The Sykes-Picot Agreement: A Century of Division

How a secret colonial treaty engineered the fragmentation of the Middle East and continues to shape regional conflicts today

The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 stands as one of the most consequential secret treaties in modern history, fundamentally reshaping the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East. Named after British diplomat Mark Sykes and French diplomat François Georges-Picot, this clandestine arrangement between colonial powers carved arbitrary borders across the region, creating artificial nation-states that continue to influence regional dynamics more than a century later. The agreement was negotiated in the shadows of World War I, at a time when the Ottoman Empire was crumbling and European powers were positioning themselves to claim the spoils of its disintegration. What made this treaty particularly insidious was not merely its colonial ambitions, but the systematic way it engineered division and conflict that would reverberate through generations.

The borders drawn by Sykes and Picot were not based on any historical, cultural, linguistic, or geographic logic that reflected the realities of the populations living in these territories. Instead, they were lines drawn on maps in European capitals, guided by imperial interests in oil fields, trade routes, and strategic military positions. These artificial boundaries split unified tribes, separated families, divided fertile lands from water sources, and forced disparate communities with centuries of animosity into single political entities. The fundamental disregard for the region’s complex social fabric was not an oversight but a deliberate strategy designed to ensure that the newly created states would remain weak, divided, and dependent on their colonial masters for survival and stability.

More than a century after its signing, the Sykes-Picot Agreement remains not just a historical curiosity but a living framework that continues to define Middle Eastern politics, economics, and conflicts. The sectarian violence in Iraq and Syria, the Kurdish struggle for autonomy across four countries, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, disputes over transboundary water resources, and the broader instability that has plagued the region can all trace their roots, at least partially, to the colonial architecture established by this agreement. Understanding Sykes-Picot is therefore essential not only for comprehending the past but for making sense of present-day Middle Eastern affairs and the challenges that continue to obstruct peace, development, and genuine sovereignty in the region.

Understanding the Sykes-Picot Agreement

The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret treaty negotiated between May 1915 and May 1916 during World War I, at a critical juncture when the Allied Powers were seeking to secure their post-war positions in the Middle East. The negotiations were conducted in strict secrecy, with neither the Arab populations who inhabited these territories nor even many officials within the negotiating governments aware of the discussions taking place. Sir Mark Sykes, representing British interests, and François Georges-Picot, acting on behalf of France, met multiple times to delineate spheres of influence that would satisfy both powers’ imperial ambitions while avoiding direct conflict between the two allies.

The agreement divided the Ottoman Empire’s Arab territories into multiple zones with varying degrees of control and influence. France was allocated direct control over coastal Syria, Lebanon, Cilicia in southern Turkey, and Mosul in northern Mesopotamia. Britain received direct control over southern Mesopotamia, including the vital port of Basra and Baghdad, as well as the ports of Haifa and Acre in Palestine. Between these zones of direct control, the agreement established two zones of influence: Zone A under French influence covering inland Syria and Mosul, and Zone B under British influence encompassing the territory between Palestine and Mesopotamia, essentially modern-day Jordan and parts of Iraq. Palestine itself was designated for international administration, reflecting the complex religious significance of the region and competing claims from multiple parties.

Russia, as a major Allied power, was included in the original agreement and granted extensive territories in eastern Anatolia, including Armenian lands and parts of Kurdistan stretching from Trebizond through Van to Bitlis. The Russian stake in the agreement reflected both territorial ambitions and the strategic importance of controlling access routes from the Black Sea. However, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 dramatically altered this arrangement when the new Soviet government, seeking to delegitimize the former Tsarist regime and curry favor with anti-imperialist movements, publicly revealed the secret agreement and renounced Russian territorial claims in the region. This exposure caused significant embarrassment to Britain and France and fueled Arab suspicions about Allied intentions.

The most profound betrayal embedded in the Sykes-Picot Agreement was its fundamental contradiction with simultaneous British promises to Arab leaders. Through the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence conducted between July 1915 and March 1916, British High Commissioner Henry McMahon had promised Sharif Hussein of Mecca British support for Arab independence and the creation of an Arab state in exchange for an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Hussein and his sons, believing these assurances, launched the Arab Revolt in June 1916, with Arab forces playing a crucial role in weakening Ottoman control and facilitating British military advances. The Arab fighters who risked their lives believed they were fighting for independence and self-determination, not realizing that their British allies had already secretly agreed to partition their lands with France.

This duplicity was compounded by the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which Britain promised support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” creating yet another contradictory commitment. The three incompatible promises—Arab independence, Anglo-French partition, and a Jewish homeland—revealed the cynical nature of wartime diplomacy and the colonial powers’ true intentions. Rather than liberation and self-determination, the agreement aimed at domination, resource exploitation, and the establishment of a regional order that would serve European strategic and economic interests for decades to come.

The exposure of these contradictions did not occur immediately. Arab forces continued fighting alongside British troops through the war’s conclusion, and it was only at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 that the full extent of the betrayal became apparent to Arab leaders. When Emir Faisal, who had led Arab forces during the revolt, attempted to argue for Arab independence and unified Arab territories, he confronted the reality that Britain and France had already decided the region’s fate. The subsequent implementation of the mandate system through the League of Nations provided legal cover for what was essentially continued colonialism, with Britain and France administering their respective territories ostensibly to prepare them for eventual independence, though in practice maintaining control over resources, foreign policy, and strategic decisions.

Establishing Colonial Dominance

The primary objective of the Sykes-Picot Agreement was to establish and perpetuate Western colonial control over a strategically vital and resource-rich region that had emerged as central to global power dynamics in the early twentieth century. The agreement represented a calculated effort to ensure that European powers would maintain access to and authority over territories containing vast petroleum reserves, critical trade routes connecting Europe to Asia, and geostrategic positions that could determine the balance of power across three continents. The discovery of oil in Persia in 1908 and growing awareness of Mesopotamia’s petroleum potential had transformed the Middle East from a region of primarily religious and historical significance into an area of paramount economic and military importance, particularly as naval forces and industrial economies increasingly depended on oil rather than coal.

British interests were especially focused on securing oil supplies for the Royal Navy, which had recently converted from coal to oil propulsion under First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill’s direction. Control over Mesopotamian oil fields, particularly around Mosul and Kirkuk, became a strategic imperative for maintaining British naval supremacy. France, meanwhile, sought to preserve its historical influence in the Levant dating back to the Crusades and reinforced through centuries of cultural, religious, and commercial ties with Christian communities in Mount Lebanon and Syria. Both powers recognized that the Suez Canal, the overland routes to India, and the emerging oil infrastructure represented assets too valuable to be left to independent regional powers that might pursue their own interests or align with rival European states.

By preemptively dividing the region before the Ottoman Empire’s complete collapse, Britain and France sought to prevent any indigenous movements from establishing independent states that could challenge European interests or create a unified Arab power capable of controlling its own resources. The timing of the agreement was crucial: negotiated while the war’s outcome remained uncertain, it represented an insurance policy ensuring that regardless of how the conflict ended, Anglo-French control over the region would be predetermined. This preemptive division eliminated the possibility that Arab leaders who had fought alongside the Allies might claim the right to self-determination that President Woodrow Wilson would later champion as a principle of the post-war order.

The arbitrary borders drawn by colonial administrators frequently ignored ethnic, religious, linguistic, and tribal affiliations that had organized life in the region for centuries. The new boundaries split the Kurdish people across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Persia, divided Bedouin tribes whose traditional migration routes crossed the new borders, separated Sunni and Shia communities from their religious centers, and forced together populations with historical grievances and minimal common identity. In Iraq, the British combined three former Ottoman provinces—Basra with its Shia majority, Baghdad with its Sunni Arab population, and Mosul with its Kurdish majority—into a single state despite these communities having little history of political unity and significant cultural differences. Similarly, French-controlled Syria and Lebanon were configured to maximize French influence rather than reflect organic political communities, with Lebanon’s borders drawn to create a slight Christian majority that France could position as a client community.

These borders were designed not for the stability or prosperity of the populations living within them, but for external control and the prevention of regional unity. Landlocked states were created deliberately to ensure dependence on neighbors for access to ports, while strategic territories were retained under direct colonial administration. The borders’ artificiality ensured that the new states would face perpetual legitimacy crises, internal divisions, and border disputes with neighbors—conditions that necessitated continued European involvement and prevented the emergence of strong, independent governments that might challenge colonial prerogatives.

This colonial architecture facilitated systematic economic exploitation through multiple mechanisms. Unequal treaties imposed during the mandate period granted European companies monopolistic concessions over oil extraction, railway construction, and other key economic sectors at terms highly favorable to foreign investors. The Iraq Petroleum Company, formed in 1928, exemplified this arrangement: despite operating in Iraqi territory, it was owned by British, French, Dutch, and American interests, with Iraq receiving only minimal royalties while the colonial powers extracted vast wealth. Natural resources were sold at artificially low prices to European markets, while manufactured goods were imported at high prices, creating trade relationships that enriched the colonial powers while hindering indigenous economic development.

