual alliance with Germany was not, as many later claimed, the result of German manipulation, but rather the outcome of Ottoman initiative born of existential fear.
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Churchill's Fateful Decision: The Seizure of Turkish Warships
When war broke out, Churchill briefly became a national hero for mobilizing the fleet without Cabinet permission and sending it to Scapa Flow, protecting it from German surprise attack. Though technically illegal, his action was widely applauded. Margot Asquith noted that Churchill's pre-eminence came not from his mind or judgment but from "his courage and colour-his amazing mixture of industry and enterprise" and willingness to take "huge risks."
His commandeering of Turkish battleships-the Reshadieh and Sultan Osman I-was similarly celebrated. These powerful vessels, built in British shipyards, were meant to modernize the Ottoman navy through patriotic public subscription. The Sultan Osman I mounted more heavy guns than any previous battleship. Admiral Limpus had sailed from Constantinople to escort the vessel home, where celebrations were planned to honor British-Ottoman friendship.
Churchill, considered the most pro-Turk Cabinet member, had supported Limpus's naval mission, which counterbalanced German influence in the Ottoman army. However, as war approached, these Dreadnought-class battleships became strategically vital-their addition to the Royal Navy would significantly increase Britain's narrow seven-ship advantage over Germany.
Contrary to Churchill's later claims that he merely followed standing orders from 1912, seizing the Turkish warships was his original idea. On July 28, 1914, he inquired about acquiring them, despite Foreign Office warnings that such action would be illegal without Ottoman consent. Churchill ordered both ships detained and guarded against Turkish crews. The Cabinet approved his action on July 31, and British sailors boarded the Sultan Osman I.
In Berlin, the war crisis prompted reconsideration of Turkey as an ally. On July 24, Kaiser Wilhelm II personally overruled his ambassador's negative assessment and ordered exploration of Enver's alliance offer. Secret talks began immediately in Constantinople between German representatives and three Ottoman leaders: Grand Vizier Said Halim, Interior Minister Talaat Bey, and War Minister Enver Pasha.
This seizure of Turkish warships, while militarily logical, proved diplomatically catastrophic. It humiliated the Young Turks, who had staked national prestige on these vessels, and pushed them definitively toward Germany. What's more, Enver and Talaat cleverly exploited the situation, offering Germany the Sultan Osman I battleship to secure an alliance-knowing full well that Churchill had already seized the vessel. By offering a battleship they no longer possessed, the Turkish leaders secured German protection without sacrificing anything.
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The Dardanelles Campaign: Churchill's Gamble
The Dardanelles campaign began with a fundamental military contradiction that would prove disastrous. While every informed military authority recognized that forcing the 38-mile strait required a combined naval-army operation, Kitchener initially insisted on a naval-only attack despite refusing to provide troops.
Churchill, though preferring a Baltic operation, sought advice from Admiral Sackville Carden commanding the British squadron off the Dardanelles. To everyone's surprise, Carden replied that while the strait couldn't be "rushed," it "might be forced by extended operations with a large number of ships." Despite the narrow passage being protected by shore batteries and mines-particularly at the 1,600-yard-wide Narrows-Carden's assessment as the commander on the spot carried the day.
The Cabinet overruled Churchill's Baltic preference and authorized Carden's Dardanelles plan. Once decided, Churchill threw his characteristic energy and enthusiasm behind the operation. However, support for the purely naval expedition rapidly reversed. By mid-February, Admiralty opinion had turned against it, though the attack was scheduled within days.
The Turks anticipated Churchill's attack but lacked means to defend against it. Their forces at the Dardanelles had ammunition for only one engagement, with some Ottoman gunboats having merely one minute's worth of shells. Despite receiving intelligence of an imminent Allied naval attack and concentrating fortifications at the straits, their situation was desperate.
