Much of the modern geopolitical instability in the Middle East is a direct result of how the United Kingdom and France dismantled the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Driven by imperial interests, oil, and strategic positioning, London and Paris carved up the region with little regard for the ethnic, religious, or tribal realities on the ground.
The foundation for this conflict began with the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916.
While the war was still raging, British diplomat Mark Sykes and French diplomat Francois Georges-Picot secretly met to divide the Middle East into spheres of influence.
They drew arbitrary straight lines across a map, dividing the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire between them. France claimed control over what is now Syria and Lebanon, while the UK claimed control over Iraq, Jordan, and Israel. These borders ignored existing cultural, geographic, and sectarian boundaries, forcing historically hostile groups together and splitting unified communities apart.
Britain, desperate to win the war, also created a web of conflicting promises, ensuring deep-seated feelings of betrayal that persist today. In 1915, Britain promised an independent, unified Arab state in exchange for an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks.
In 1916, through Sykes-Picot, Britain promised to divide the region with France, directly contradicting the promise made to the Arabs. Then, in 1917, through the Balfour Declaration, Britain promised to support the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in the British mandate of Palestine. When the war ended, the UK and France prioritized their own agreement.
The Arabs felt betrayed, fueling Arab nationalism, while the conflicting promises over the British mandate of Palestine set the stage for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
After the war, the League of Nations formalized this division through the Mandate System, giving the UK and France administrative control over the newly created states.
The borders they formalized created inherently unstable nation-states and birthed entirely new ones out of thin air. From its single mandate over Palestine, the UK effectively laid the groundwork for Jordan and Israel at the exact same time. In 1921, Britain partitioned the territory along the Jordan River. They carved out the vast eastern portion to create the Emirate of Transjordan (modern-day Jordan), installing a Hashemite ruler to appease their Arab allies and manage their conflicting wartime pledges. The territory west of the river was kept under direct British administration to fulfill the Balfour Declaration's promise of a Jewish national home. With a stroke of an imperial pen, the political borders of both future nations were birthed simultaneously.
Elsewhere, the same arbitrary map-drawing guaranteed a perpetual struggle for power. In Iraq, Britain mashed together three distinct Ottoman provinces, forcing Kurds in the north, Sunni Arabs in the center, and Shia Arabs in the south into a single state. France carved Lebanon out of Syria to create a safe haven for Maronite Christians, a French ally, but the borders included large populations of Sunni and Shia Muslims, laying the groundwork for future civil war. Meanwhile, the Kurds were promised an independent state in 1920, but when borders were finalized in 1923, the UK and France abandoned them, leaving millions of Kurds scattered across multiple modern countries.
To maintain control over restive populations, both empires employed divide and rule strategies, empowering minority groups to rule over majorities. In Syria, the French heavily recruited the Alawites into the military to counter the Sunni Muslim majority, entrenching military power that ultimately led to the Assad dynasty.
In Iraq, the British relied heavily on the Sunni minority to govern the Shia majority and Kurdish populations, institutionalizing sectarian resentment.
While subsequent events like the Cold War, the discovery of massive oil reserves, foreign interventions, and local dictators vastly complicated the region, the structural foundation of the mess we live today was poured by Britain and France. They created artificial states with incompatible populations, broke promises to local leaders, and institutionalized sectarian divisions to maintain their own imperial power.
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