The establishment of client regimes dependent on Western support became a cornerstone of maintaining control even as formal colonialism became politically untenable. Britain installed Hashemite monarchies in Iraq and Transjordan, creating governments that owed their existence to British support and could be relied upon to protect British interests. France established political systems in Syria and Lebanon that favored minority communities allied with French interests, particularly Maronite Christians and Alawites, creating power structures that required French backing to maintain control over majority populations. These client regimes were provided with military training, weapons, and financial support conditional on maintaining policies aligned with colonial interests, creating dependencies that persisted long after formal independence.

The mandates system established by the League of Nations provided legal cover for what was essentially continued colonialism under international supervision. Article 22 of the League Covenant established mandates for territories “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world,” employing racist language that presumed Arab populations required European tutelage before achieving self-governance. The mandate system theoretically committed Britain and France to prepare their territories for eventual independence, but in practice it authorized continued colonial control with minimal international oversight and no specified timeline for independence. Mandatory powers controlled foreign policy, maintained military bases, exploited natural resources, and shaped internal governance structures while claiming to fulfill an international civilizing mission.

This legal framework allowed Britain and France to maintain the substance of colonial control while adapting to changing international norms that increasingly rejected explicit imperialism. The mandates created a bureaucratic apparatus of control—including colonial administrators, military advisors, financial supervisors, and legal frameworks—that persisted even after nominal independence was granted. When Syria and Lebanon gained independence in the 1940s and Iraq in 1932, they inherited state structures, economic relationships, and political systems designed during the mandate period to facilitate external influence rather than serve their populations’ interests. The institutional legacy of the mandate system thus ensured that even formally independent states remained economically dependent, politically penetrable, and militarily inferior to their former colonial masters, perpetuating the fundamental power relationships that Sykes-Picot had been designed to establish.

Preventing Muslim Unity Against Colonial Powers

A crucial strategic calculation underlying the Sykes-Picot framework was the deliberate fragmentation of Muslim populations to prevent unified resistance against British and French colonialism. European colonial powers had witnessed the power of unified Islamic movements in previous centuries, from the Ottoman Empire’s expansion into Europe to the Mahdi uprising in Sudan that had defeated British forces in 1885. The specter of pan-Islamic unity, which had been promoted by Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II and found resonance among Muslim populations from North Africa to South Asia, represented a genuine threat to European imperial ambitions. The agreement systematically divided Arab territories into separate entities, creating artificial barriers between communities that had historically shared cultural, religious, economic ties, and most importantly, a common Islamic identity that transcended tribal and regional affiliations.

The fragmentation was methodical and comprehensive. The natural geographic and cultural unity of Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham), which had functioned as a coherent region for centuries encompassing modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and parts of Iraq, was deliberately shattered into five separate entities under different forms of control. Damascus, the historic capital of the Umayyad Caliphate and a center of Islamic learning, was separated from Jerusalem, Mecca, and other Islamic holy sites, preventing any single Arab state from claiming leadership of the Muslim world based on religious authority. The division ensured that no Arab state would possess both the economic resources of Mesopotamian oil, the agricultural wealth of the Levant, the religious legitimacy of the Hijaz (which contained Mecca and Medina), and the strategic position of the Levantine coast—a combination that could have created a genuinely powerful independent state.

By establishing multiple weak states with competing interests and disputed borders, the colonial powers ensured that regional energy would be directed toward internal conflicts and inter-state rivalries rather than organized opposition to European domination. Border disputes were not accidental but engineered: the ambiguous status of Mosul between Turkey and Iraq, the contested territories between Syria and Lebanon, the unclear boundaries between Iraq and Kuwait, and the perpetual tension over Palestine all served to keep newly formed states focused on conflicts with their neighbors rather than on challenging their colonial masters. Each border dispute required mediation by European powers, creating ongoing dependencies and opportunities for intervention.

The creation of sectarian and ethnic divisions—often by privileging minority groups in positions of authority over majority populations—further destabilized the region and created dependencies on colonial patrons. France’s strategy in Syria and Lebanon exemplified this approach with devastating long-term consequences. In Syria, France actively recruited Alawites, a minority Shia sect comprising only about 12% of the population, into the military and security forces, creating a power structure where a religious minority dependent on French support controlled a Sunni majority. France established a separate state of the Alawites in the coastal mountains and encouraged Alawite identity as distinct from Arab identity, sowing divisions that persist in Syria’s current conflict. Similarly, France carved out Greater Lebanon from Syria with borders designed to create a slim Christian majority, positioning Maronite Christians as a governing elite despite the significant Muslim population, ensuring that Lebanon’s Christian leadership would require French protection against the Muslim majority and neighboring Muslim states.

Britain employed similar tactics in Iraq, where the Sunni Arab minority, comprising only about 20% of the population, was placed in dominant political and military positions over the Shia Arab majority (approximately 55%) and the Kurdish population (about 20%). Britain justified this by claiming that Sunnis were more “advanced” and capable of governance, but the actual motivation was creating a ruling class dependent on British support to maintain control over a potentially hostile majority. The Iraqi monarchy, military officer corps, and civil service were predominantly Sunni, while Shia religious authorities and Kurdish tribal leaders were marginalized from formal power structures. This inverted power dynamic ensured that Iraq’s government required British backing to suppress Shia uprisings and Kurdish rebellions, making genuine independence impossible.

The deliberate cultivation of sectarian consciousness where it had previously been relatively muted represented another dimension of the divide-and-rule strategy. While Sunni-Shia theological differences had existed for centuries, they had not always translated into sharp political divisions or prevented cooperation against external threats. Colonial powers actively emphasized and institutionalized sectarian identities through separate legal systems, distinct representation in government bodies, and differential access to resources and opportunities based on religious affiliation. Census counts were conducted with religious categories given paramount importance, educational systems were organized along sectarian lines, and political representation was allocated according to religious quotas—all measures that hardened sectarian boundaries and made cross-sectarian political mobilization more difficult.

This strategy of “divide and rule” extended beyond territorial fragmentation to include the deliberate cultivation of rivalries between Arab nationalist movements and other ethnic groups, particularly the Kurds. Britain and France both made vague promises of Kurdish autonomy or independence to gain Kurdish cooperation during World War I, then subsequently denied these promises while using the specter of Kurdish separatism to threaten Arab nationalist movements. When Arab governments demanded genuine independence, colonial powers could point to the “Kurdish problem” as evidence that these states were too fragile and divided to govern themselves. Similarly, colonial authorities amplified tensions between settled agricultural populations and Bedouin pastoral tribes, between urban merchant classes and rural peasants, and between different regional identities, ensuring that multiple fault lines existed within each new state.

The manipulation of Sunni-Shia tensions served multiple strategic purposes. By supporting Sunni minorities in Shia-majority Iraq and Bahrain while simultaneously supporting Shia minorities in Sunni-majority Syria, colonial powers could play both sides against the middle, ensuring that neither sect could unite against European control. The positioning of Sunni Saudi Arabia against Shia Persia (Iran) created a permanent sectarian rivalry that prevented Islamic unity across the Persian Gulf. Britain’s role in facilitating the Saudi conquest of the Hijaz, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, from the Hashemite Sharif Hussein—who had led the Arab Revolt based on British promises—exemplified this strategy. The Saudi-Hashemite rivalry, overlaid with Wahhabi-traditional Sunni tensions, created yet another division preventing Arab unity.

The creation of competing monarchies and political systems further fragmented any potential for coordinated action. Britain installed Hashemite monarchies in Iraq and Transjordan under Faisal and Abdullah, sons of Sharif Hussein, creating states theoretically aligned with each other but practically weak and dependent on British support. Meanwhile, Britain simultaneously supported the rival House of Saud in the Arabian Peninsula, ensuring that Hashemite and Saudi rulers would compete for leadership of the Arab world rather than unite against British influence. France established a republican system in Syria after suppressing the Hashemite Kingdom of Syria in 1920, creating a different political model that complicated coordination with neighboring monarchies. The diversity of political systems—monarchies in some states, republics in others, theocracies in yet others—meant that Arab states lacked even the common political framework that might facilitate cooperation.