When Admiral Carden's British warships opened fire on February 19th, Turkish shore batteries couldn't even return fire due to insufficient range. Constantinople's inhabitants believed their city would fall within days, prompting the desperate Grand Vizier to suggest making peace with Russia to "hit England all the harder." The Turks even proposed a Russian-Turkish-German alliance with free passage through the Dardanelles for Russia in exchange for switching sides.
By March 4th, Admiral Carden reported to Churchill that the fleet could reach Constantinople in about fourteen days. Victory seemed imminent, with the previously skeptical Fisher finally converted upon learning that key Dardanelles forts were running out of ammunition.
After the March 18 battle that prompted de Robeck to withdraw, Ottoman commanders had concluded their cause was lost. While de Robeck was ordering retreat, Turkish forces, unaware of his decision, received orders to fire their remaining ammunition and abandon their coastal positions. Had de Robeck pressed the attack for just one more day, he would have faced no opposition-minesweepers could have cleared a path through the Narrows, and the fleet would have reached Constantinople unopposed.
For Churchill, this near-victory became a lifelong torment. It wasn't merely a personal triumph lost, but "his last chance to save the world in which he had grown up: to win the war while the familiar, traditional Europe of established monarchies and empires still survived." The Ottoman Empire, sentenced to death, had received an unexpected reprieve.
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Gallipoli: The Doomed Invasion
At dawn on April 25, 1915, British, Dominion and Allied armies waded ashore onto six narrow, unconnected beaches on the Gallipoli peninsula. The Turks, knowing when but not where the attack would come, were initially surprised and could have been overwhelmed.
At the northernmost landing site, Ari Burnu, Australian and New Zealand troops found themselves at the wrong beach. Climbing steep slopes, they encountered Turkish soldiers who fled until rallied by Mustapha Kemal. After a day-long battle that could have gone either way, the Turks drove the invaders back down.
At the peninsula's tip, five other landings met varying degrees of resistance. At beaches Y, X, and S, invaders faced minimal opposition but failed to exploit their advantage-stopping after reaching cliffs, making camp without advancing, or becoming confused about command.
The Allies held overwhelming numerical superiority that first day, as most of Liman's forces were held in reserve. By April 26, however, Turkish reinforcements poured in, eliminating the possibility of quick victory. Though General Birdwood recommended re-embarking the ANZAC forces, Hamilton decided instead to dig in-unknowingly dooming the expedition meant to break the war's stalemate to become a drawn-out replay of western front trench warfare.
Hamilton had positioned his troops at best for a stalemate, at worst for disaster. While Turks occupied dominating heights, Allied troops entrenched on beaches, their fight becoming one for survival. Though most British government officials eventually favored evacuation, Churchill and Kitchener fought against it-Churchill refusing to accept defeat, Kitchener believing a British army must never be seen defeated by a Middle Eastern one.
The Allies' defeat at Gallipoli was devastating-what could have been an easy victory on April 25, 1915, ended 259 days later in retreat, with each side suffering a quarter million casualties. This decisive battle demonstrated that a supposedly backward Asian army could defeat a modern European one. The setback drove Britain to deeper Middle Eastern involvement, both specifically through alliances with local rulers who might aid their military efforts, and generally by creating a sense that Britain must play a major postwar role in the region to give meaning to such enormous sacrifice.
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The Arab Revolt: Promise and Reality
By coincidence, Lord Kitchener was lost at sea just as Emir Hussein of Mecca proclaimed his rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. Though British officials in Cairo viewed the uprising as their triumph, for Hussein it was nearly an admission of defeat. His policy had been neutrality, collecting bribes from both sides, until he discovered the Young Turks planned to depose him.
The situation grew dire when Djemal Pasha began crushing Arab dissidents in Damascus in 1915, executing many who had connections to Hussein's son Feisal. Then in April 1916, Hussein learned that a 3,500-strong Ottoman force with German officers was marching through the Hejaz-sufficient to crush him. Forced to act, Hussein proclaimed revolt between June 5-10, 1916, using both Turkish and British gold to fund his forces.
