Learning Again to Live With Wars
August 17, 2026
Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the Middle East has been traumatized by Western interventions, wars, power competition, and peace treaties among regional adversaries that have failed to embrace the broader region. In brief, its past century has been one of conflict.
At the end of World War I, the very first of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points read:
“Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”
Since plans to partition the Ottoman Empire and the Sykes-Picot agreement did not fit this definition, the system of mandates set up by the League of Nations emerged as a “compromise.” The following is a passage from Peter Mansfield’s History of the Middle East:
“It must be said that some British and French statesmen regarded the distinction between mandates and colonies as no more than fiction. One of the frankest was the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, who told the House of Lords on 25 June 1920,
“It is quite a mistake to suppose… that under the Covenant of the League of Nations or any other instrument, the gift of the mandate rests with the League of Nations. It does not do so. It rests with the Powers who have conquered the territories, which it then falls to them to distribute, and it was in these circumstances that the mandate for Palestine and Mesopotamia was conferred upon and accepted by us and that the mandate for Syria was conferred upon and accepted by France.” [i]
The mandate system was a great disappointment to Arabs who expected immediate independence. In the Great Syrian Revolt (1925–1927), thousands of Syrians were killed in the fighting between Syrians and the French military.
This is how Margaret MacMillan sums up the period in her remarkable book, “Peacemakers”:
“Britain and France paid a high price for their role in the peace settlements in the Middle East. The French never completely pacified Syria, and it never paid for itself. The British pulled back in Iraq and Jordan as quickly as they could, but they found they were stuck with Palestine and an increasingly poisonous situation between Arabs and Jews. The Arab world as a whole never forgot its betrayal, and Arab hostility came to focus on the example of Western perfidy nearest at hand, the Zionist presence in Palestine. Arabs also remembered the brief hope of Arab unity at the end of the war. After 1945, the resentments and that hope continued to shape the Middle East.”[ii]
On August 20, 1953, Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by American and British intelligence services.
In July 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. On October 29, 1956, Israeli armed forces pushed into Egypt toward the Canal, and British and French forces followed. Bowing to hostile world reaction, particularly from the Eisenhower administration, British and French forces withdrew in December, followed by the Israelis in March 1957.
Coming to more recent times, on October 7, 2001, the US and the UK launched Operation Enduring Freedom against the Taliban.
In March 2003, they invaded Iraq on false premises.
On March 19, 2011, France, the UK, and the US launched military operations against Qaddafi.
However, the Arab Spring confronted the West with an unexpected contradiction. Former regional leaders who had long been treated as friends suddenly metamorphosed into oppressive dictators, reflecting the inconsistency between the West’s public discourse on democracy and its economic interests.
In December 2024, the Assad regime in Syria collapsed after a rebel offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which originally formed as an affiliate of al-Qaeda. Today, its Riyadh-born leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is the President of Syria. His numerous trips to Western capitals only demonstrate that he has become a well-received and cooperative leader for the West.
In brief, Israel, to its credit, has successfully sidelined its two principal Arab adversaries, Iraq and Syria, over the last twenty-five years. In the not-too-distant future, it will formally annex the West Bank and will never leave Gaza. Tel Aviv is now after sidelining Iran.
At the beginning of the war with Iran, President Trump said that it would last four to five weeks but could go “far longer.” The war is now in its sixth month. Apart from Iran’s nuclear program, passage through the Strait of Hormuz and, more recently, the Bab al-Mandeb have become new flashpoints. Many worry that the conflict is expanding.
China is paying a price as a major importer of Iranian oil. Yet, from Beijing’s perspective, this might be seen as a tolerable trade-off for having the US bogged down in the Middle East again.
It seems that the world is becoming accustomed to the war in Iran, much like the one in Ukraine, now in its fifth year. The war with Iran has made oil prices volatile. Russia and Ukraine are now increasingly striking their grain export terminals in the Black Sea, once again creating problems for global food supply chains.
And in the Western hemisphere, after the capture of President Maduro, a US “intervention” in Cuba may also become part of Rubio’s campaign for presidential nomination.
In a must-read Foreign Affairs essay titled “America’s Fatal Attraction to War, The Perverse Incentives for Presidents to Use Military Force”, Emma Ashford addresses US interventions/wars.[iii] Her concluding sentences are the following:
“… Eventually, the United States will find itself constrained—no longer able to fight everything, everywhere, all at once. The question is whether it wants to proactively decide where it uses its resources, or whether it wants its hands tied by a parade of forever conflicts.”
As for Türkiye, the parliament passed the “Framework Law” by a large majority on August 10. The US ambassador to Ankara, Tom Barrack, welcomed the law and praised it. Diplomatic tradition does not allow ambassadors to comment on the domestic developments of the countries where they serve. However, this businessman, a political appointee like many others under Trump’s rule, sees himself as the regional governor and continues to overstep the bounds of tolerance while his hosts remain silent. By contrast, in February 1997, the ambassador of an important country was rightly told to leave Ankara following his inappropriate involvement in Türkiye’s domestic politics.
A final word: Those interested in decorating their homes with works of art usually buy a painting first and then look for a frame that best displays it. It seems that we now have a frame but have yet to find the right painting. All we need to remember is that a painting is more than its frame. Until an inspiring painting of democracy lies within its edges, Türkiye’s new “framework” will remain empty.
[i] Peter Mansfield, History of the Middle East, Penguin Books, pp. 221–222.
[ii] Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers, John Murray (Publishers), p. 420.
[iii] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/guest-pass/redeem/Y0d1-OqrT74
