David Fromkin (1932–2017)

Believe it or not, there was a time when “there is trouble in the Middle East” was not an evergreen statement.

That time has certainly passed from living memory, but was not nearly as long ago as one might imagine.

When my grandmother was born in 1906, the Ottoman Empire not only still existed, but still controlled most of the area we consider the Middle East: Syria, Palestine, the Hejaz, and Iraq.

Twenty years later, the Ottoman Empire was gone, and the conditions were established which show more have led to all the continuous crises in the century since.

David Fromkin detailed exactly how all of this went down from 1914 to 1922 in the aptly titled A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.

The TL;DR version? It was the British. (It’s always the British).

You might think the book is all about the Ottoman Empire’s exploits in World War I and immediately afterward. The author certainly spends some time discussing these things, but for good reason the book is mostly centered on Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, and their imperial designs on the Middle East after the imagined but expected fall of the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire was known as the “sick man of Europe” because its glory was clearly fading, its European holdings had been revolting to some degree or another, and with varying levels of success, since the 1820s, and if any European power really wanted to, they could expend the effort to eliminate it. But it remained because propping it up was preferable to the European powers than the free-for-all intra-European fighting which would take place for the lands involved.

The French had been active in supporting the Christians in Lebanon and believed it deserved hegemony over Syria (of which Lebanon was then a part). The British had been long concerned about the Russians: India was quite important to Britain, and so the Suez Canal and its naval access to India was important to Britain, and so Britain was the real force in power in Egypt, and the British were concerned about Russian imperial ambitions in central Asia and the Middle East. The Germans were always concerned about British imperial power and ambitions.

And so the Ottomans were stuck in the middle. When the war started, the Young Turk porte might have been influenced toward neutrality or in either direction, but the Germans did better in their diplomacy, and the Ottomans allied with the Central Powers.

What I never knew was how the British were within 24 hours of seizing Istanbul and were planning to concede it to the Russians in 1915. Churchill had sent in the navy; they had encountered some resistance and lost a ship; he commanded them to go in the next day, but the order was not followed. Had it been followed, the British would have seen the Ottomans withdraw from their positions, and they would have been able to enter Constantinople without firing many shots. The modern world would look and be entirely different if this had taken place.

But it didn’t. The navy withdrew. They planned an invasion and never really committed the resources necessary to it. It led to the Gallipoli disaster.

Since that didn’t work, the British then attempted to engender a rebellion among the Arabs against the Turks. The Arabs had their issue with Turkish leadership, but somehow the British convinced themselves they could generate enough of a rebellion to make a difference, and the Arabs would welcome British oversight. The British promised Hussein, a Hashemite ruler, that he would be caliph of the Arabs, imagining it a limited spiritual role and not its full secular-spiritual understanding. They also continued to support the opposing house of ibn Saud.

In the end Feisal and Abdullah, sons of Hussein, were used by the British as the pretense of an Arab show of force for what was really a British army. In 1917 and 1918 this British Army would successfully overrun Palestine and Syria.

World War I ended on 11/11/1918, but the conflict with the Ottoman Empire/Turkey would continue for many more years. If Lloyd George could have imposed and certified his terms early, things might have gone differently. But it took many years; the Americans did not want to cultivate British imperial ambitions but would not take on responsibility itself; final agreements were not made until 1922.

And the world of 1922 was nothing like the world of 1918, let alone 1914. The Russians were now the Bolshevik Soviets, who allied with their former opponents the Turks against their former allies the British. The British had encouraged the Greeks to press their interests in Asia Minor, and it backfired on all of them spectacularly, leading to the slaughter of many Greeks and Turks, the migration of Greek Christians from Asia Minor to Greece, leaving Asia Minor without a Christian population for the first time since the days of the Apostles, and most of the Turkish Muslims in Greece moved to Turkey.

The Europeans, primarily the British, had come in and drew lines and created nation-states to suit their short-term interests and purposes. The British attempted to dislodge the French from Syria, but without great success; it did lead, however, to the separation of Lebanon and Syria, as it is to this day. The British had propped up a competent general who became the Shah and turned Persia into Iran. The lands between Syria and Iran had never been a single polity, and contained at least three major groups; and yet the British fashioned it into a nation called Iraq, and installed a foreign Arab from the southwest, Feisal the Hashemite, as king. Churchill granted what he imagined was temporary rule over the Transjordan portion of Palestine to Feisal’s brother Abdullah, which essentially created the nation of Jordan which remains and is ruled by Abdullah’s descendant to this day. And Churchill and George really wanted to honor the Balfour Declaration and create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but were constantly thwarted by a lack of resources and opposition from other British authorities.