Educational and cultural policies reinforced these divisions by promoting distinct national identities centered on the newly created states rather than broader Arab or Islamic unity. French mandate authorities promoted a distinct Lebanese identity emphasizing Phoenician heritage rather than Arab identity, while simultaneously promoting Syrian identity distinct from broader Arab nationalism. British authorities in Iraq promoted Iraqi nationalism distinct from pan-Arab sentiment, while in Palestine they avoided promoting any form of Palestinian national identity that might challenge the Zionist project. School curricula, national symbols, state ceremonies, and official histories were all crafted to build loyalty to the new artificial states rather than to broader communities of language, religion, or culture.

These divisions made coordinated resistance virtually impossible and allowed colonial powers to maintain influence with minimal direct military presence. When nationalist movements arose in one territory, they could not count on support from neighboring populations who had been conditioned to view their struggles as separate. The Syrian revolt against French rule in 1925-1927 received no meaningful support from Iraq or Transjordan, whose British-backed governments had no interest in challenging colonial power. The Iraqi revolt of 1920 against British rule, which briefly united Sunni and Shia populations, was suppressed with British military force while neighboring Arab territories remained passive. The absence of coordinated resistance meant that colonial powers could defeat nationalist movements piecemeal, using military forces from one colony to suppress revolts in another, and playing Arab leaders against each other by offering concessions to some while denying them to others.

The long-term success of this fragmentation strategy is evident in the fact that even after formal independence, Arab states proved incapable of effective unity. The United Arab Republic between Egypt and Syria (1958-1961) collapsed after only three years due to the deep divisions and competing interests created by decades of separate development under different colonial powers. Subsequent attempts at Arab unity, whether through the Arab League, short-lived federations, or coordination against common threats, have consistently failed because the Sykes-Picot borders and the sectarian, ethnic, and political divisions they institutionalized have become entrenched realities that resist integration. The fragmentation that began as a colonial strategy has become a seemingly permanent feature of Middle Eastern politics, exactly as its architects intended.

Engineering Conflict Through Water Resource Control

Among the most devastating long-term consequences of the Sykes-Picot borders was the inequitable distribution of water resources, creating structural conditions for perpetual conflict that would intensify over subsequent decades. Water, the most fundamental requirement for human survival, agricultural production, and industrial development, became a weapon of control and a source of endless tension in a region where it was already scarce. The arbitrary borders frequently divided river basins and watersheds between multiple states, granting upstream countries disproportionate control over water supplies essential for downstream populations, creating a permanent power imbalance that violated fundamental principles of international water law and hydraulic justice that had governed water-sharing arrangements for millennia.

In pre-colonial times, river systems in the Middle East had been managed as integrated units, with local arrangements and traditional practices ensuring that upstream and downstream communities cooperated in water management. The Ottoman administrative system, despite its many flaws, had maintained a degree of coherence in water governance across river basins. The Sykes-Picot borders destroyed this coherence by placing the headwaters of major rivers in one state while the mid-course and delta regions fell under different sovereignties. This fragmentation was not accidental but represented a calculated colonial strategy: by ensuring that no single Arab state controlled an entire river system, European powers guaranteed that water disputes would create dependencies on external mediation and prevent the emergence of regionally dominant powers.

The Tigris and Euphrates river systems, which had historically sustained civilizations across Mesopotamia for over five thousand years and given birth to human civilization itself, were divided between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq with no coherent framework for equitable sharing. The headwaters of both rivers originate in the mountains of eastern Turkey, where rainfall and snowmelt generate the vast majority of the rivers’ flow. The Euphrates then flows through Syria, where it has historically provided irrigation for agriculture and water for major cities like Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor, before entering Iraq and joining with the Tigris to form the Shatt al-Arab waterway that empties into the Persian Gulf. The Tigris follows a similar pattern, originating in Turkey, forming part of the Turkey-Syria border, then flowing through Iraq.

The colonial borders meant that Turkey, which controlled the headwaters and contributed approximately 90% of the Euphrates flow and 50% of the Tigris flow, was placed in an upstream position of overwhelming power over Syria and Iraq. This arrangement was particularly devastating for Iraq, whose entire agricultural heartland—the fertile plains between the two rivers that had once been the breadbasket of ancient civilizations—became dependent on water that flowed through two foreign countries before reaching Iraqi territory. Iraq’s vulnerability was compounded by the fact that it lies at the end of both rivers, receiving whatever water upstream states chose to release, often heavily polluted and salinized by agricultural runoff and inadequate drainage systems in Turkey and Syria.

Turkey exploited this position systematically, particularly after the 1960s, through the construction of massive dam projects that fundamentally altered the hydrology of both rivers. The Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP), initiated in the 1970s and involving 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric plants on the Tigris and Euphrates, gave Turkey the ability to control water flows to downstream states. The construction of the Keban Dam (1974), Karakaya Dam (1987), and especially the massive Atatürk Dam (1990)—one of the world’s largest earth-fill dams—allowed Turkey to impound vast quantities of water, reducing flows to Syria and Iraq by as much as 40-50% during critical agricultural seasons. When Turkey began filling the Atatürk Dam reservoir in January 1990, it completely cut off the Euphrates flow to Syria and Iraq for an entire month, creating an immediate crisis and demonstrating Turkey’s absolute power over its downstream neighbors.

Syria, caught in the middle position, faced water stress from Turkish dams while simultaneously being accused by Iraq of overusing water and failing to allow adequate flows downstream. Syria constructed its own dams, including the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates (completed 1973), which created Lake Assad and further reduced water flows to Iraq. The competing water demands of three countries with no binding treaty or enforcement mechanism created a situation of permanent tension. Iraq repeatedly protested that it was receiving insufficient water, with flows dropping from historical averages of 30 billion cubic meters annually to as low as 10-15 billion cubic meters in dry years, threatening agricultural collapse and drinking water supplies for millions of people.

Similarly, the Jordan River basin was fragmented between multiple entities—Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories—creating disputes that persist today with even greater intensity. The Jordan River system, though much smaller than the Tigris-Euphrates, serves a densely populated region where water scarcity is extreme. The river’s sources include the Hasbani River in Lebanon, the Banias River in the Golan Heights (Syrian territory occupied by Israel since 1967), and the Dan River in Israel. These tributaries join to form the Jordan River, which flows through the Sea of Galilee (Lake Tiberias), then continues south through the Jordan Valley, forming the border between the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Jordan, before emptying into the Dead Sea.

The partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel fundamentally altered water politics in the Jordan basin. Israel’s 1964 completion of its National Water Carrier, which diverted water from the Sea of Galilee to the coastal plain and the Negev desert, reduced the Jordan River’s flow by approximately 60%, transforming what had been a substantial river into little more than a stream in many sections. Arab states attempted to respond by planning to divert the Hasbani and Banias rivers before they reached Israeli territory, but Israeli military strikes destroyed these diversion projects in 1965-1966, contributing to tensions that culminated in the 1967 Six-Day War. Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights in that war gave it control over the Banias River and additional water sources, while the occupation of the West Bank provided control over the Mountain Aquifer, the most important groundwater resource in the region.

Palestinian access to water under Israeli occupation illustrates the weaponization of water resources with devastating clarity. Israeli settlements in the West Bank consume approximately four times more water per capita than Palestinian communities, with Palestinians restricted in their ability to drill wells, repair water infrastructure, or develop new water sources. The Mountain Aquifer, which lies primarily beneath the West Bank, provides about 25-30% of Israel’s water supply, yet Palestinians are limited to extracting minimal quantities while Israeli settlements extract freely. This disparity means that Palestinian agriculture remains underdeveloped, Palestinian communities face regular water shortages, and Palestinian economic development is constrained by insufficient water access—all direct consequences of borders and control arrangements stemming from the Sykes-Picot framework and its aftermath.

These divisions over water resources—increasingly critical in an arid region facing climate change, rapid population growth, and agricultural intensification—have fueled numerous conflicts and continue to serve as flashpoints for regional tensions. Water disputes have been cited as contributing factors to multiple wars, including the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Syria-Iraq tensions in the 1970s, and the broader destabilization that has plagued the region. The Islamic State’s rise in Syria and Iraq was facilitated partly by its seizure of dams and water infrastructure, which it used to control populations and punish enemies by cutting off water supplies. Climate change is intensifying these pressures, with the Tigris-Euphrates basin experiencing severe droughts, the Jordan River reduced to a fraction of its historical flow, and underground aquifers being depleted faster than natural recharge can replenish them.

By denying equitable access to water, the colonial borders created inherent instabilities that prevent regional cooperation and economic development. States with control over water sources possess leverage over their neighbors that they can exploit for political concessions, economic advantages, or strategic gains. Turkey has repeatedly used its control over Euphrates and Tigris waters to pressure Syria and Iraq on issues ranging from Kurdish separatism to border disputes to geopolitical alignments. Israel’s water dominance in the Jordan basin gives it enormous power over Jordan and the Palestinians, power that becomes leverage in negotiations over everything from peace agreements to security arrangements to economic policies.

