Time to rethink the borders of the Middle East map

Most Americans are unaware that today’s Middle East is an artificial construct created by British and French diplomats (Sykes and Picot) after World War I to advance their empires’ economic and political interests. They carved up the Middle East map with the stroke of a pen, and we have lived with the consequences ever since.

The San Remo Conference in 1920 codified colonial interests out of the remains of the defunct Ottoman Empire. Ethnic, religious and topographical considerations were ignored or minimized.

Now, just over a hundred years later, we are at another crossroads in the aftermath of the collapse of Syria, one of the Western-created nation-states. Many wars have been fought to keep these artificial states together, but they have more compelling reasons to be divided than to stay whole. As Conrad Black wrote in Brussels Signal, “The collapse of the Assad government in Syria must rank as the final unflattering death knell of the attempts at nation-building by the victorious Allied leaders at the end of World War I.”

Is 2025 the year we finally are ready to acknowledge the harm of jamming together religious and tribal groups who hate each other? The multi-ethnic state model works in the United States because Americans desire it. The world may not be ready to redraw the boundaries of the Middle East but it should not be under the false illusion that ignoring the false divisions will lead to fewer cycles of persecution, torture, religious extremism and authoritarian rule.                                                                                 

Syria, today’s shiny coin for international attention, is another mock nation imagined by the Brits and French. For the last 44 years, it was ruthlessly ruled by an Alawite minority led by the Assad family, who persecuted the majority Sunni population. 

Unfortunately, the Syrian uprising in 2024 is led by Sunni jihadists funded by the ascendent Muslim Brotherhood (MB) Turkish President Recep Erdogan and his Qatari partners. Erdogan’s goal is the resurrection of the Ottoman empire and acquiescence to Turkish hegemony in the Muslim Middle East. The Muslim Brotherhood is the ideological bedrock of political Islamism and radical jihadism, which ranges from Hamas to al Qaeda to HTS (Tahrir al-Sham), the latter the most likely group to dominate Syria in 2025 and beyond.

HTS’ leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, appears to have learned the lessons of past jihadist confrontations with Westerners and will be patient to gain their misplaced trust. He knows if he says the words they want to hear — democracy, freedom of religion, tolerance, respect for human rights — they will offer tens of billions of dollars for reconstruction of his war-torn nation. America and the West are happy to be fooled over and over again.

Logic says Syria could be divided into an autonomous America-aligned Kurdish region, a small Alawite region on the Mediterranean Coast, and, unfortunately, a Turkish-dominated Sunni jihadist entity in the rest of the rump nation. Most of the Christian population has been chased away and exiled out of fear of persecution. Syrian Druze may prefer to join their families on the Israeli side of the Golan.

Despite the optimism of the Syrian people captured in American media, Syria today feels more like the early excitement of the Arab Spring (2011), which quickly turned into an Arab Winter of repression. 

Iraq, another artificial nation, was created with British commerce and dominance in mind. The colonial powers installed a king not indigenous to Iraq as compensation for broken British and French promises. The Hashemites were given newly created monarchies in Iraq and Jordan. The Iraqi king was deposed in the 1950s, but the multi-ethnic and sectarian divided nation remained intact. 

From 1979-2003, Iraq was ruled by the tyrant Saddam Hussein, who persecuted the majority population until the U.S. invasion, which led to cycles of vengeance and war without America doing what was most needed, creating three states in Iraq. The Kurds in the north, the Shiites in the south, and the Sunni majority in the center would form states roughly along ethnic and traditional lines. The Kurds, an indigenous people who were promised their own country, were betrayed by the European powers. Today, they are persecuted in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. 

The Iranian-dominated nation of Iraq will keep oppressing its minorities until the Iranian empire of evil next door is overthrown by the Iranian people, something that should be an American foreign policy goal, stated publicly, supported with aid where possible, but not backed by U.S. troops on the ground. 

Which brings us back to how this all happened. Skyes and Picot redrew the Middle East according to colonial desires while ignoring the profound differences in religion, culture, clan and territory that had been in place for centuries, spawning a century of strife and persecution.

So many of the promises were broken, leaving a bad taste in the mouths of Middle Eastern peoples with long memories. The ancient and indigenous Jewish people were promised, as the lines were being drawn by the colonial powers, an area from the Mediterranean through today’s Jordan, which was whittled down to less than 20 percent of what was pledged.

Yet, Israel could be a model for nation-states in the Levant because it was created for a people of shared history, tradition, indigeneity and religion. Unfortunately, unlike their Muslim neighbors, only they can give full rights to their minority citizens, because they adopted a Western-style democracy. This does not negate the possibility of autonomy for the Palestinians unless their lodestar remains the elimination of the Jewish State.

In Jordan, the Brits installed a Hashemite king from the Arabian Peninsula, but his monarchy is not indigenous to the Levant. Lebanon, another artificial construct, was initially supposed to be Christian-dominated in alliance with France, but is now a failed state due to demographic changes that led to a Shiite plurality allied with the hegemonic Islamic Republic of Iran.

Lebanon, too, should be divided, but the international and Western powers are blinded by their misconceived historical perspective, thinking that Lebanon, Syria and Iraq are millennial old nations, where in fact, they are less than a century old.

None of this is optimal, but this is the hand the region has been dealt. The Middle East has been such a basket case for so long that perhaps a newly reimagined region based on ethnic and religious realities is needed to reverse the damage colonial interests created a hundred years ago. 

In America, the foreign policy pendulum has swung to the isolationist side, which risks missing an opportunity to advance our regional interests. We can learn from the mistakes of nation-building in Iraq while working with the people of the region who want to be our allies. This is a path forward for U.S. foreign policy. 

Those Syrian rebel enthusiasts would be wise to listen to the lyrics of the rock band The Who, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Under a new administration, America should help the Middle East learn to sing a new tune.

Eric R. Mandel is the director of the Middle East Political Information Network and senior security editor for the Jerusalem Post’s Jerusalem Report.