(Oil & Gas 360) – What will happen to Syria now that the Assad family’s brutal dictatorship is over is a big question in the foreign policy establishment. A bigger question is: What is Syria?
The boundaries of Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and other parts of the Middle East were established after World War I by the British and French colonial powers for the benefit of colonial administration, not for the benefit of stable governance by independent states.
A famous rule of the British colonial administration was “Divide and Rule.” The idea of this rule was that if boundaries of so-called countries were drawn to divide ethnic, religious, or cultural groups, tribes, or other autonomous entities into separate countries, it would weaken them.
On the other hand, if various groups antagonistic to each other were included in a single country, they would direct their animosity against each other rather than the colonial ruler.
After the British defeated the Ottoman Turks in the Middle East in World War I, they drew country boundaries according to this rule and dominated most of the Middle East. They drew a boundary around something they called Syria and gave the French a Mandate over it.
The French got Syria for some reason not very clear; evidently the British felt they owed them something because they were an ally in the war in France. But the British did not give them anything that was known to have oil. The British took the known oil areas and small enclaves along the Gulf for trading ports.
Nobody paid much attention to the desolate middle of the Arabian Peninsula known as The Empty Quarter. A local warlord, Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al-Faisal Al Saud, also known as Ibn Saud, defeated other tribal leaders and established Saudi Arabia.
Standard Oil Company of California explored the area and discovered significant oil deposits just before the outbreak of World War II. Worried about the British dominance in the area and Churchill’s dedication to developing diverse supplies of oil, Ibn Saud met with US President Franklin Roosevelt a few months before the end of WWII. He committed to oil development by US companies in Saudi Arabia in exchange for US guarantees of Saudi Arabian security.
The colonial system crumbled over two decades following WWII and is long gone. The country boundaries drawn for a different world over a hundred years ago remain, however. Various groups who do not like each other very much are still divided into different arbitrarily defined countries. As a result, the Middle East and its countries are still an unstable mess.
Maybe it is time to re-draw the boundaries. Why not? Several countries’ boundaries were changed over the past few decades, e.g., the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the Balkans, Sudan. Generally, the people who live in a country determine what they want its boundaries to be.
In the Middle East a third- party mediation will be needed for any possibility of success and wide acceptance. Possibly that could be done through the UN, a mostly useless organization. Give them something to do.
Regardless of our own oil production, we need to consider what happens in the Middle East. We do not want international oil markets run by the Chinese.
Of course, then the next question is whether the rest of the world is better off if the Middle East becomes internally stable. We should not make changes we shall come to regret.
Samuel P. Huntington described Islam as “having bloody borders”. Maybe the old British Rule was correct: If the Middle East is busy fighting with itself, it is not a threat to the rest of us.
By oilandgas360.com contributor Dr. Charles Kohlhaas.
“The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Oil & Gas 360.