Water-scarce nations face existential threats that can justify military action and prevent normal diplomatic relations with upstream neighbors. Iraq’s agricultural sector, which once employed the majority of the population and exported food, has been devastated by reduced water flows, with marshlands that sustained distinctive cultures for thousands of years reduced to desert, agricultural output plummeting, and rural populations forced into cities where unemployment and poverty create conditions for extremism. Jordan faces chronic water deficits that make it one of the most water-scarce countries in the world, dependent on external aid and imports to meet basic needs. Syria’s agricultural heartland in the northeast suffered catastrophic drought from 2006-2010, contributing to rural collapse and urban migration that created social pressures facilitating the uprising against the Assad regime.

This engineered scarcity ensures ongoing instability that prevents the emergence of strong, independent regional powers capable of challenging the post-colonial order. Countries that cannot feed their own populations, cannot develop their industries due to water constraints, and face potential collapse from upstream water cuts cannot become genuinely independent or powerful. The water-based dependencies created by the Sykes-Picot borders ensure that Middle Eastern states remain weak, conflicted, and penetrable by external powers who can offer mediation, technical assistance, or financial aid for water projects—always, of course, with strings attached that preserve Western influence.

The absence of comprehensive river basin treaties or effective international enforcement mechanisms means that water conflicts remain unresolved and likely to intensify. The 1997 UN Convention on the Law of Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses, which establishes principles for equitable and reasonable utilization of shared water resources, has not been ratified by Turkey, Syria, or Iraq, leaving no binding legal framework to resolve disputes. Attempts at trilateral negotiations have repeatedly failed, with upstream states asserting absolute sovereignty over water within their borders while downstream states invoke principles of prior use and equitable sharing that upstream states refuse to recognize. This deadlock serves the interests of external powers who can position themselves as indispensable mediators while ensuring that the fundamental issues remain unresolved, perpetuating the instability that Sykes-Picot was designed to create.

American Continuation of the Sykes-Picot Framework

While the British and French empires that created the Sykes-Picot system have receded from direct colonial control, the United States has in many respects continued implementing and enforcing the fundamental logic of that colonial architecture, adapting it to contemporary geopolitical realities while preserving its essential purpose. The transition from European to American hegemony in the Middle East was gradual but decisive, beginning with the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957, which positioned the United States as the guarantor of Western interests in the region. American foreign policy in the Middle East has consistently prioritized maintaining the fragmented state system, preventing regional integration, and ensuring that no single power can dominate the region independently of Western interests—objectives that precisely mirror those of Sykes and Picot a century earlier.

The American adoption of the Sykes-Picot framework became explicit during the Cold War, when the United States inherited Britain’s role as the external power maintaining the regional order against threats of pan-Arab nationalism, Soviet influence, and indigenous revolutionary movements. The Baghdad Pact of 1955 (later CENTO) represented an early American attempt to create a security architecture that would preserve pro-Western regimes and prevent the emergence of a unified bloc that might challenge Western dominance. When Britain and France’s Suez intervention in 1956 failed catastrophically, demonstrating the terminal decline of European colonial power, the United States stepped into the vacuum not to dismantle the colonial system but to preserve it under new management.

The U.S. approach has involved supporting the existing state structure despite its artificial nature and the conflicts it generates. American policy has treated the Sykes-Picot borders as sacrosanct, opposing any attempts at border revision or state merger even when such changes might resolve conflicts or reflect the preferences of local populations. When Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic in 1958, creating the first successful merger of Arab states and potentially beginning a process of regional unification, the United States worked systematically to undermine it, supporting Syrian military officers who eventually led the 1961 coup that dissolved the union. This established a pattern: any movement toward Arab unity, regardless of its popular support or potential benefits, would face American opposition.

American military interventions have consistently enforced the Sykes-Picot order through both direct action and proxy warfare. The 1991 Gulf War, while justified as a response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, also served to prevent the emergence of a regionally dominant Iraq that controlled both Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil reserves. The brutal sanctions regime imposed on Iraq throughout the 1990s, which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians according to UN estimates, served not only to contain Saddam Hussein but to ensure that Iraq remained weakened and incapable of challenging the regional order. The sanctions specifically targeted Iraq’s industrial capacity, water treatment facilities, and agricultural infrastructure—exactly the foundations that would be necessary for genuine national independence and regional power.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq represented perhaps the most dramatic American enforcement of the Sykes-Picot logic, though its consequences revealed the contradictions inherent in that system. The invasion destroyed Iraq’s state institutions and military, eliminating what had been the strongest Arab military force and the most industrialized Arab economy. The subsequent American occupation implemented policies that deliberately fragmented Iraqi society along sectarian and ethnic lines. The Coalition Provisional Authority’s decision to disband the Iraqi army and implement de-Ba’athification drove hundreds of thousands of primarily Sunni Arabs out of employment and political participation, creating the grievances that fueled insurgency and eventually the rise of ISIS. The new Iraqi constitution enshrined sectarian and ethnic quotas, creating a political system based on division rather than national unity.

The American promotion of Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq exemplifies the continuation of colonial divide-and-rule strategies. While rhetorically supporting Iraqi territorial integrity, the United States created a de facto independent Kurdish region with its own military forces (the Peshmerga), separate governing institutions, independent oil contracts with foreign companies, and direct relationships with Washington that bypassed the central Iraqi government. This arrangement gave the United States leverage over both Baghdad—which depended on American support against Kurdish separatism—and Erbil—which depended on American protection against Baghdad and regional neighbors. The 2017 Kurdish independence referendum, though ultimately unsuccessful, revealed how American support for Kurdish autonomy had created a permanent fracture in Iraqi sovereignty, exactly as British support for Kurdish autonomy had been intended to do a century earlier.

American intervention in Syria, beginning in 2011 and intensifying after 2014, has similarly worked to prevent the consolidation of state authority. Under the guise of supporting “moderate rebels” against the Assad regime and fighting ISIS, the United States armed and funded numerous opposition groups, many of which espoused sectarian ideologies or represented narrow ethnic interests rather than inclusive national visions. The fragmentation of Syria into zones controlled by the government, various rebel factions, Kurdish forces, Turkish-backed groups, and ISIS (at its height) ensured that no unified authority could emerge. Even after ISIS’s territorial defeat, the United States maintains approximately 900 troops in northeastern Syria, controlling oil-rich territories in partnership with Kurdish forces, effectively partitioning the country and denying the central government control over crucial resources.

The American intervention in Libya in 2011, justified as humanitarian protection under the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, resulted in the complete collapse of the Libyan state and its fragmentation into competing militias, rival governments, and tribal fiefdoms. What had been Africa’s most prosperous nation with the continent’s highest Human Development Index descended into chaos, slave markets, and civil war. The destruction of Libya served multiple strategic purposes: it eliminated a government that had challenged Western prerogatives, prevented the emergence of a potential African leader that might facilitate African unity and independence from Western financial systems, and created instability that prevented any regional power from establishing influence in North Africa. The pattern is consistent: strong states that challenge the post-colonial order are destroyed, while weak fragmented entities that require external intervention are perpetuated.

Furthermore, American support for Kurdish autonomy extends beyond Iraq to encompass a regional strategy of empowering Kurdish forces in multiple countries. In Syria, the United States partnered with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), providing weapons, training, and air support that allowed Kurdish forces to capture approximately 25% of Syrian territory, including most of its oil and gas fields and its most fertile agricultural land. This support has created tensions with Turkey, a NATO ally, while preventing any unified Syrian state from emerging. The American willingness to risk relations with Turkey to support Kurdish forces demonstrates how maintaining regional fragmentation takes precedence over alliance relationships or strategic coherence.

American opposition to pan-Arab nationalist movements has been consistent and uncompromising throughout the post-World War II period. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, which championed Arab unity, non-alignment, and independence from Western control, faced relentless American pressure including economic warfare, support for domestic opposition, and military threats. When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, asserting Egyptian sovereignty over Egyptian territory, the United States ultimately supported Egypt against British and French intervention—but only to position itself as the new hegemon rather than to support genuine independence. Subsequently, the United States worked to isolate Egypt economically and supported Arab states aligned with Western interests against Nasserist movements across the region.

The Ba’athist movements in Syria and Iraq, despite their many flaws and authoritarian characteristics, represented ideologies of Arab unity and independence from Western control. The United States consistently opposed Ba’athism, supporting coups against Ba’athist governments when possible and imposing sanctions when coups failed. The irony is that American opposition often strengthened authoritarian tendencies within Ba’athist regimes, as leaders responded to external threats by tightening internal control. This created a self-fulfilling prophecy where American policy justified itself by pointing to the authoritarian nature of regimes that had become more authoritarian partly in response to American pressure.

