The battle for control of the Middle East.

• Author: Jones, Curt

As a geopolitical region, the Middle East generates a never-ending power struggle for overall hegemony. That objective has never been achieved by a single contender. The Caliphate came closest. From the death of Muhammad in 632, the Islamic conquest exploded into the power vacuum created by the mutual exhaustion of the Byzantines, based in Constantinople, and the Sasanians, based in Persia. In 30 years the Arabs overran the entire Middle East except the Asian outskirts of Constantinople. The Byzantines took Anatolia back soon after.

Otherwise, the region has oscillated between periods of political consolidation under two or three empires (some indigenous, some foreign), and periods of splintering into a jumble of political entities and disputed fragments.

The approximate dates of the most recent period of indigenous consolidation were 1500-1800, between the Ottomans in the west, and the Safavids and successors in Persia.

The most recent period of foreign consolidation, under Britain, France, and Russia, was 1800-1950.

The last 65 years have been a period of splintering, marked by a four-way contest for control among Turkey; Iran and its affiliates; the Sunni combine; and the Israeli-American diarchy and its affiliates. Several Sunni states have taken out extra insurance by simultaneous affiliation with the diarchy and the Sunni combine. In the confusion caused by the turmoil in the region, and by the inconsistency of American Middle East policy, the Kurdish outcasts have managed to exercise de facto statehood, and even the Gaza Strip has an administration responsible for its own domestic policy, and such foreign policy initiatives as the Israeli lockdown permits. In the Middle East, de facto trumps de jure. Just as Occupied Palestine is for practical purposes part of a Greater Israel, Iraqi Kurdistan and the Gaza Strip are autonomous, and the total of states in the Middle East is now 21.

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