re: The complete disappearing of Trump's successes in the Middle East

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The rivalries in the region are very new overall. Egypt, Syria, and the Arab heartland spent a long time as provinces of larger empires.

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And, among themselves, sure there were some old tribal conflicts with forgotten sources that still simmered, but they didn't really have anything to fight about until oil.

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And, among themselves, sure there were some old tribal conflicts with forgotten sources that still simmered, but they didn't really have anything to fight about until oil.

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Absolutely true as well. Going through the documentation to try to understand the tribal rivalries is another immense task, but in truth it existed from the beginning of Islam through the rivalry between Bani Hashim and Bani Quraysh, which the Quraysh eventually won. Members of the Hashim tribe eventually became Kings of Jordan, Iraq, Hejaz and Syria (briefly).

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That Arab-Jewish conflict isn't that old.

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The intense ethnic rivalries that characterize the region are as old as recorded history. The weight of the Ottoman yoke simply kept the conflicts under control for several centuries.

After WWI, the Sykes-Picot Agreement between the victorious allies effectively partitioned the Ottoman Empire as a spoil of war. This disastrous arrangement simply created modern nation states in a region historically bound by tribal and ethnic loyalties.

The modern-day nation states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia all were effectively created by Westerners drawing random lines in the sand. Add the ethnic state of Israel to the mix and you have a region rife for continued conflict.

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The intense ethic rivalries that characterize the region are as old as recorded history.

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It depends on how you define ethnicity. The Westphalian system used in Sykes-Picot assumed a very particular brand of nationalism, nationalism which affected the end of the Ottomans, rather than trying something like earlier Ottoman administration, which gave autonomy to minorities as long as the government received loyalty. The millet system codified some of that autonomy, as it even allowed a millet to redistribute taxes among their own communities. The modern nation-state system also constrains the larger nations so that it is in their interest to use proxy groups to achieve similar influence as they would have gotten through outright conquering. The region was dominated by Turks and Persians for half-a-millennia, it would be silly to assume that absent European or American involvement, those groups wouldn't dominate again.

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The Westphalian system used in Sykes-Picot assumed a very particular brand of nationalism, nationalism which affected the end of the Ottomans, rather than trying something like earlier Ottoman administration, which gave autonomy to minorities as long as the government received loyalty.

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The Romans did the same. This indeed is a characteristic of many lasting military Empires.

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The region was dominated by Turks and Persians for half-a-millennia, it would be silly to assume that absent European or American involvement, those groups wouldn't dominate again.

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What? I suggested no such thing. Indeed, I clearly stated that the Ottomans dominated the region and it was the Ottoman’s Imperial rule which kept ethnic rivalries in check throughout the Ottoman Empire.

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The Romans did the same. This indeed is a characteristic of many lasting military Empires.

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A lot of features of early Arab polity shared overlaps with existing Greek, Roman and Persian administrative structures. That carried over into later caliphates too.

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What? I suggested no such thing. Indeed, I clearly stated that the Ottomans dominated the region and it was the Ottoman’s Imperial rule which kept ethnic rivalries in check throughout the Ottoman Empire.

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Sorry, that caveat was intended for the audience at-large, not you in particular. I know you didn't suggest that, but I was trying to describe it as an effect of the Sykes-Pycot agreement. I apologize for my poor wording.

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crazy4lsu

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A good riposte, but how do you explain the drastic drawdown in their reserves?

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A lot of features of early Arab polity shared overlaps with existing Greek, Roman and Persian administrative structures. That carried over into later caliphates too.

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And later, similar administrative structures where adopted by the British Empire. Are you familiar with the work of Martin Van Creveld? If not, I highly recommend Crevald’s opus The Rise and Decline of the State.

Creveld argues the emergence of industrialized societies that are still centered in ethnic, tribal or sectarian allegiances pose an existential threat to Westphalian notions of modern Statehood. First published a few years before 9-11-01, Creveld’s study seems prophetic in predicting the rise of non-State sponsored terrorism and the crisis of legitimacy that faces modern nation States in the West.

When viewed against the vast scale of human history, Creveld demonstrates that abstract loyalties and abstract allegiances to an abstract entity such as the State can only be viewed as a very recent phenomenon:

“The State is an abstract entity which can be neither seen, nor touched. The entity is not identical with either the rulers or the ruled, it is a corporation in the sense that it possesses a legal persona of its own, which means that it has rights and duties and may engage in various activities as if it were a real, flesh and blood, living individual. Understood in this way, the State — like the corporation of which it is a subspecies — is a comparatively recent invention.”

As we discussed above, the success of far-flung Military Empires across the ages depended upon some form of local autonomous rule. Creveld notes that the British Empire faced rebellion and revolt when the British provincial and colonial governments attempted to suppress native customs and cultures that an increasingly modernized British society found repugnant. In contrast, the British Empire was strongest in those regions in which local rule prevailed:

“For the rest, they were content to leave the chiefs to administer their own peoples according to their traditions, even to the extent of formally appointing them servants of the Crown, paying them salaries and emphasizing their respect for them. The system was cheap to run, the number of white administrators usually being only one per 70,000-100,000 natives; as Winston Churchill might have said, never did so few keep down so many with the aid of so little.”

In a nut-shell, Creveld argues that the modern nation-state has largely outlived its usefulness in much of the world and is destined to be replaced by a different form of socio-political organization. The throughly modern idea that religiously diverse, multi-ethic cultures will live amongst each other in the peace and harmony of pluralistic democracies seems a fanciful notion that is incompatible with the whole of human history.