Efforts to contain Iranian influence represent perhaps the most explicit continuation of Sykes-Picot logic in contemporary American policy. Iran, as a non-Arab regional power with revolutionary ideology and genuine independence from Western control, represents exactly the kind of challenge to the colonial order that Sykes-Picot was designed to prevent. American policy toward Iran since the 1979 revolution has been premised on containing, isolating, and ultimately weakening Iran to prevent it from becoming a regional hegemon that could integrate the region outside Western control. The massive sanctions regime imposed on Iran targets not just its nuclear program but its entire economy, seeking to create enough internal pressure to either change the regime or force it into dependence on Western terms.

The “Arab NATO” concept, more formally known as the Middle East Strategic Alliance (MESA), represents a recent American attempt to formalize the Sykes-Picot system under new architecture. This proposed alliance of Gulf Arab states, Egypt, and Jordan, explicitly organized against Iranian influence, would institutionalize Sunni-Shia divisions and create a permanent military structure dependent on American leadership and arms sales. The initiative reveals how sectarian division, originally a colonial strategy, has been embraced as official American policy, with billions of dollars in weapons sales contingent on maintaining sectarian alliances that prevent regional unity.

The promotion of sectarian identities and sub-state actors continues as a deliberate strategy rather than an accidental byproduct of American policy. In Iraq, American officials explicitly organized politics around sectarian and ethnic identities, creating governing councils with fixed quotas for Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds. This system, known as muhasasa ta’ifia (sectarian apportionment), ensured that Iraqi politics would be organized around sectarian competition rather than ideological differences or policy debates. Similarly, American support for sectarian militias in Syria and encouragement of Sunni-Shia tensions throughout the Gulf region reflects a calculated strategy to prevent the emergence of cross-sectarian movements that might challenge the existing order.

Economic sanctions have become a primary tool for enforcing the Sykes-Picot framework without direct military intervention. The United States has imposed comprehensive sanctions on Iraq (1990-2003), Iran (intensifying since 1979), Syria (since 2011), and Libya at various periods, always targeting states that challenge the regional order. These sanctions are designed not merely to change specific policies but to comprehensively degrade state capacity, prevent economic development, and create dependencies that facilitate external control. The sanctions on Syria, for example, target not just the government but the entire economy, including reconstruction efforts, effectively preventing Syria from recovering from war and ensuring long-term weakness and instability.

Military pressure against states that challenge the existing order operates through multiple mechanisms beyond direct invasion. The United States maintains massive military bases throughout the region, with major installations in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, and elsewhere, totaling over 40,000 troops permanently deployed. This military presence serves to protect allied regimes, deter challenges to the regional order, and maintain American ability to intervene rapidly anywhere in the region. The annual $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel, supplemented by access to advanced weapons systems not provided to any other nation, ensures Israeli military superiority over any possible coalition of Arab states, preventing any challenge to the regional balance of power.

The Abraham Accords, normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states including the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco, represent a sophisticated evolution of the Sykes-Picot framework. These agreements create formal alliances between Israel and Arab states organized around containing Iran and opposing resistance movements like Hezbollah and Hamas. The normalization effectively integrates Israel into a regional security architecture that locks in the post-colonial order, making any fundamental revision of regional arrangements impossible without confronting a coalition of American-backed states. The agreements reveal how the Sykes-Picot system has evolved from European colonial control to a complex architecture of client states, sectarian alliances, and normalized Israeli hegemony—all ultimately underwritten by American power.

The “Caesar Act” sanctions on Syria, implemented in 2020, exemplify how American policy continues to enforce the fundamental objectives of Sykes-Picot through economic warfare. These sanctions target anyone who does business with Syria, effectively preventing reconstruction and condemning the Syrian population to continued deprivation. The explicit goal is preventing the consolidation of Syrian state authority and ensuring that Syria remains weak, divided, and unable to challenge the regional order. Similarly, the continuing sanctions on Iran, even after the 2015 nuclear agreement (from which the United States withdrew in 2018), target Iran’s entire economy with the stated goal of preventing Iran from having resources to support regional allies and project influence.

The fundamental objectives of Sykes-Picot—preventing regional unity, maintaining fragmented weak states, ensuring external control over resources and strategic positions, and blocking the emergence of independent regional powers—persist under American management with remarkable consistency. The methods have evolved from direct colonial control to military intervention, economic sanctions, support for sectarian divisions, and complex alliance systems, but the essential purpose remains unchanged. The Middle East is to remain fragmented, conflicted, and penetrable by external powers, exactly as Sykes and Picot intended when they drew their lines on the map over a century ago. Understanding this continuity is essential for comprehending why the region remains unstable, underdeveloped, and violent despite its resource wealth and the repeated failures of policies that perpetuate these conditions.

Israel as Product of the Sykes-Picot Order

The State of Israel represents perhaps the most enduring and consequential product of the Sykes-Picot framework, embodying the colonial logic of territorial division, population displacement, and externally imposed political arrangements that has defined the modern Middle East. The agreement’s allocation of Palestine to British control, with provisions for international administration reflecting the territory’s religious significance, created the conditions for the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, in which British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour promised support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” This declaration, issued during World War I as Britain sought Jewish support for the war effort and positioned itself for post-war control of Palestine, fundamentally contradicted simultaneous British promises of Arab independence and represented a commitment to facilitate the colonization of an already-inhabited land.

The Balfour Declaration was not an isolated decision but rather emerged directly from the Sykes-Picot negotiations and the broader colonial project of dividing the Middle East. Palestine’s designation for international administration in the original agreement reflected British awareness that the territory’s status would be contested, but Britain’s subsequent acquisition of the Palestine Mandate from the League of Nations gave it unilateral control to implement the Zionist project. The mandate’s terms explicitly incorporated the Balfour Declaration, making Britain’s legal obligation under international law the facilitation of Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine, despite the fact that the indigenous Palestinian Arab population comprised over 90% of the territory’s inhabitants in 1917.

The subsequent British Mandate period (1920-1948) systematically facilitated Jewish immigration and institutional development that culminated in Israel’s establishment in 1948. British authorities allowed and encouraged Jewish immigration despite Palestinian protests and periodic violence, with the Jewish population growing from approximately 56,000 in 1918 (about 8% of the total) to over 600,000 by 1947 (about 33% of the total). This demographic transformation was not organic but rather the result of deliberate British policy that permitted the Jewish Agency and other Zionist organizations to operate as a state-within-a-state, maintaining separate military forces (the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi), separate economic institutions (the Histadrut labor federation), separate educational systems, and parallel governing structures.

British authorities treated Jewish and Palestinian populations asymmetrically throughout the mandate period, systematically favoring Zionist institution-building while suppressing Palestinian political organization. When Palestinians revolted against British rule and Zionist colonization in the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, British forces crushed the uprising with extreme violence, executing or exiling Palestinian political leadership, destroying thousands of Palestinian homes, and implementing collective punishment that decimated Palestinian society’s organizational capacity. Meanwhile, British authorities trained Jewish military forces, allowed Jewish arms acquisition, and facilitated the development of industrial and agricultural infrastructure that would become the foundation of the Israeli state.

The partition plan proposed by the UN in 1947, which recommended dividing Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, reflected Sykes-Picot logic in its most naked form: external powers dividing territory inhabited by indigenous populations without meaningful consultation with those populations. The proposed Jewish state would comprise 55% of historic Palestine despite the Jewish population owning only about 7% of the land and comprising only one-third of the population. This disparity reveals how the partition plan prioritized accommodating European Jewish immigration over the rights of the indigenous Palestinian population, applying colonial principles of territorial redistribution that ignored Palestinian claims based on continuous habitation, land ownership, and majority status.

Israel’s creation in 1948 followed the Sykes-Picot logic of establishing a Western-aligned state that would serve European and later American interests in the region. Zionist leaders, recognizing their dependence on Western support, positioned the future Jewish state as a reliable ally that would protect Western interests against Arab nationalism, Soviet influence, and any movement toward regional unity that might challenge Western hegemony. David Ben-Gurion explicitly framed Israel as an outpost of Western civilization in the Middle East, a strategic asset that would ensure continued Western influence in a region where anti-colonial sentiment was rising and independence movements threatened to expel Western power.

The Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, during which approximately 750,000 Palestinians—more than half the Palestinian population—were expelled or fled from their homes, created the Palestinian refugee crisis that persists today. This ethnic cleansing was not an accidental byproduct of war but rather a deliberate strategy implemented through Plan Dalet and subsequent military operations that destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages, massacred civilians in places like Deir Yassin to spread terror and encourage flight, and prevented refugees from returning to their homes after the war. The displacement of the Palestinian population served multiple purposes within the colonial framework: it created a demographic majority for the Jewish state, eliminated a population that would have resisted Zionist control, and introduced a permanent source of instability that would prevent regional cohesion and ensure ongoing conflict requiring external mediation.