The revolt fell dramatically short of expectations. The Arab Bureau had anticipated up to 250,000 Ottoman troops of Arab origin would defect, but none did. No political or military figures joined Hussein from the Ottoman Empire. Instead of a massive Arab uprising, Hussein commanded only a few thousand subsidized tribesmen who proved ineffective against Turkish artillery. British ships, aircraft, and Muslim troops from Egypt were required to secure Mecca, Jeddah and coastal ports, though Hussein refused to allow Christian British forces to move inland to the Holy Places.
The Arab Bureau's assessment of Hussein's revolt was grim. Nearly a year after Hussein proclaimed the Arab Revolt, Hogarth wrote it off as a failure in the Arab Bulletin, concluding that "it had not fulfilled the hopes placed in it nor did it justify further expectations." He noted that "the Hejaz Bedouins were simply guerillas, and not of good quality at that" who "would not attack nor withstand Turkish regulars." The best that could be hoped for was that Hussein's Arab Movement would "just hold its own in place."
Britain had invested heavily-11 million pounds sterling (equivalent to about 400 million dollars today) plus considerable military and political resources. By September 1918, Reginald Wingate wrote that "Moslems in general have hitherto regarded the Hejaz revolt, and our share in it, with suspicion or dislike" and that it was important to make Hussein look successful to prevent Britain from looking bad.
The most conspicuous failure of the Mecca revolt was its inability to capture Medina, the other large holy city of the Hejaz. Located 300 miles northeast of Mecca, Medina blocked the route northward toward Syria. Hussein's followers attacked it in the first days of the revolt but were easily repelled, and they remained unable to capture it throughout the war.
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The Balfour Declaration: Creating the Jewish National Home
The Balfour Declaration dramatically accelerated American Zionism's development. Before the war, American Zionism was minuscule-only 12,000 members among three million American Jews, with a treasury of just $15,000 and an annual budget under $5,200. In New York, the movement claimed only 500 members.
Louis Brandeis, who became a Zionist in 1912 and assumed leadership in 1914, transformed the movement by addressing American Jews' fundamental concern: that Zionism might question their American patriotism. Brandeis brilliantly reframed Zionism as enhancing American identity, comparing it to Irish-Americans' support for Irish independence: "Every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine...will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so."
The Balfour Declaration vindicated Brandeis's arguments by making a Jewish Palestine an Allied war goal, later endorsed by President Wilson. By 1919, Zionist Federation membership soared to 175,000, though Zionists remained a minority among American Jews and faced continued opposition from established Jewish communities until the 1940s.
By late 1917, Britain's war aims had fundamentally shifted. Leo Amery noted in his diary that one of his key achievements was convincing colleagues of "the importance of East Africa, Palestine, and Mesopotamia and the Imperial outlook generally."
The devastating European war had made meaningful victory on the continent impossible. Britain couldn't look to European annexations to compensate for its losses, and even Germany's destruction wouldn't serve British interests-Smuts argued Germany needed to remain substantial enough to maintain the European balance of power.
For Britain to recover its global position, imperial expansion became essential-primarily in the Middle East. What began as an "accidental irrelevance" on the periphery had become central to Lloyd George's world policy. Where Asquith's Cabinet saw Middle Eastern hegemony as merely desirable, Lloyd George's government now viewed it as necessary, providing the crucial link between Cape Town, India, and the Pacific territories.
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Churchill's Middle Eastern Settlement
Churchill had been the most vocal critic within government of Lloyd George's Middle Eastern policy since the war's end. He consistently warned that peacetime Britain lacked both the troops and parliamentary support to fund coercion in the Middle East. As early as October 1919, he predicted Greece might ruin herself in Smyrna, worried about damage to Anglo-French relations, and expressed concern about "the Jews, whom we are pledged to introduce into Palestine and who take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out."
