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When Wilsonian ideals met European Realpolitik in the wake of the First World War, it was already late. The soon-to-be victorious European powers were already well down the road to carving up the remains of the fallen Ottoman Empire.
Without exaggeration, it is impossible to understand ‘the modern Middle East’ without at least a cursory knowledge of how that region was named and claimed in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
George W. Bush’s America and Tony Blair’s Britain are not the first to find themselves enmeshed in complex strategies for taming, reigning, or owning in the Levant and on the shores of the Tigris and Euphrates. It is a colonial and imperial habit, an observation I make with some sympathy for those who excercise the burden of power in a world where power is welcomed only selectively.
Fromkin is at his best on the Balfour Declaration and its genesis of expectations and facts on the ground that were inherently irreconcilable, to the grief of too many Arabs—not all of them Palestinians—and Israelis to this day.
A Peace to End All Peace would make good reading beside T.E. Lawrence’s (Lawrence of Arabia’s) The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and—for the more daring reader— the late E. Said’s Orientalism.
It’s also savory and nutritious on its own.
Canter Bridge 
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