And then they found oil everywhere, and it became really important. And we know the rest of the story.

When ISIS took over parts of northern Iraq, one of the first things they did - and made sure to record it - was to physically destroy the markers which delineated Syria from Iraq, sharply condemning the Sykes-Picot agreement and line. We in America might find that kind of thing baffling: why are they so obsessed with lines from about a century ago? And yet, as this book well indicates, everything had been as it had been for almost 600 years until 1922; and most would not have known much difference between Ottoman rule and the Abbasid and Umayyad rule which preceded them, so, really, 1200 years! The Middle East went from living as it did in medieval days to a world of modern nation-states with lines and divisions imposed upon them by others who considered themselves more civilized. The author did well to encourage Westerners to think about how long it took for Europe to finally figure out its political ideologies and borders after the Roman Empire, and then recognize the Middle East has only had a century of its current borders. If you are interested in what’s going on in the Middle East, this book is required reading for understanding how the Europeans, especially the British, obtained what was best for their short-term interest, and how that has turned out for everyone ever since. show less

A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin provides an excellent glimpse at the mind-boggling complexity of international relations. This is a history of the creation of the modern Middle East, and the interrelationships among all the interested parties. Most of the transactions read like my very favorite joke from The Joys of Yiddish:

"The two traveling salesmen, competitors in selling notions, spied each other on the platform. "Hello, Liebowitz." "Hello, Posner." Silence. "So - where are you show more going?" asked Liebowitz. "To Minsk," said Posner. Silence. "Listen, Posner," sighed Liebowitz, who was a very bright shaygets [in this sense: clever lad; rascal], "when you say you're going to Minsk, you want me to think you're going to Pinsk. But I happen to know that you ARE going to Minsk - so why are you lying?!!"

Multiply the idea conveyed in the joke by adding in all the players for the Middle East: Britain, France, Russia, Turkey, Arabs (with rival clans), Jews (with varying ideologies), the United States, Italy, and so on. You need a constantly readjusted flow chart to ascertain who is on which side and whose side the other side thinks the other side is on!

This masterful narrative focuses on the restructuring of the modern Middle East between the years 1914-1922: the fabrication of Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia by Britain, the setting of the frontiers of Syria and Lebanon by France, and the creation of the borders of Armenia and Azerbaijan by Russia. Fromkin contends that the conflicts that unsettle the region today are largely a result of the presumptuous manipulation of peoples and places by the imperialist ambitions of the Triple Entente.

The first prize to be divvied up was the Ottoman Empire. Even before the war, secret pacts divided the “Sick Man of Europe” among the allies in anticipation of its seemingly inevitable demise. But one of Britain’s largest mistakes was underestimating the Turks, both as military actors and as a people capable of self-determination, in part because of racism.

Another racist current coloring events was a pervasive anti-Semitism among the British governing classes. It caused them to believe that Jews were conspiring with the Germans, the Turks, and the Russians for power. (Although many Bolsheviks were born into the Jewish religion, they could be identified as Jews in “racial” terms only.) As Fromkin notes, “The Foreign Office believed that the Jewish communities in America and, above all, Russia, wielded great power.” This led them to bizarre misunderstandings of the motives and goals of their adversaries, and to policy formation geared toward an accommodation of the non-existent Jewish conspiracies they saw looming around every corner.

The story, told from the perspective of British involvement, begins with the decision by the War Minister, Lord Kitchener, to partition the Middle East after World War I. After Lord Kitchener’s death in 1916, David Lloyd George (Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister) and Winston Churchill (serving in several different capacities) played larger roles in the British enterprise in the Middle East. “Winston Churchill,” Fromkin writes, “above all, presides over the pages of this book: a dominating figure whose genius animated events and whose larger-than-life personality colored and enlivened them.”