The creation of a permanent refugee crisis, with Palestinians dispersed across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank, ensured that the Palestinian question would destabilize every Arab state hosting refugees and prevent these states from normalizing relations with Israel or focusing on internal development. Palestinian refugee camps became sites of political organization, military resistance, and periodic violence that drew in host states and created pretexts for Israeli military operations. The refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, in violation of international law and UN Resolution 194, transformed what could have been a temporary displacement into a permanent injustice that has fueled resistance movements, interstate conflicts, and regional instability for over seven decades.

Israel’s military superiority, guaranteed by Western support, has ensured that no regional coalition can effectively challenge the post-Sykes-Picot order. From its establishment, Israel received sophisticated weapons, financial aid, and diplomatic support from Western powers, initially France and Britain, then predominantly the United States after the 1967 war. American military aid to Israel, currently $3.8 billion annually with additional supplemental appropriations, has made Israel the most heavily armed state in the region with qualitative military superiority over any potential adversary. Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons arsenal, developed with French assistance in the 1960s and estimated at 90-300 warheads, provides ultimate insurance against existential threats while its possession is ignored by the same Western powers that impose sanctions on other Middle Eastern states for pursuing nuclear capabilities.

The 1967 Six-Day War represented a decisive moment in consolidating Israel’s role within the Sykes-Picot framework. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and Sinai Peninsula (later returned to Egypt) expanded Israeli control over territories containing important water resources, strategic highlands, and additional Palestinian populations. The occupation created a permanent state of exception where millions of Palestinians have lived under military rule without political rights for over fifty years, unable to form an independent state yet denied citizenship in Israel. This situation of permanent occupation serves the Sykes-Picot logic perfectly: it prevents the emergence of a viable Palestinian state that might align with other Arab states against Western interests, while maintaining a conflict that divides and weakens the Arab world.

The settlement enterprise in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which has seen over 700,000 Israeli settlers move into these territories in violation of international law, has created facts on the ground that make any viable Palestinian state increasingly impossible. The settlements fragment the West Bank into disconnected enclaves, control the most fertile land and water resources, and create a complex matrix of control involving separate road systems, checkpoints, military zones, and administrative divisions that prevent Palestinian territorial continuity. This fragmentation mirrors the broader Sykes-Picot fragmentation of the Arab world, creating a miniature system of bantustans within Palestine that ensures Palestinian weakness and dependence.

The ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with Israel’s relationships with neighboring Arab states, continues to shape regional politics in ways that maintain fragmentation and prevent unified action on common interests. The conflict has been used repeatedly to justify authoritarian rule in Arab states, with leaders claiming that liberalization must wait until the Palestinian issue is resolved. It has prevented economic integration that might benefit all regional states, as Arab states officially boycotted economic relations with Israel for decades. It has militarized societies and diverted enormous resources to defense spending rather than development. Most importantly, it has prevented the emergence of a unified Arab stance on virtually any issue, as states disagree on approaches to the Palestinian question, relationships with Israel, and the priority of Palestinian liberation versus other national interests.

Arab military defeats by Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 served to discredit Arab nationalism, undermine confidence in Arab unity, and demonstrate the futility of military confrontation with a Western-backed Israel. These defeats, particularly the catastrophic 1967 war in which Israel destroyed the air forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in hours and occupied territories equivalent to three times its original size, broke the psychological momentum of Arab nationalism and strengthened arguments that accommodation with the West and acceptance of Israel represented the only viable path forward. The defeats thus served the Sykes-Picot framework by eliminating the threat that a unified Arab world might overturn the colonial order through military force.

The Oslo Accords of the 1990s, presented as a peace process leading to Palestinian statehood, in practice institutionalized Palestinian fragmentation and Israeli control while providing a façade of progress that prevented more radical alternatives. The creation of the Palestinian Authority as a subcontractor for Israeli security, the division of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C with varying levels of Palestinian autonomy, and the separation of Gaza from the West Bank created a situation where Palestinians administered their own occupation while Israel retained ultimate control. The “peace process” became a permanent process without peace, an open-ended negotiation that allowed Israel to continue settlement expansion while Palestinians were told to wait for a state that never materialized.

The 2006 Israeli war in Lebanon and the repeated Israeli military operations in Gaza (2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2023-present) demonstrate how Israeli military superiority is employed to prevent any challenge to the regional order. Hezbollah’s emergence as a powerful military force in Lebanon, capable of forcing an Israeli withdrawal in 2000 and fighting Israel to a draw in 2006, represented a direct challenge to Israeli military dominance. Similarly, Hamas’s control of Gaza and its continued resistance despite overwhelming military disadvantage represents an ideological rejection of the accommodation that Israel and its Western backers demand. Israeli military operations against these actors, involving massive destruction of civilian infrastructure and casualties overwhelmingly among civilians, serve not just to weaken these specific organizations but to demonstrate to the broader Arab and Muslim world the costs of resistance.

Normalization agreements between Israel and some Arab states, often facilitated by the United States, further embed Israel within the regional system in ways that perpetuate rather than resolve the fundamental contradictions created by colonial borders. Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, purchased with $1.3 billion in annual American military aid, removed the most populous and militarily significant Arab state from any potential anti-Israel coalition. Jordan’s 1994 peace treaty similarly removed another frontline state while creating economic dependencies on Israeli cooperation for water and trade. These agreements were not negotiated from positions of strength but rather represented Arab acceptance of Israeli permanence and power in exchange for American financial support and diplomatic recognition.

The Abraham Accords, formalized in 2020 between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, represent the culmination of this process of embedding Israel within a regional security architecture organized around containing Iran and marginalizing the Palestinian cause. These agreements were not peace treaties in the traditional sense, as these states had never been at war with Israel, but rather normalization agreements that formalized pre-existing covert security cooperation and intelligence sharing. The agreements reveal how the Sykes-Picot framework has evolved: Israel is no longer an alien implant resisted by all Arab states but rather a central component of a regional order that includes pro-Western Arab monarchies, all aligned against Iran, Turkey (at times), and resistance movements like Hezbollah and Hamas.

The integration of Israel into regional security structures serves multiple functions within the neo-colonial framework. It provides Israel with Arab legitimacy that reduces international pressure for Palestinian rights. It creates security dependencies where Arab states rely on Israeli intelligence, cybersecurity technology, and military cooperation against common enemies. It redirects Arab attention from Palestine to Iran, transforming the region’s primary conflict from the Israeli-Palestinian issue to a Sunni-Shia sectarian confrontation that divides Muslims and prevents unity. And it ensures that any Arab state seeking to challenge the regional order must confront not only Western power but also a coalition including Israel and Arab states with normalized relations.

The Israeli occupation’s apartheid characteristics, as documented by Israeli and international human rights organizations including B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, reveal how Israel functions within the Sykes-Picot framework as a system of permanent domination rather than a temporary security arrangement. The systematic discrimination in law and practice between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, the regime of military law applied to Palestinians while settlers in the same territories live under civilian law, the massive disparities in resource allocation, freedom of movement, and political rights, and the explicitly stated goal of Jewish supremacy between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, all constitute a system designed to maintain Jewish Israeli control over maximum territory with minimum Palestinian population.

This system of domination serves the broader Sykes-Picot objective of preventing viable independent Arab states. A genuinely independent Palestinian state, even in the limited territory of the West Bank and Gaza (22% of historic Palestine), would potentially align with other Arab states, provide a base for anti-colonial organizing, and challenge the narrative that the Sykes-Picot order represents the only viable arrangement. By preventing Palestinian statehood while maintaining permanent occupation, Israel ensures that Palestinians remain stateless, fragmented between the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Israel proper, and the diaspora, and incapable of threatening the regional order. The Palestinian issue thus becomes a permanent source of instability and division rather than a rallying point for Arab unity.

The role of Christian Zionism in American support for Israel adds another dimension to understanding Israel as a product of colonial logic. Millions of American evangelical Christians support Israel not based on strategic interests but on theological beliefs about Israel’s role in biblical prophecy. This religious support base provides political cover for unconditional American backing of Israel and makes American policy toward Israel less responsive to strategic calculations or moral considerations about Palestinian rights. The fusion of colonial strategic interests with religious fervor creates an exceptionally durable foundation for Israel’s position within the American-managed regional order.

Israel’s position as a strategic asset extends beyond military power to include intelligence cooperation, technology transfer, and experience in counterinsurgency and population control that benefits Western powers. Israeli intelligence agencies maintain extensive networks throughout the Middle East, providing information to American and European services. Israeli military industries serve as testing grounds for weapons systems that are then sold to Western militaries. Israeli expertise in surveillance, border control, and managing occupied populations is exported to Western countries and other allies. These multifaceted relationships make Israel valuable to Western powers independent of any particular regional conflict, ensuring continued support regardless of Israeli actions toward Palestinians.

