The Middle East did not collapse on its own
There is a very useful, very repeated lie, and a deeply racist way of looking at the Middle East: assuming that the Middle East is trapped between dictatorships, fanaticism and violence because its societies failed to evolve, because its religion is incompatible with freedom, or because “they have always been like that, savages.” That lie serves a clear political function: to erase the responsibility of those who, for more than a century, turned the region into a laboratory of imperial cynicism. The Middle East did not collapse on its own. It was pushed into collapse. And the same names appear again and again: the United Kingdom, France, and later, the United States.
First came London and Paris, who, after the agony of the Ottoman Empire, divided the region with the arrogance of those who carve up someone else's map from a European office. The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 was not a diplomatic accident or a mistake of its time. It was a declaration of principles. For those two countries, the Middle East was not a group of peoples with the right to decide their own destiny, but a zone to be divided, administered and exploited. Then came the League of Nations mandate system, which sold “guardianship” as what was in fact colonialism with a legal varnish. Iraq and Palestine fell under British control; Syria and Lebanon under French control. The language was more refined than old conquests, but the logic was the same: rule others without asking them anything.
The United Kingdom had already spent decades acting in Egypt as if it owned the house. It occupied Egypt in 1882 and turned it into a protectorate in 1914. In Aden and the Gulf, it built a network of political subordination to secure trade routes, ports and strategic positions. France did in Syria and Lebanon what so many European powers did elsewhere: present itself as a civilizing force while imposing external political frameworks useful to its own interests. They were not clumsy benefactors, but imperial powers defending power, trade and control.
When classic colonialism became publicly indefensible, domination did not disappear; it simply changed form. Then the United States stepped in, having learned the British and French lesson very well. It was no longer necessary to occupy every territory with your own flag; it was enough to use something cleaner for public opinion and more effective in practice: support allied governments, punish sovereign projects, secure military bases, guarantee energy flows, and topple whoever threatened that order. Fewer viceroys and more intelligence services. Fewer colonial uniforms and more covert operations. Less civilizing discourse and more rhetoric about stability.
The case of Iran in 1953 remains the most obscene example. Mohammad Mosaddegh was neither a fanatic nor a delusional strongman. He represented a possibility that London and Washington found intolerable: that a country in the region might control its own wealth, especially oil, and pursue a more sovereign path. Official U.S. documentation and declassified archives leave little room for naivety: there was planning and involvement in the operation that ended with his overthrow. In other words, when a regional leader tried to prevent his country's resources from obediently serving foreign interests, the response was not respect for self-determination or democratic legality, but a coup with CIA and MI6 involvement.
This is the point too many people refuse to face: historically, the United States, the United Kingdom and France were not scandalized by every human-rights violation in the Middle East; they were scandalized by disobedience. The proof is not in grand speeches but in a repeated pattern: tolerance for useful regimes, hostility toward overly autonomous projects, selective indignation depending on strategic convenience. What was defended was not the freedom of peoples, but a regional order favorable to energy, military and geopolitical interests.
Then the same analysts wonder why the region radicalizes. The right question is different: what did they expect to happen? Did they expect societies subjected for generations to imperial partitions, mandates, occupations, coups, wars, humiliation and foreign tutelage to calmly build stable democracies? Societies do not radicalize by whim. They radicalize when political space is destroyed, when moderate routes fail, when sovereignty becomes fiction, and when daily life unfolds under fear, poverty or violence.
This does not mean absolving local actors. That would be as foolish as the opposite narrative. Of course there are reactionary clerics, corrupt oligarchies and predatory monarchies. Of course the Taliban are responsible for their barbarity. But one truth does not cancel the other: the West bears responsibility for many of these monsters, perhaps not because it invented all of them, but because it created the conditions for many to grow, gain legitimacy, or replace more democratic alternatives.
It is also intellectually poor to explain the Middle East's crises through Islam alone. Christianity was, for centuries, a fierce machinery of control, censorship, patriarchy and persecution. Europe did not advance because Christianity became kind. It advanced because its power was limited through political struggle, secularization, feminism, public education, trade unionism, social conflict and institutional construction. Rights did not spring from the altar; they were wrested from those who used it to rule.
This is where the responsibility of Washington, London and Paris becomes impossible to hide. When a region is treated for decades as a strategic board, human dignity stops being the priority and control takes its place. Tyrants are tolerated if they guarantee stability. International law is invoked when convenient and trampled when inconvenient. Human rights are defended with one hand while the order that blocks them is protected with the other.
That is why the Middle East should not be explained as the failure of peoples supposedly incapable of living in freedom. It should be understood as the result of a long chain of imperial selfishness, diplomatic cowardice, calculated interventions, and complicity with local elites that found foreign backing the best way to perpetuate themselves. The United Kingdom and France opened many of the wounds, and the United States learned to manage, deepen and exploit them effectively.
The truth is simpler and more brutal: societies do not advance while living under permanent threat, tutelage or violence. They advance when they have time, peace, institutions and room to debate, organize and win rights from those who oppress them. In the Middle East, that time was repeatedly stolen. And those who stole it were not gods or cultural curses. They were specific governments, under specific flags, with specific interests: power and money.
If you want to comment on the article or propose a topic: Contact.