Don't Blame Sykes-Picot for the Middle East's Mess

(Foreign Policy) Steven A. Cook and Amr T. Leheta - The failure of the Sykes-Picot agreement signed 100 years ago is now part of the received wisdom about the contemporary Middle East. The borders of the countries in the region do not make sense, according to this argument, because there are people of different religions, sects, and ethnicities within them. For starters, Sykes and Picot never negotiated state borders, but rather zones of influence. And the framework the two diplomats hammered out never came into existence. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George's government actively began to undermine the accord as soon as Sykes signed it. Nor are the Middle East's modern borders completely without precedent. These boundaries were not whimsical lines drawn on a blank map. They were based, for the most part, on pre-existing political, social, and economic realities of the region, including Ottoman administrative divisions and practices. Steven A. Cook is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where Amr T. Leheta is a research associate.


2016-05-17 00:00:00

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