Chapter Ten: “A Peace to End All Peace,” 1916-1922

Despite its early success in the war, the Ottoman Empire could not hold out against superior Allied forces indefinitely and was compelled to sue for peace in October 1918. Its defeat created a vast power vacuum in the Middle East, one that the main European victors in the war, France and Britain, intended to fill. However,t hey were not the only parties staking claims to parts of the region. With London and Paris’s encouragement, Italy and Greece also began to look to the Middle East to satisfy their territorial ambitions. At the same time, non-state actors including Arab princes, Zionists, and sundry nationalist movements advanced competing and seemingly irreconcilable claims that were backed in some cases by a series of contradictory wartime agreements.

As a consequence, the Middle East underwent a complex and drawn-out process of negotiation, resistance, and accommodation in the immediate postwar era. Eventually, the various parties arrived at an arrangement that, reflecting the relative power of the participants, determined the political systems, rulers, and frontiers of the post-Ottoman Middle East. While many of the people who helped to produce the new map of the region were pleased with the results, other, more perceptive observers grasped that the settlement was fundamentally flawed and would likely doom the Middle East to future instability. Perhaps the most far sighted among them was future British Field Marshal Archibald Wavell (1883-1950). Parodying President Woodrow Wilson’s (r. 1913-1921) famous declaration that World War I was a “war to end all war,” he declared prophetically in 1922 that the diplomats, bureaucrats, and regional experts who had contrived the modern Middle East between 1918 and 1922 had created a “peace to end all peace.” One, he predicted, that would ensure instability in the region for decades to come.

Diplomatic Maneuvering

Peace was little more than a dream in 1916. Instead, the conflict that had produced so much death and misery in 1914 had, remarkably, grown even worse over the next two years. The deadliest fighting took place on the Western Front. Though they deployed new weapons including tanks and poison gas, the French and British armies fighting there proved abjectly incapable of breaking through the increasingly complex and formidable German trenchworks that stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss border and struggled to make even minor gains in a war that quickly degenerated into a mass slaughter on an industrial scale. No campaign demonstrated this reality more clearly than the Franco-British push along the Somme River in the summer and fall of 1916. Despite months of furious attacks and the loss of a staggering 600,000 Allied soldiers, the offensive only managed to advance the front line a mere seven miles.

Casualties on this scale were unsustainable and impelled Britain, France, and Russia to seek new allies that could share the burden. Commencing not long after the war began, their efforts began to bear fruit in 1915. That spring, they persuaded Germany’s former Triple Alliance partner, Italy, to join the conflict on the Allied side. Later, in June 1917, they induced Greece to enter the war. The participation of these countries in the fighting certainly boosted the Allied war effort, but it came at a cost: in exchange for joining, the new belligerents demanded that the Allies grant them significant territorial concessions at the expense of the defeated states. For example, Italy declared war only after the Allies had first promised that it would receive South Tyrol and territory along the Adriatic from the Habsburg Empire. Similarly, Greece entered the conflict with the understanding that Britain, France, and Russia would help it achieve the megali idea, or great idea: the Greek nationalist dream of reconstituting the Byzantine Empire.

However, as the death toll mounted, the territorial promises secured early in the war seemed increasingly inadequate. Accordingly, the belligerents, old and new alike, began to demand greater and greater compensation to justify the slaughter. Yet, where could London, Paris, and St. Petersburg, renamed Petrograd in 1914, find sufficient territory to satisfy both their own aspirations and the expectation of their new allies? After all, Britain and France had already staked claims to Germany’s overseas colonies and were disinclined to give up their gains. The answer, increasingly, was of course the Ottoman Empire. In a process they referred to as the “‘Great Loot,’” Entente diplomats began to promise their new European Allies territory in Asia Minor. Italy would receive Antalya along Anatolia’s southern coast, while Greece would acquire territory in southwest Asia Minor.

The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, July 1915-June 1916

However, British officials did not focus exclusively on gaining additional military help. Instead, they also sought ideological assistance in the war. Most notably, they became increasingly interested in 1915 and 1916 in securing assistance in neutralizing the Ottoman declaration of jihad that they feared was gaining renewed traction among the British Empire’s Muslim subjects thanks to the Ottoman Empire’s victories at Gallipoli and Kut. Fortune appeared to smile on the British in this effort. In the summer of 1915, the Ottoman governor of the Hijaz, the Emir Hussein (r. 1916-1924), approached the ranking British official in Egypt, High Commissioner Henry McMahon (1862-1949), in an effort to secure formal recognition of Arab independence under his family’s rule. There followed a lengthy exchange of letters between McMahon and Hussein that came, subsequently, to be known as the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence.

