The enduring value of David Fromkin’s study of the political machinations that created the modern Middle East, A Peace to End All Peace, lies in the meticulously conveyed history of outside interference in local affairs, including, most ominously, the establishment of national borders throughout much of the region by the so-called Great Powers of Europe. Those “powers,” Great Britain, France, Russia, and the soon-to-be nonexistent Ottoman Empire, vied with and against each other for influence in Arabia and across North Africa, as well as in the vast region of South Asia that includes Afghanistan. The result was a conglomeration of Arab nations, the borders of which reflected those machinations rather than the natural evolution of nation-states that might otherwise have materialized. Most prominent among the agreements involving European powers was the Sykes-Picot agreement. Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges Picot were the diplomatic representatives of Great Britain and France, respectively, who, during the Great War (World War I), negotiated between themselves the future borders of the Middle East with each of these two world powers guaranteed control over different regions or countries. While the most well-known, the Sykes-Picot agreement was only one of a series of such secretly concluded resolutions dividing the spoils of war between Great Britain, France and Russia, the Ottoman Empire being a combatant on the side of Germany during the war and then in its death throes (which would lead to the post-war establishment of the modern Republic of Turkey).
Fromkin’s study is valuable for the depth of research he conducted and for the astute analyses he provides. A Peace to End All Peace takes the reader through the dissolution of the once mighty Ottoman Empire, with the resulting vacuum in Arabia providing the opening to Great Britain and France for which those nations had long hungered. The Ottoman Empire had represented an extremely formidable obstacle to French and British ambitions for hundreds of years, and the empire’s demise left now-liberated Arab tribes the opportunity, they believed, to gain independence and to establish their own kingdoms and republics. Indeed, the empire’s final defeat in the Great War emboldened such figures as Ibn Saud, eventual founder of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and King Hussein, whose Hashemite kingdom would comprise, at various times, modern-day Jordan and Iraq, each of those two nations ruled by a son of Hussein Ibn Ali, a leader of the Arab Revolt against the Turks during the war, to press for advantage against each other at the expense of tribes wishing to be incorporated into neither newly-established entity. While British support for the Arab Revolt against Turkish (Ottoman) occupation provided an important sideshow to the major conflict raging in Europe, that support concealed Britain’s ambition of filling the aforementioned vacuum that would be left in Arabia once the Turks were definitively defeated.
Fromkin’s book performs an invaluable service in presenting this history. The problems of the modern Middle East owe themselves in no small part to the political maneuvers performed by Britain and France. By describing and explaining these maneuvers—and one would be remiss if one failed to mention the role of the Balfour Declaration in further muddying the waters, although muddying them in a way that provided a sanctuary for European, African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Jews desperate to escape genocidal tyranny at the hands of leaders of nations across much of the world—Fromkin provides readers a solid background in understanding how we arrived at our current destination. It’s a convoluted history, but essential to appreciating the intricacies involved in the modern Middle East. That is the service Fromkin performs in A Peace to End All Peace.
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