In the spring of 1916, while young men died by the millions in the trenches of Europe, two diplomats sat in a quiet room and drew lines on a map. Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and François Georges-Picot of France carved up lands they had never visited, dividing peoples they had never met, creating borders that ignored geography, ethnicity, religion, and history.
Those lines—drawn with rulers across deserts and through ancient communities—created the modern Middle East. They also created a century of war.
The Context: A Dying Empire and Hungry Vultures
By 1916, the Ottoman Empire—which had ruled much of the Middle East for four centuries—was crumbling. The "Sick Man of Europe" had made the fatal error of joining Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I. Now the Allied powers smelled opportunity.
Britain had specific interests: protecting the Suez Canal (lifeline to India), securing oil supplies from Persia (modern Iran), and preventing any rival power from dominating the region. France had historical ties to Lebanon's Christian communities and ambitions for Syria. Russia wanted Constantinople and access to warm-water ports.
"The Great War redrew the map of the Middle East, created new nations, and set the stage for conflicts that continue today."
— National WWI Museum and Memorial
The question was not whether the Ottoman lands would be divided, but how—and who would get what.
Three Promises, Three Contradictions
What made the post-war settlement so catastrophic was that Britain made three mutually exclusive promises to three different parties. Each promise was sincere at the moment it was made. All three could not be kept.
Promise 1: The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence (1915-1916)
Sharif Hussein of Mecca controlled Islam's holiest cities. Britain needed him to lead an Arab revolt against the Ottomans—to tie down Turkish troops and undermine the enemy from within. In exchange, Britain's High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, offered a breathtaking prize: an independent Arab kingdom.
"Great Britain is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits demanded by the Sherif of Mecca."
— Sir Henry McMahon to Sharif Hussein, October 24, 1915
Hussein understood this to include Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. The letters were deliberately vague about precise boundaries—a diplomatic trick that would later allow Britain to claim Palestine was never included. But the Arabs who fought and died in the revolt believed they were fighting for freedom.
T.E. Lawrence—"Lawrence of Arabia"—who helped lead the Arab Revolt, later wrote with bitter honesty about the betrayal:
"I risked the fraud on my conviction that Arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the East, and that better we win and break our word than lose... The Arab Revolt had counted on Allied faith."
Promise 2: The Sykes-Picot Agreement (May 1916)
While McMahon was promising Hussein an Arab kingdom, Sykes and Picot were secretly dividing that same territory between their empires.
The agreement created zones of direct control and zones of "influence":
- France would directly control coastal Syria and Lebanon (the "Blue Zone")
- Britain would directly control southern Iraq and the ports of Haifa and Acre (the "Red Zone")
- Inland Syria and Mosul would be under French influence
- Jordan and Baghdad would be under British influence
- Palestine would be under international administration
"France and Great Britain are prepared to recognize and protect an independent Arab state or a confederation of Arab states."
— The Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916
Note the cynical language: they were "prepared to recognize" Arab independence in areas they planned to control as "zones of influence." The Arabs would get nominal independence while the Europeans pulled the strings.
The agreement was secret. It was also shameless—both men knew it contradicted the promises being made to Hussein at that very moment.
Promise 3: The Balfour Declaration (November 1917)
As if two contradictory commitments weren't enough, Britain added a third. In November 1917, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild:
"His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object."
— Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, November 2, 1917
The declaration added a caveat—that nothing should "prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine"—but this was window dressing. The "existing non-Jewish communities" were 90% of Palestine's population. You cannot establish one people's "national home" in a land overwhelmingly inhabited by another people without prejudicing their rights.
Why did Britain issue this declaration? Motives were mixed: genuine sympathy for Zionism among some officials, a desire to win Jewish support for the war effort (particularly in America and Russia), and strategic calculation that a Jewish homeland would create a friendly population near the Suez Canal.
Whatever the motives, Britain had now promised the same land to three different parties.
The Mandates: Colonialism in Legal Costume
After the war, the contradictions had to be resolved—or at least papered over. The mechanism was the League of Nations "mandate" system, created by Article 22 of the League Covenant:
"To those colonies and territories which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves there should be applied the principle of trusteeship."
— League of Nations Covenant, Article 22, 1919
The language is remarkable. The Arabs of the Middle East—heirs to civilizations that had built empires while northern Europe was in the Dark Ages—were deemed "not yet able to stand by themselves." The mandate system was colonialism dressed in the language of benevolent guardianship.
France received mandates for Syria and Lebanon. Britain received mandates for Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine. The mandate texts explicitly incorporated the Balfour Declaration, making support for Zionism an international legal obligation.
Drawing the Borders
The borders of the modern Middle East were drawn to serve colonial convenience, not local reality:
Iraq was created by combining three Ottoman provinces: Mosul (Kurdish), Baghdad (Sunni Arab), and Basra (Shia Arab). These three communities had never been a single political unit. Forcing them into one state created tensions that erupted in the 2000s civil war.