At first, McMahon and the British did not believe that they had much to gain from the negotiations. The head of the Hashimite clan and thus a sharifian, or descended from Muhammad, Hussein had initially asked London to help him and his sons establish a series of independent, Hashimite-ruled Arab kingdoms encompassing Syria, Mesopotamia, and Arabia. In exchange, he pledged to lead a revolt against the Ottoman Empire and promised that huge numbers of Arab soldiers would desert Djemal Pasha’s (1872-1922) army and join their rebellion. McMahon found the emir’s expansive demands for territory to be wildly out of scale with his likely ability to affect the war. More importantly, he was aware that London had its own designs on the Arab lands that the emir sought. Accordingly, he carefully refrained from discussing specific territorial claims with Hussein.

However, the abject failure of a major push to break the deadlock at Gallipoli in the late summer of 1915 put the emir’s request in a different light. Thereafter, British officials became more enthusiastic about the assistance that Hussein could provide. In part, they warmed to a deal because they had come to believe that Hashimite irregulars might make a modest contribution to an upcoming offensive into Palestine by drawing off Ottoman soldiers and by disrupting lines of communication. Ultimately, however, it was the Hashimite’s soft power rather than their military potential that rekindled British interest in concluding a deal. Believing that Hussein’s title and ancestry gave him enormous legitimacy in the Muslim world, London had come to conclude that his presence on the Allied side could help to maintain the continued loyalty of the millions of Muslim subjects of the French, British, and Russian empires.

McMahon consequently shifted his tone and began to indicate in his letters that London was willing to accommodate Hussein’s territorial aspirations. He insisted on two exceptions, however. First, aware that London had designs on the vilayets, or provinces, of Basra and Baghdad, he made clear that they had to remain separate from the Arab territories that Hussein sought. Second, he demanded that portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, remain apart from the proposed Hashimite states, ostensibly because they were not purely Arab, but really because France had made clear that it wanted to add them to its empire. Hussein was disappointed with these qualifications. Nonetheless, with the British dangling promises of weapons, recognition, and gold in front of him, he decided to accept McMahon’s conditions and pledged to begin his rebellion against the Ottoman Empire in mid 1916.

Though each side had its reservations, both Hussein and the British were pleased with the outcome of the negotiations. That they were mutually satisfied owed substantially to the fact that neither party fully understood that the other had been bargaining in bad faith. Hussein, for his part, had in effect signed checks that could not be cashed. That is, despite his assertions to the contrary, he exercised no meaningful influence over Arabs living outside the Hijaz; accordingly, his claim that a revolt under his banner would lead huge numbers of Arabs to switch sides was an empty one. If Hussein had overpromised, McMahon had been downright duplicitous. A subtle negotiator, he had made liberal use of evasive language and careful qualifiers to ensure that while Britain appeared to have agreed to help the emir secure Arab independence under his family’s rule, it in fact had made no concrete commitments whatsoever. Thus, while Hussein came away from the exchange believing that London had pledged to help him and his sons establish themselves as the sovereign monarchs of independent states, it had in fact agreed only to make them the titular rulers of indirect British colonies. Indeed, as Foreign Secretary Edward Grey (1862-1933) noted privately at the time, London was promising little more than “a castle in the air which would never materialize.”

Sykes-Picot Agreement, May 1916

As earlier alluded to, McMahon had good reason to dissemble in his discussions with Hussein. At the same time that he was negotiating with the emir, another British official Mark Sykes (1879-1919) was engaged in secret talks with the French diplomat François Georges-Picot (1870-1951) over the partition of the Arab Middle East.As a result, the high commissioner needed to avoid making promises to Hussein that might conflict with France’s territorial designs. Sykes, a rank amateur, and Picot, a hardened French nationalist, met several times between October 1915 and March 1916 to determine how the Allies would divide the region. Picot drove a hard bargain. He insisted that France gain direct control of territory in southeast Asia Minor and along the coast of the Levant, and he demanded that it indirectly rule the Syrian interior as far as the city of Mosul. These were expansive demands, particularly given the widespread belief that the vilayet of Mosul contained substantial oil deposits. Nevertheless, London perceived advantage in yielding to Picot’s request. With one eye fixed firmly on the future, it concluded that French possession of Syria would give Britain both a buffer and a natural ally should Russia resume the Great Game following the war.

In any event, control of Syria was not one of London’s goals in the Middle East. Instead, its focus in the region was on taking possession of Mesopotamia, a region that it correctly believed contained substantial oil deposits, and on controlling a belt of territory connecting Egypt in the west to modern-day Iraq in the east that could safeguard the empire’s vital communications with India. Sykes consequently proposed splitting the Middle East along a line stretching from Acre in Palestine to Kirkuk in Mesopotamia, with France gaining control of territory north of the line and Britain securing the region south of it. Picot agreed to the broad outlines of Sykes’s division of the region; however, he refused to sign off on the proposal to assign Palestine to Britain. Insisting that the territory had to retain its historical connection to Syria, the French diplomat demanded that France take control of it following the war.