Fromkin vehemently argues against aspersions cast on Churchill’s reputation that arose from his policies in WWI, particularly in regard to the ill-fated action in Gallipoli. Contrary to statements of Churchill’s contemporaries (with their own reputations to protect), Fromkin’s research shows that Churchill first opposed the Gallipoli option, then tried to make it contingent on a joint army-navy operation, then tried to salvage what was left with what he was given. When disaster ensued (a suspension of the failed campaign after a quarter of a million casualties on Britain’s side and a similar amount on Turkey’s), Churchill was made the scapegoat for the ill-conceived and miscarried engagement.

Churchill’s worth was recognized by British leaders, however, and he continued to help formulate policy even after he left the government. After the war, Churchill alone recognized that Britain’s terms could not be imposed if Britain’s armies left the field; and he most forcefully argued that the Moslem character of Britain’s remaining troops in the East must be taken into account lest the army’s loyalty be compromised.

Woodrow Wilson comes off poorly in Fromkin’s telling -- his insistence on attending peace negotiations upset protocol and added nothing to the process, since he came with “many general opinions but without specific proposals….” “Lacking both detailed knowledge and negotiating skills, Wilson was reduced to an obstructive role….” Naïve and ill-informed, he was manipulated by Lloyd George into furthering Britain’s imperial aims. Back home, Wilson “committed one political blunder after another, driving even potential supporters to oppose him.” Nevertheless, Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” played an influential role in the politics of Europe.

Fromkin ends his fascinating account by observing that following WWI, “administration of most of the planet was conducted in a European mode, according to European precepts, and in accordance with European concepts.” Native political structures and cultures were ignored, destroyed, and/or replaced. But legitimacy cannot be conferred by drawing lines on a map; the legacy of the dissection of the Middle East by the great powers informs our politics yet today, and thus the events discussed in this book remain highly relevant and absorbing.

Note: National Book Critics Circle Award (1989) show less

Others have already said it, but I'll say it again: this is a superb account of the high-handed dealings of the colonial powers, during and just after World War I, which shaped the modern Middle East. Besides being meticulously researched and very well written, the book tells a fascinating story which brims with ironies. Fromkin notes that the British asked the Arabs to trust them, yet the British didn't trust the Arabs, nor did they trust the French or the Russians; in fact, individuals at show more various levels of the British government didn't even trust each other, and often they misunderstood or flat-out didn't know each other's views. At every turn, throughout that period, the British and the French were deceiving each other, individuals within their governments were deceiving other individuals in the same government, and all of them were deceiving themselves. It's hard to keep all the twists and turns straight, but every chapter brings new insights. One finishes the book with sadness at what happened, but with the satisfaction of finally understanding what went wrong--and why the Middle East remains a power keg today. show less

A Peace to End All Peace is a serious work of scholarship in understanding the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the foundations of the modern Middle East in the aftermath of World War I. It's deeply researched and painstaking in presenting the different views inside the British government. It is also somewhat scattered, difficult to read, and feels like it's missing key parts.

In 1914, it was obvious to all that the Ottoman Empire was on the ropes. Perpetually broke, technologically show more backwards, with major concessions to European powers over the rights of Christian minorities and the sovereignty of Egypt, and riddled with radical reformist secret societies, the Ottomans were ready for collapse. When the war came, and they aligned with the Entente, it would just take a few sharp invasions to topple the whole rotten edifice, at least in theory.

In practice, it was a different matter, as the Ottoman's repelled an invasion at Gallipoli, and another in Iraq. The Bedouin revolts promised by Arabian princes were expensive and ineffective, contra the self-made myth of T.E. Lawrence (which takes a knocking in this book). British policy was far from unified, even as events tilted towards them in 1918. The Prime Minister opposed the Minister of War opposed the Government of India opposed the Cairo Bureau opposed the Foreign Office. The bureaucratic infighting involved frequent changes of position, punctuated by major position papers, including the Balfour Declaration, which guaranteed a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the secret Sykes-Picot arrangement which divided up the Middle East between Britain and France, and a host of treaties and declaration of principles.

But truth is decided by the facts on the ground, and it is here, in the key period between 1918 and 1922 that the narrative loses steam. Immediately after the armistice, Britain had a million man army spread across the Middle East. They demobilized, and a multisided conflict between European rump armies, Bolshevik missions from Russia, a new ethnic Turkish army, and the Greeks lead to major battles. When the dust finally cleared, the Middle East was much as we see it today, with the building blocks of Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and seeds of the Israel/Palestine conflict. The British were left the inheritors of a system they no longer wanted or had faith in. show less