The fundamental contradiction at the heart of Israel’s existence within the Sykes-Picot framework—a state established through displacement and maintained through military domination, legitimized by claims of democracy and Western values while denying basic rights to millions of Palestinians under its control—ensures permanent instability. This instability serves colonial interests by preventing the emergence of a stable, prosperous, unified Middle East that might challenge Western hegemony. Israel’s existence as currently constituted requires permanent conflict, permanent Western support, and permanent Arab weakness. Understanding Israel not as an anomaly or deviation from the Sykes-Picot framework but as its most perfect expression—a state literally drawn on a map by colonial powers, populated through externally organized immigration, and maintained through Western military aid—is essential for comprehending why the century-old colonial architecture persists and why genuine peace and justice remain elusive.

Iran: The Exception to Sykes-Picot

Iran stands as the notable exception to the Sykes-Picot system, remaining the only major regional power to maintain territorial integrity and political independence from the colonial carve-up that fragmented the Arab world. Unlike the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire, which were systematically divided and placed under direct European control, Persia (as Iran was then known) maintained nominal independence throughout the colonial period, though it faced significant British and Russian interference and was briefly divided into spheres of influence under the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention. This agreement, which predated Sykes-Picot by nearly a decade, divided Iran into a Russian zone in the north, a British zone in the south encompassing areas near the Persian Gulf and Indian border, and a neutral zone between them, demonstrating that Iran was not exempt from imperial designs but rather subject to a different form of colonial pressure.

The key difference was that Iran retained its sovereignty, governmental institutions, and territorial continuity, even as foreign powers meddled in its internal affairs, controlled its finances, and extracted economic concessions. The Qajar dynasty, though weak and corrupt, remained in place as Iran’s government, preventing the complete institutional destruction that mandate systems imposed on Arab territories. When Reza Shah Pahlavi seized power in 1925 and established a new dynasty, Iran underwent modernization and centralization that strengthened rather than weakened state capacity, contrasting sharply with the deliberate weakening of Arab states under colonial administration. Iran’s experience of semi-colonialism—exploitation without direct rule—differed fundamentally from the total colonialism imposed on Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Transjordan.

Iran’s distinct Persian identity, separate from Arab identity despite shared Islamic faith, provided cultural resilience against absorption into the Sykes-Picot framework designed specifically for Arab territories. Persians possess their own language (Farsi), distinct from Arabic, their own literary and historical traditions stretching back millennia to the Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sassanian empires, and a strong sense of Iranian nationalism that predates Islam. This pre-Islamic heritage, celebrated in works like Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (Book of Kings), provided Iranians with an identity framework independent of Arab or Islamic unity movements, making Iran less susceptible to the pan-Arab nationalism that threatened colonial control in Arab lands but also creating barriers to the pan-Islamic unity that might have challenged Western dominance more effectively.

Iran’s Shia religious tradition, adhered to by approximately 90% of Iran’s population, further distinguished it from the predominantly Sunni Arab states and created a theological and institutional independence from Sunni religious authorities in Mecca, Al-Azhar, or elsewhere. Shiism’s hierarchical clerical structure, centered in the Iranian holy cities of Qom and Mashhad as well as the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, provided Iran with independent religious authority and legitimacy that could not be controlled by Sunni governments allied with Western powers. The Shia doctrine of the Imamate and the authority of religious scholars (marjaiya) created a parallel power structure to secular government that would later enable the Islamic Revolution, as clerics commanded popular loyalty independent of state institutions.

Iran’s historical continuity as a state entity predating the colonial period by millennia provided institutional memory and national consciousness that newly created Arab states lacked. Iranians could point to centuries of Persian imperial power, from Cyrus the Great to the Safavid dynasty that made Shiism Iran’s state religion in the 16th century. This continuity meant that Iranian nationalism had deep roots, while Arab states struggled to build national identities for territories whose borders had been drawn only decades earlier. The Iranian state’s survival, albeit in weakened and corrupted form, contrasted with the complete destruction of Ottoman Arab provinces and their replacement with artificial constructs designed for colonial control.

However, Iran was not immune to Western domination, merely subject to it in different forms. The 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup that overthrew democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had nationalized Iran’s oil industry, demonstrated that Iran’s formal independence meant little when it challenged Western economic interests. The coup reinstalled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as an absolute monarch, transforming Iran into an American client state whose independence was purely nominal. For the next 25 years, Iran functioned as a pillar of American regional strategy, maintaining the largest and most sophisticated military in the Persian Gulf, serving as a bulwark against Soviet influence and Arab nationalism, and ensuring Western access to Iranian oil on favorable terms.

The Pahlavi era revealed Iran’s integration into a modified Sykes-Picot framework where formal independence masked effective subordination to Western interests. The Shah’s Iran was a rentier state dependent on oil revenues, with SAVAK (the secret police, trained by CIA and Mossad) suppressing dissent, massive American military aid creating dependence on American spare parts and training, and Western companies dominating the economy despite nominal Iranian ownership. The White Revolution of the 1960s, promoted as modernization, actually disrupted traditional social structures and created grievances that would fuel revolution, while benefiting Western companies and Iranian elites connected to the regime. Iran’s role as regional policeman, particularly its suppression of the Dhofar Rebellion in Oman on behalf of British interests, demonstrated how Iran served Western dominance despite formal independence.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 decisively rejected Western domination and attempted to create an alternative model of political organization based on Islamic governance rather than secular nationalism or monarchical authoritarianism. The revolution, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, mobilized millions of Iranians across class, urban-rural, and ideological divides around opposition to the Shah’s dictatorship, American domination, and the broader structure of Western imperialism in the Muslim world. The revolution’s ideology of vilayat-e faqih (guardianship of the Islamic jurist) proposed that religious scholars should exercise political authority, rejecting both Western-style democracy and secular dictatorship in favor of an Islamic republic that would serve as a model for Muslim liberation from Western control.

The revolution’s early rhetoric explicitly rejected the Sykes-Picot order and called for its overthrow. Khomeini condemned the artificial borders dividing Muslims, denounced Arab governments as puppets of Western imperialism, and declared that the revolution would export itself across the Muslim world. The taking of American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran for 444 days signaled absolute rejection of American influence, while the new constitution enshrined opposition to imperialism and support for liberation movements as founding principles. Iran’s renaming of streets, its designation of America as the “Great Satan,” and its break with Israel (which had been a close ally under the Shah) represented a fundamental repudiation of the regional order.

The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1990), initiated by Iraq with Western support just months after the revolution’s consolidation, represented an attempt by the Sykes-Picot powers to destroy the revolutionary regime before it could inspire similar movements elsewhere. Iraq, armed by the United States, Soviet Union, France, and Gulf Arab states, received satellite intelligence from the U.S., chemical weapons precursors from Western companies, and financial support exceeding $100 billion from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The war, which killed over one million people and devastated both countries’ economies, failed to overthrow the Iranian government but succeeded in weakening Iran and forcing it to focus on survival rather than exporting revolution. The war also reinforced sectarian Sunni-Shia divisions, as Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated Iraq was positioned as defending the Arab world against Persian Shia expansionism, creating sectarian frameworks that would persist long after the war ended.

Iran’s resistance to the Sykes-Picot order manifests most visibly in its support for non-state actors and movements across the region that challenge the existing state system and Western dominance. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), particularly its Quds Force responsible for external operations, has built a network of relationships with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine, the Houthi movement in Yemen, various Shia militias in Iraq, and the Assad government in Syria. These relationships provide Iran with influence across the region while supporting groups that resist Israeli occupation, American military presence, and pro-Western Arab governments.

Hezbollah, established in 1982 with Iranian support during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, represents Iran’s most successful regional partnership. Hezbollah evolved from a resistance movement fighting Israeli occupation into a powerful political party and military force that has fundamentally altered Lebanese politics and demonstrated the possibility of militarily challenging Israeli supremacy. Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel, in which it fought the Israeli military to a stalemate despite overwhelming Israeli advantages in airpower and technology, shattered the myth of Israeli invincibility and inspired resistance movements across the region. Hezbollah’s ability to threaten Israeli territory with tens of thousands of missiles serves Iranian strategy by creating a deterrent against Israeli or American attacks on Iran while demonstrating that Western military superiority can be challenged.

