Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
Eng. Saleem Al-Batayneh
The most disturbing thing revealed by the Fourth Gulf War and its aftermath is not that it answered old questions. It is that it opened a much larger set of new ones. Perhaps the most unsettling is also the simplest: Is the Arab world approaching another geographical reordering, with the maps already drawn and only the moment of implementation remaining?
I was struck by something recently written by the Scottish writer R. Busch, described as a professor of international relations and Middle East politics at the University of St Andrews in Glasgow, in The Herald in Scotland. His argument is uncomfortable because it touches a nerve that many Arab societies have preferred to avoid.
His thesis, in essence, is that many of the states created in the aftermath of the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement were artificial political constructions that failed to develop a sufficiently coherent model of political and economic development. Many continue to struggle with the erosion of the nation-state itself: weak institutions, corruption, social inequality, poverty, unemployment, stalled development and failing education systems. These pressures have not merely produced economic hardship. They have generated social frustration, displacement, migration, expanding refugee camps and, above all, the gradual disappearance of the hopes that accompanied independence.
Whether one agrees with every aspect of this argument is another question. But it deserves to be taken seriously.
The European role in the Middle East has changed dramatically, and the borders inherited from the Sykes-Picot era no longer carry the same political meaning they once did. The argument is not necessarily that every existing border will be physically erased. The more subtle possibility is that borders may remain on maps while the political functions of states change around them.
That distinction matters.
A country does not necessarily have to disappear for its strategic role to disappear. Its borders can remain intact while its sovereignty, alliances, economic orientation or center of political decision-making changes. Some states may therefore survive territorially while becoming fundamentally different political entities.
This is where the debate over a possible “New Middle East” becomes particularly unsettling. The region has repeatedly been told that new maps are being contemplated, new balances are emerging and new political arrangements are taking shape. Much of this discussion remains speculative, and it would be irresponsible to treat every alleged map or secret plan as established fact. But the broader question cannot simply be dismissed: what happens when the political architecture of a region becomes disconnected from the societies living inside it?
The Arab world has experienced this problem before.
In 1957, shortly after the Suez Crisis, the Indian journalist Khwaja Rustom Khurshed Karangia published The Sword of Israel, following his visit to Israel and meetings with Israeli officials. The book appeared a decade before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and has since acquired a controversial place in discussions about Israeli strategic thinking.
Among the material attributed to the book was what became known as the “Karangia Document,” which purportedly contained Israeli documents and plans concerning the fragmentation of the Arab world and the displacement of large portions of its population. The material was reportedly shown to Karangia by Israel’s then-defense minister, Moshe Dayan.
The most striking element of the story is not merely the alleged contents of the documents. It is the anecdote surrounding Dayan’s supposed reaction to the journalist’s astonishment at his willingness to reveal such plans. The phrase attributed to him has endured because of its brutal simplicity: “Don’t worry. Arabs don’t read.”
Whether the quotation is historically authentic in precisely that form is less important than the question it raises.
Do Arabs read enough?
Do Arab states study the history of the region deeply enough to recognize recurring patterns? Do governments and intellectual elites examine strategic documents written decades ago, compare them with present developments and ask which predictions were wrong, which were exaggerated and which may still contain lessons?
More than seven decades after Karangia’s book appeared, parts of its narrative can be read with an uncomfortable sense of familiarity. The Middle East remains fragmented, politically polarized and increasingly vulnerable to external intervention. States struggle to control their own territories. Societies are divided along sectarian, tribal, ethnic and ideological lines. Millions have been displaced. National identities compete with older and more localized identities. And the ordinary citizen continues to pay the price for conflicts over which he or she has little control.
This is where the legacy of Sykes-Picot deserves a more sophisticated examination.
It is easy to blame the 1916 agreement for everything that subsequently went wrong in the Arab world. History is rarely that simple. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, European colonialism, local political rivalries, authoritarianism, wars, economic mismanagement, foreign intervention and the failure of national institutions all contributed to the region’s modern crises.
But Sykes-Picot remains symbolically powerful because it represents a moment when external powers helped redraw the political geography of the Arab Mashriq according to strategic calculations that did not necessarily correspond to the social realities on the ground.
Straight lines were drawn across a landscape populated by tribes, communities, religious groups and historical societies whose relationships predated the modern state.
The people remained.
The map changed.
And the contradictions remained embedded within the new states.
For decades, populations that had lived within the Ottoman administrative system found themselves enclosed within new political boundaries established by Britain and France. Their political status changed, but the deeper social and historical relationships among communities did not simply disappear.
That legacy continues to haunt the region.
The Arab world has spent more than a century attempting to reconcile geography with identity, national citizenship with communal belonging, and the modern state with older historical loyalties. In some countries, the state succeeded in creating a meaningful national identity. In others, the process remained incomplete.
The result today is a region in which memory often collides with geography.
Religion collides with identity.
National identity collides with sectarian, tribal and ethnic identities.
And sovereignty collides with the realities of external influence.
This is why the possibility of a new regional order should not be reduced to the question of whether someone has secretly drawn a new map. Maps are the visible expression of political power; they are rarely the starting point. The more important question is whether the institutions that sustain existing states remain capable of exercising authority over their territory and representing their populations.
A state that cannot provide security, justice, employment, education or basic economic stability becomes vulnerable long before its borders are formally altered.
That is the uncomfortable lesson.
The danger facing the Arab world may not necessarily be another Sykes-Picot imposed from outside. It may be the gradual hollowing out of existing states until external actors no longer need to redraw their borders because the political meaning of those borders has already eroded.
Look across the region and the warning signs are difficult to ignore. States unable to resolve basic problems of poverty, unemployment, corruption and economic instability become increasingly dependent on external actors. Societies exhausted by war and displacement lose confidence in political institutions. Young people who see no economic future begin to look elsewhere. Refugee camps become permanent rather than temporary. National sovereignty becomes increasingly conditional.
And when sovereignty becomes conditional, geography eventually follows politics.
The tragedy is that the Arab world has seen these patterns before. It has experienced foreign occupation, imposed borders, civil wars, proxy conflicts and repeated attempts to engineer political outcomes from outside. Yet every generation seems to rediscover the same lessons at enormous human cost.
Perhaps the real failure is not that Arabs were unable to prevent Sykes-Picot.
It is that they have not yet fully learned how to transcend its legacy.
The answer, however, cannot be a nostalgic return to a pre-1916 world. Nor can it be the rejection of the nation-state simply because its borders were historically constructed. Every modern state is, to some degree, a historical construction. The task is to make the state legitimate, capable and inclusive rather than to romanticize an imagined past.
The Arab world does not need new borders nearly as much as it needs stronger states.
It needs institutions that citizens trust, economies that create opportunity, education systems that prepare young people for the future, and political systems capable of absorbing social differences without turning them into existential conflicts.
Most importantly, it needs strategic literacy.
A region that does not read its own history will inevitably allow others to write its future.
That may be the deeper meaning behind the old phrase attributed to Moshe Dayan. Whether he actually said “Arabs don’t read” is a question for historians. But the warning embedded in the story remains relevant: intelligence, strategy and power belong to those who study the past closely enough to recognize what may be coming next.
The Arab world today stands between an old order that is clearly weakening and a new one whose contours remain uncertain.
The question is not simply whether another Sykes-Picot is coming.
The question is whether the Arabs will understand the transformation before it arrives.
Because by the time the new map is officially unveiled, the most important decisions may already have been made.
Author’s Bio:
Engineer Saleem Al-Batayenh was a member of the Jordanian parliament.