British leaders had reversed their Middle Eastern views since 1918. While initially eager to seize strategic positions, by 1919 Parliament and press demanded withdrawal from these costly commitments. Churchill made cost-cutting his priority, ultimately reducing Middle Eastern expenditures by 75 percent-from forty-five million to eleven million pounds annually by September 1922. He favored conciliating France and installing the Hashemite family as local rulers throughout the Arab world, believing this would provide an economical strategy where "pressure on one Arab sphere" could achieve British ends across multiple kingdoms.
The Cairo Conference opened at the Semiramis Hotel on March 12, 1921, with forty officials attending. Churchill masterfully guided both large political meetings and small committee sessions, focusing primarily on cutting Mesopotamia occupation costs. The conference produced a four-part plan: offer Feisal the throne of Mesopotamia (appearing to come from locals rather than Britain); shift to an airforce-based military strategy; temporarily maintain Kurdish areas as a separate entity; and acknowledge little could be done for displaced minorities like Assyrian Christians.
For Transjordan, Churchill proposed installing Abdullah as temporary governor to restore order and prevent attacks on French Syria. Despite objections from Herbert Samuel and Lloyd George that this arrangement might provoke France and undermine Palestine's unity, Churchill secured approval for Abdullah to govern Transjordan for six months with British subsidy but without British troops.
By 1922, Churchill had redesigned the Arabic-speaking portion of the former Ottoman Empire. The Turks no longer ruled it. In the east, Kurdish, Sunni, Shi'ite, and Jewish populations were combined into Iraq under an Arabian prince-nominally independent but effectively a British protectorate. Syria and an enlarged Lebanon were under French rule. A new Arab entity that would become Jordan was carved from Palestine, while west of the Jordan would contain the Jewish National Home.
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A Legacy of Conflict: The Modern Middle East Emerges
The Middle East became what it is today because European powers reshaped it but failed to ensure their arrangements would endure. Britain and her Allies destroyed Turkish rule irrevocably, creating countries, nominating rulers, and delineating frontiers-but never quelling local opposition. This gave birth to a Middle Eastern Question within the region itself, with powerful forces remaining unreconciled to these arrangements.
Beyond disputes about rulers or frontiers, fundamental claims challenge the very existence of countries like Iraq, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon. Deeper still lies the question of whether European-style secular states can survive in a region devoted for over a thousand years to Holy Law governing all aspects of life. European statesmen recognized Islam's hold on the region but underestimated its resilience, failing to foresee the continued vitality of religious movements.
This explains the region's characteristic lack of legitimacy-no universally shared agreement on rules or recognition of countries and rulers. The Middle East may be experiencing a crisis similar to Europe's after Rome's fall, which took 1,500 years to resolve.
The establishment of Allied control in the Middle East marked the culmination of Europe's centuries-long conquest of the world. This final chapter followed centuries of exploration and colonization across the Americas, Africa, and beyond. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the Middle East remained the only native bastion Europeans hadn't yet stormed.
For Britain, the 1922 settlements represented a doubly crowning achievement: they had secured a far larger share of the Middle East than seemed possible beforehand, while Russia received much less; and the powers appeared willing to accept this territorial division without further conflict. The two major issues that had troubled world politics since Napoleonic times-where Russia's frontier would be drawn and what would become of the Ottoman Empire-were finally resolved with Russia's frontier established along a northern tier of independent states, and the Ottoman domains partitioned between Turkey, France, and Britain.
Yet this triumph would prove short-lived. From Britain's perspective, the 1922 settlement was already outdated when implemented. It embodied Sir Mark Sykes' 1915-1917 vision, but by 1922 British thinking had evolved dramatically. The government now regretted giving France a Mandate over Syria, having predicted disaster from such an arrangement. They were equally unhappy with their own choices-installing the Hashemites in Iraq and Transjordan despite viewing them as treacherous and ineffective. In Palestine, Britain accepted a Mandate to implement a Zionist program they had enthusiastically supported in 1917 but had since lost all enthusiasm for. British officials would govern the Middle East without conviction, having imposed a settlement in which they themselves no longer believed.