Iran’s support for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, despite sectarian differences (Hamas is Sunni), demonstrates commitment to opposing the Sykes-Picot order by supporting resistance to Israeli occupation regardless of sectarian identity. This cross-sectarian support, providing weapons, training, and funding to Palestinian resistance groups, challenges the sectarian Sunni-Shia framework that Western powers promote to divide Muslims. Iran’s position on Palestine—insisting that Israeli occupation must end and Palestinian rights restored—stands in sharp contrast to Arab states that have normalized relations with Israel while Palestinians remain occupied, revealing how the revolutionary ideology prioritizes anti-imperialism over sectarian or ethnic solidarity.

Iran’s intervention in Syria beginning in 2011, supporting the Assad government against an uprising that received Western and Gulf Arab backing, reflected both strategic calculations and ideological commitments. Syria, as Iran’s sole Arab state ally and providing geographic connection to Hezbollah in Lebanon, represents a crucial component of Iran’s regional position. The intervention, involving IRGC advisors, Hezbollah fighters, and Shia militias recruited from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, prevented Assad’s overthrow and demonstrated Iran’s capability to project power across the region. The Syrian war has been portrayed in Western and Gulf Arab media as Iranian Shia expansionism oppressing Syria’s Sunni majority, reinforcing sectarian narratives that obscure how the conflict represents competing visions of regional order—Western-backed fragmentation versus Iranian-supported resistance to that fragmentation.

Iran’s opposition to the existing territorial divisions manifests in rhetoric questioning the legitimacy of borders drawn by colonial powers and supporting movements that transcend those borders. Iranian leaders regularly denounce the Sykes-Picot Agreement by name, framing it as an illegitimate colonial imposition that divided Muslims to facilitate Western domination. This opposition, however, remains largely rhetorical rather than programmatic, as Iran has not actually attempted to redraw borders or overthrow the state system but rather works within it while supporting non-state actors who challenge specific governments. The contradiction between revolutionary rhetoric about erasing colonial borders and practical acceptance of those borders as framework for Iranian foreign policy reveals the difficulty of fundamentally transforming a regional order backed by overwhelming Western military and economic power.

Iran’s promotion of Islamic unity transcending the artificial borders represents an ideological challenge to the Sykes-Picot framework even when practical implementation remains limited. The annual International Conference on Islamic Unity held in Tehran, Iranian support for Muslim causes from Palestine to Kashmir to Myanmar, and the framing of Iranian foreign policy in terms of Islamic solidarity rather than Persian nationalism all serve to position Iran as champion of a united Muslim world against Western imperialism. However, this promotion of Islamic unity coexists with specifically Iranian national interests, Shia sectarian preferences, and Persian cultural chauvinism that limit Iran’s appeal across the broader Muslim world and create suspicions about Iranian motivations.

This challenge to the established system explains the persistent tensions between Iran and Western powers, manifesting in forty years of American sanctions, European diplomatic pressure, assassination of Iranian scientists, cyber attacks like Stuxnet that destroyed Iranian nuclear centrifuges, and constant threats of military action. The United States has maintained comprehensive sanctions on Iran almost continuously since 1979, expanding them repeatedly to target not just Iran’s nuclear program but its entire economy, its central bank, its oil exports, and any foreign companies that do business with Iran. These sanctions, described by some scholars as economic warfare, have cost Iran hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenue and prevented economic development that might make Iran genuinely independent of global financial systems controlled by Western powers.

The framing of Iran as the primary threat to regional stability, adopted by successive American administrations and echoed by Israel and Gulf Arab states, serves to justify policies designed to contain, isolate, and ultimately weaken Iran. The narrative of Iranian expansionism, terrorism support, nuclear weapons ambitions, and sectarian warfare portrays Iran as an aggressive revisionist power threatening peaceful status quo states, inverting the reality that Iran challenges a regional order imposed by colonial powers and maintained through Western military intervention. This narrative framework enables Western powers to position themselves as defending regional stability and security while actually defending a fundamentally unjust and unstable order that serves Western interests at the expense of regional populations.

Iran’s conflicts with regional states that benefit from or accept the current order—particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE—reflect how challenging the Sykes-Picot system creates antagonisms with those invested in its preservation. Saudi Arabia, whose very existence as a state resulted from British support for the Saud family’s conquest of the Hijaz and whose continued rule depends partly on American military protection, represents everything the Iranian Revolution opposed: monarchy rather than republic, Sunni rather than Shia religious authority, accommodation with Western powers rather than resistance, and acceptance of Israeli existence rather than support for Palestinian liberation. The Saudi-Iranian rivalry, portrayed in sectarian terms as Sunni versus Shia, actually represents competing visions of regional order—American-backed monarchical authoritarianism accepting the Sykes-Picot framework versus Iranian revolutionary republicanism challenging it.

However, Iran’s position also reveals the profound limitations of challenging the Sykes-Picot system without the military, economic, and political power necessary to fundamentally transform it. Iran’s revolutionary ideology and actions have prompted containment efforts, economic sanctions, and the formation of opposing coalitions that reinforce regional fragmentation even while resisting specific aspects of Western dominance. The Arab-Israeli normalization agreements, explicitly organized around containing Iran, demonstrate how Iranian resistance paradoxically strengthens aspects of the system it opposes by driving Arab states closer to Israel and the United States. The framing of regional politics as Arab versus Persian or Sunni versus Shia, which Iranian rhetoric sometimes reinforces by emphasizing Shia identity and Persian nationalism, undermines the pan-Islamic unity that might actually challenge the Sykes-Picot order.

Iran’s own internal contradictions limit its challenge to the colonial order. The Islamic Republic maintains the centralized state structure inherited from the Pahlavi era, exercises authoritarian control over dissent, and pursues Iranian national interests that sometimes conflict with broader Islamic solidarity. Iran’s suppression of its Arab, Kurdish, Baloch, and Azeri minorities, its execution of political dissidents, its mandatory hijab laws and persecution of women who resist them, and its economic mismanagement that has impoverished many Iranians all undermine claims to represent an attractive alternative to the Sykes-Picot order. The gap between revolutionary rhetoric about Islamic governance and the reality of clerical authoritarianism, corruption, and economic dysfunction weakens Iran’s soft power and limits its appeal as a model for other Muslim societies.

The JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers, illustrated both the possibilities and limitations of Iran’s challenge to the Sykes-Picot framework. The agreement, which lifted some sanctions in exchange for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, represented implicit Western recognition that Iran could not be simply overthrown or collapsed and must be accommodated to some degree. However, American withdrawal from the agreement in 2018 and reimposition of maximum pressure sanctions demonstrated that accommodation remains contingent on Iranian subordination to Western demands about not just nuclear issues but regional behavior, missile programs, and support for allied groups—essentially demanding that Iran abandon the very policies that constitute its challenge to the regional order.

Iran’s development of ballistic missiles, drones, and asymmetric warfare capabilities represents adaptation to the reality that it cannot match Western conventional military power but can impose costs that deter direct attack. The precision strike capability demonstrated in Iran’s January 2020 missile attack on U.S. bases in Iraq, retaliating for the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, showed that Iran can threaten American interests throughout the region. Similarly, Iranian-supplied drone technology used by Houthi forces in Yemen has been employed against Saudi oil facilities, demonstrating vulnerabilities in even the most heavily defended targets. These capabilities provide deterrence and create costs for attacking Iran, but they do not provide positive power to reshape the regional order or protect Iranian allies like Syria from devastating conflict.

The fundamental paradox of Iran’s position is that its challenge to the Sykes-Picot order has been significant enough to provoke decades of Western hostility and sanctions but not powerful enough to actually transform that order. Iran has survived as an independent state, supported resistance movements that have achieved tactical successes, and prevented Western military hegemony from being absolute, but it has not created an alternative regional order or united Muslims against Western dominance. Instead, Iranian resistance has provided justification for increased Western military presence, deeper Arab-Israeli cooperation, intensified sectarian polarization, and the very fragmentation that Sykes-Picot was designed to create. Whether this represents failure of Iranian strategy or simply demonstrates the enormous difficulty of challenging a colonial order backed by overwhelming military and economic power remains debatable.

Iran’s future trajectory will significantly influence whether the Sykes-Picot order can be transcended or will persist indefinitely. If Iran eventually accommodates Western demands, accepting limitations on its regional influence in exchange for sanctions relief and integration into global economic systems, the last significant challenge to the colonial order will have been neutralized. If Iran continues resisting but remains isolated and weakened by sanctions, it will exemplify the costs of challenging Western hegemony without sufficient power to succeed, potentially discouraging future challenges. Only if Iran could somehow catalyze broader regional unity against Western dominance—overcoming sectarian divisions, Arab-Persian tensions, and the opposition of Gulf monarchies—might the Sykes-Picot framework finally face an existential challenge. The probability of such unity emerging, however, appears remote given the century of fragmentation, the enormous disparities in military and economic power, and the sophisticated mechanisms of control that have been refined since Sykes and Picot drew their lines on the map.

Conclusion