Following WW I (the “war to end all wars”) British Diplomat Sir Mark Sykes and his French counterpart François Georges-Picot negotiated the now infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement, which was intended to divide up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire into British and French spheres of influence. The resulting hodgepodge of artificial entities controlled by London and Paris was a recipe for conflict from the start. The borders and installed governments largely ignored tribal, ethnic, sectarian and geographic realities in establishing the entities. As David Fromkin points out in his seminal book “A Peace to End All Peace”, “It (the agreement) showed that Sir Mark Sykes and his colleagues had adopted policies for the Middle East without first considering whether, in existing conditions, they could feasibly be implemented…and suggested the extent to which the British government did not know what it was getting into when it decided to supersede the Ottoman Empire in Asia…” Now, after almost 100 years of ongoing turmoil, we are witnessing the violent collapse of the ill-conceived political structure in the region.
Of the entities that remained after Sykes – Picot, only Egypt and Iran had any semblance of the characteristics of a nation-state. While Iran is home to numerous ethnic groups, it is united by its overwhelming Shia Muslim character. As the recent Iranian election of Hassan Rowhani with high voter turnout demonstrates, Iran’s system of integrating Islamic governance and participatory politics continues to have the support of most Iranians living in the country. Iran is emerging as a more confident and cohesive state. Egypt on the other hand is falling apart before our eyes.
The overthrow of the democratically elected, Muslim Brotherhood led government by the Egyptian military and its co-conspirators in the Egyptian deep state seems to herald the end of the brief Egyptian experiment with democracy. As a result the Muslim Brotherhood’s mode of coming to power by nonviolently, incrementally invading the centers of governance has been discredited. The al Qaeda “idea” of creating an atmosphere of strife and civil disorder as a vehicle for allowing local Islamic groups to come to power through the collapse of the nation-state has gained more credibility. As western democracies tire of the ongoing strife, the resulting “emirates” will be able to throw off the remnants of western hegemony. Al Qaeda can now plausibly say “I told you so”.
The Syrian civil war is likely to result in the breakup of the Syrian state which will spill over into Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey. The ethnic Kurds whose nation-state aspirations were ignored by Sykes – Picot will probably reassert themselves in Syria, Turkey, Iraq and possibly Iran. The autocratic Gulf Monarchies of Qatar, Kuwait, UAE and Saudi Arabia and their partner in Jordan are torn between the need to support their Sunni “takfiri” co-religionists among the Syrian rebels with the possibility of jihadist blowback among their own dissidents and their hatred for Shia Iran. They seem to have decided to double down in Syria while repressing dissent at home.
Whatever the final outcome, it seems certain that the Sykes-Picot construct, which never evolved into a social contract between governments and governed, is doomed to collapse. U.S. policy makers have no good options and little influence. Intervention will likely make a bad situation worse. It won’t be pretty.
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