Syria was carved up: France separated Lebanon to create a Christian-majority state friendly to French interests, then later detached Alexandretta (Hatay) and gave it to Turkey. The borders bore no relation to demographics or geography.
Transjordan was invented in 1921 when Winston Churchill—then Colonial Secretary—drew a line to give Sharif Hussein's son Abdullah a kingdom. The story goes that Churchill boasted he had created Jordan "with the stroke of a pen, one Sunday afternoon."
Palestine was the most contested. The mandate explicitly committed Britain to facilitating Jewish immigration while somehow protecting Arab rights. This impossible task would produce three decades of violence before Britain gave up and handed the problem to the United Nations.
The Treaty of Versailles and Its Aftermath
The 1919 Treaty of Versailles formally transferred Ottoman territories to the victorious powers:
"Germany renounces in favour of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers all her rights and titles over her oversea possessions."
— Treaty of Versailles, Part IV, Article 119, June 28, 1919
The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 finalized the dissolution:
"Turkey hereby renounces all rights and title whatsoever over or respecting the territories situated outside the frontiers laid down in the present Treaty."
— Treaty of Peace at Lausanne, July 24, 1923
The Ottoman Empire was dead. In its place were artificial states with artificial borders, ruled by foreign powers who had promised freedom but delivered colonialism.
The Consequences: A Century of Conflict
Every major conflict in the modern Middle East can be traced back to these decisions:
The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate made conflict inevitable by promising a "Jewish national home" in a land with an Arab majority. The 1948 war, the 1967 war, the intifadas, the current crisis in Gaza—all flow from that impossible promise.
Iraq's Instability: Combining Kurds, Sunnis, and Shia into one artificial state created permanent tension. The British imposed a Hashemite monarchy (giving another of Hussein's sons a throne). When that monarchy was overthrown in 1958, Iraq began its cycle of coups, dictatorships, and eventually the catastrophe of the 2003 invasion.
Syrian Civil War: France's arbitrary borders and divide-and-rule policies (favoring Alawites over the Sunni majority) planted seeds that would eventually produce the Assad dynasty and its brutal civil war.
Lebanese Civil War: Creating Lebanon as a Christian-majority state was only possible by excluding parts of Greater Syria. As demographics shifted, the delicate sectarian balance collapsed into fifteen years of civil war (1975-1990).
Kurdish Statelessness: The Kurds—a distinct people numbering some 30-40 million—were divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. They remain the world's largest nation without a state.
The Exposure: When Secrets Became Public
The Sykes-Picot Agreement was secret—until it wasn't. In late 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and discovered copies of secret Allied agreements in the Tsarist archives. They published them, causing enormous embarrassment to Britain and France.
For Arabs who had been fighting and dying in the revolt, believing they were fighting for independence, the revelation was devastating. Sharif Hussein initially refused to believe it. When he finally accepted the truth, he felt betrayed—because he had been betrayed.
The revelation didn't change anything. The agreements were implemented anyway. But the knowledge of betrayal poisoned Arab attitudes toward Western powers for generations.
The Lessons: Why This History Matters
Understanding Sykes-Picot isn't just academic. It's essential for understanding:
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Why Middle Eastern borders seem arbitrary: Because they are. They were drawn by Europeans for European interests.
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Why the region seems perpetually unstable: Because the states created were artificial, combining hostile groups and dividing natural communities.
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Why anti-Western sentiment runs deep: The betrayal of wartime promises created justified grievance that has never healed.
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Why "nation-building" fails: External powers cannot create stable nations by drawing lines on maps. Nations grow from shared identity, history, and consent—none of which were present in the mandate states.
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Why Israel-Palestine seems intractable: The problem began with a promise that could not be kept—a "national home" for one people in another people's homeland.
The men who drew these lines—Sykes, Picot, Balfour, Churchill—were not monsters. They were products of their time, when European powers assumed the right to dispose of "lesser" peoples as they saw fit. But good intentions (to the extent they existed) didn't prevent catastrophic consequences.
A century later, we're still living with those consequences. The lines drawn in 1916 still mark the borders. The contradictory promises still generate conflict. The peoples divided and combined against their will still struggle with the results.
Understanding this history doesn't solve today's problems. But it explains why the problems exist—and why simple solutions so consistently fail.
Primary Sources
- Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) - Yale Law School Avalon Project
- McMahon-Hussein Correspondence - University of Delaware History Archive
- Balfour Declaration (1917) - Yale Law School Avalon Project
- League of Nations Covenant - Yale Law School Avalon Project
- Treaty of Versailles (1919) - Yale Law School Avalon Project
- Treaty of Lausanne (1923) - BYU WWI Document Archive
- League of Nations Mandate for Palestine - Yale Law School Avalon Project