This week marks the 100th anniversary of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the document that shaped the modern Middle East. Known officially as the Asia Minor Agreement, it was authored by the British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French counterpart François Georges-Picot. They were charged with the task of mapping out new zones of influence in parts of the Ottoman Empire, should the Triple Entente, which at the time included czarist Russia, defeat the Ottomans in World War I.
The regions under negotiation were the Syrian coast and what became Lebanon, which would go to France; central and southern Mesopotamia, which would fall under British supervision; and Palestine, which would be under international administration. The huge block of mostly desert in between would have local Arab chiefs under French supervision in the north and British in the south. The agreement was signed May 16, 1916. Now, a century later, according to a wildly diverse body of opinion, from the leader of the Islamic State Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya'alon, Sykes-Picot has finally fallen apart.
Over the last hundred years, the very phrase Sykes-Picot has become shorthand for a number of ideas about Middle East history. To wit: Sykes-Picot imposed artificial borders on the region; it legitimized colonial interference in the Middle East; it represented the betrayal of the Arabs by the Western powers. As it turns out, all of these beliefs are premised on conceptions that are grounded not in historical reality, but political ideology.
All borders are artificial. Even before the advent of the state system, borders around the world were either agreed upon by two or more parties or imposed through war or threat of war. Borders are human conventions, even if they are set off by natural landmarks, like bodies of water or mountains. In any case, the Sykes-Picot Agreement did not establish national borders. The borders within the area that Sykes-Picot dealt with were later agreed upon by Paris and London. Sykes-Picot merely allocated zones of influence, a political demarcation consistent with the history of the region, dominated by empires for thousands of years.
"One empire, the Ottoman, lost," says Tony Badran, research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, "and two other empires, the French and the British, divided parts of its holdings between themselves. That division was in keeping with how empires have dealt with this area throughout the ages. The imperial tradition in this zone dates back millennia."
Badran traces it back to the historical ancient Near East, when the region's great imperial powers included Egypt, Persia, and what's now Turkey, from the Hittite Empire, to the Byzantines, and lastly the Ottomans. What we refer to as the Levant, says Badran, has simply been a buffer zone between imperial powers. "It's a zone of conflict, a historical theater of war. The people who live here are always assets of bigger powers. If you ally with Egypt and the Assyrians win, it's a losing bet. The kingdom of Judah later sought to align with Egypt against the Babylonians. Egypt and Judah lost, resulting in the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile to Babylon."
Often faulted for being oblivious to the reality of the Middle East, as Badran argues, the Sykes-Picot Agreement actually represented a mature understanding of the region's history. The "colonial interference" that Sykes-Picot stands for was nothing but the latest instance of empires carving out zones of influence, partly to balance each other's power.
Even after Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan won independence—the Arabs rejected the 1947 U.N. plan to partition Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish states—many Arab political figures and intellectuals claimed that they'd been betrayed by the West. According to this view, the colonial powers had promised them a greater Arab homeland, and instead divided them into separate states. This is the Arab nationalist reading of recent Middle East history.
The central tenet of Arab nationalism is that the people of the Middle East who speak various dialects of the Arabic language constitute one indivisible nation with a shared past and a common destiny. As we now see with the sectarian and ethnic onslaught underway in Iraq and Syria, this notion is fanciful. If there really is such a thing as the Arab nation—rather than a collection of competing sects, ethnicities, and tribes—it is a nation at war with itself.
Indeed, the rise of Arab nationalist ideology coincides with the rapid decline of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It was the Ottomans who, for all their very bloody methods, managed to maintain a certain amount of stability throughout the region, balancing warring factions. With the Ottomans on their way out, regional intellectuals and ideologues, including some among the Middle East's minority populations, saw Arab nationalism as a safety mechanism of sorts, intended to convince the region's various populations that more united them—language, culture, history, future—than set them apart.
The region's political leaders used Arab nationalism for a very different purpose—to undermine their regional rivals. For instance, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser regularly attacked Jordan and Saudi Arabia for betraying the Arab cause—i.e., the war to eliminate the Zionists and liberate Palestine. It is hardly a coincidence that Nasser's targets were American allies, and his Egypt, like the other prominent Arab nationalist regimes, Syria and Iraq, was a Soviet client. Again, the middle of the Arabic-speaking Middle East was a buffer zone, where the world's two great powers competed for zones of influence.
Backing Arab nationalist causes and hanging the colonialist/imperialist label on Washington was part of Moscow's Cold War propaganda campaign. And indeed it was the United States that inherited the legacy of Sykes-Picot when Eisenhower ushered France and the United Kingdom out of the region with the 1956 Suez Crisis. Now, according to the Arab nationalist reading, the United States was the great colonial power.
Actually, that wasn't far from the truth, even if a country with its origins in anticolonialism rejected the description. The reality is that the Europeans were irrelevant. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the Cold War over, the Middle East enjoyed more than two decades of relative stability. It was the United States that kept the peace, a peace at least as stable as and an order much more liberal than that of the Ottomans. The peace that the region enjoyed had nothing to do with early-20th-century European diplomats, but was thanks to postwar American power. Sykes-Picot is the euphemism that Americans uncomfortable with the idea of empire have used to describe the American order of the Middle East.
For decades, the Arab-Israeli conflict was understood to be the region's central crisis—solve that, common wisdom held, and everything else will fall into place. As we now understand, compared with the Syrian war and the casualty count over 5 years which dwarfs that of the Arab-Israeli conflict over close to 70, the Arab-Israeli conflict is little more than a skirmish between two tribes. That the international community could afford to devote so much concern and resources to it over the course of decades is a testament to the nature of American power.
The issue isn't that the Islamic State crashed the borders of Syria and Iraq in 2014 and therefore the colonial legacy of Sykes-Picot. Rather, it's that the Obama White House wants out. It's the American order of the region that's been dismantled—not by ISIS, but by the president of the United States. In effect, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that seeks to realign American interests in the region with Iran, while plotting a U.S. exit from the region, is a revision of Sykes-Picot.
We can't fix the Middle East, Obama deputy Ben Rhodes told the New York Times Magazine. It's about ancient sectarian and ethnic rivalries and hatreds. But the point was never to solve the problems of the region, a conflict zone for thousands of years. It was merely to ensure stability and protect American interests. The Ottomans were flushed out of the region when they wound up on the losing side of the Great War. The Obama White House opted out because it was tired. The region will pay the price for the administration's self-pity, as will the rest of the world, including America.