By March 1916, the two men had finally hammered out a final agreement. According to its terms, Britain would directly rule Basra and Baghdad and would exert indirect control of other Arab territories south of the line Sykes had drawn, while France would directly administer southeastern Anatolia and coastal Syria (which would be designated as Lebanon) and would indirectly oversee the Syrian interior as far as Mosul. They compromised over Palestine. In recognition of the importance of its religious sites, they agreed that it would come under international control following the war. Pleased with the deal, they presented it to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Sasanov (1860-1927). After reviewing the agreement, he gave it his formal blessing. However, he conditioned Petrograd’s acceptance on Paris and London’s willingness to grant Russia new territorial concessions in Asia Minor beyond Istanbul and the straits, which the Allies had already agreed would come under the tsar’s control at the conclusion of the conflict. Picot and Sykes accepted this qualification. Accordingly, with an exchange of letters in May 1916, the three powers formally signed off on what has been known ever since as the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

The Historical Debate: The Sykes-Picot Agreement

During the past few decades, the agreement has come to assume an outsized role in popular understandings of the genesis of the many conflicts that have bedeviled the Middle East over the past century. According to the conventional narrative, Sykes and Picot divided the region for nakedly imperialist reasons rather than to meet the aspirations of the people living there. As a result, the agreement they negotiated imposed artificial and problematic borders that embedded within the Middle East state system a series of intractable conflicts. To the educated public, in other words, it was this externally imposed agreement, the modern Middle East’s diplomatic original sin, rather than problems endemic to the region that produced the many conflicts that the Middle East has experienced over the past century.

While popular, this view is not universally shared by scholars. On the contrary, a number of historians argue that it distorts and oversimplifies what was a much more complex process. The historian Sean McMeekim, for one, argues that while the conventional view is accurate in its characterization of British and French motives, it also substantially overstates in two critical ways the agreement’s role in defining the region’s future development. First, the frontiers and divisions that Sykes and Picot hammered out in 1915 and 1916 bore only a superficial resemblance to the Middle East that finally emerged from the shadow of war in the early 1920s; therefore, it cannot be held responsible for the problems that those frontiers may have created. More importantly, he continues, the idea that the agreement was the source of the region’s modern-day tribulations denies agency to the many states, peoples, and groups that contested the shape and structure of the Middle East in the years immediately following World War I. Indeed, it is McMeekin’s view that the creation of the modern Middle East occurred not in 1916 with the Sykes-Picot Agreement but instead in the immediate postwar years in a complex process, still dominated by Britain, that demarcated the borders and established the states that continue to define the region to the present day. However, in counterpoint to this argument, it must be understood that the starting point for those demarcations was Sykes-Picot.

The Balfour Declaration, November 1917

Further complicating understandings of the Sykes-Picot Agreement was the fact that the British were not yet done apportioning the Ottoman Empire’s territory in the Arab Middle East. Most notably, at the urging of the influential chemist and Zionist, Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour (1848-1930) prepared a third document dealing with the region’s postwar territorial arrangements, the famous Balfour Declaration, well after Sykes and Picot had concluded their agreement. Issued on November 2, 1917, the statement proclaimed that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of that object.” At just 128-words, it was a remarkably brief statement. However, what it lacked in length it more than made up for in impact, for, in issuing it, Britain had committed itself to backing the Zionist effort to establish a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.

Why did the British government move to make the already difficult question of the postwar Middle East’s disposition even more complicated? It did so in part because several key members of the cabinet were personally supportive of Zionism. Balfour and Prime Minister David Lloyd George (r. 1916-1922), in particular, were genuinely sympathetic to the situation of the Jewish people and personally supportive of the Zionist cause. As a rule, however, the British government did not make foreign policy on the basis of sympathy. Such was most certainly the case with regard to Palestine. Britain’s support for Jewish goals in the territory stemmed not from Palestine’s importance to the Zionist cause but instead from its broader geostrategic significance. That is, by 1916, British officials had come to conclude that Palestine’s position along the eastern approaches to the Suez Canal rendered it so strategically vital that they needed to assume control of it.

Here, however, they confronted a serious problem. Much though they wanted simply to annex Palestine at the end of the war, they understood that France and, especially, the United States, would, for very different reasons, block any attempt on their part to do so. French disapproval was straightforward and reflected traditional power politics: having just signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Paris was highly unlikely to agree to alter the deal to suit Britain’s imperial ambitions without receiving unacceptably costly concessions in return. American opposition, in contrast, was more ideological in nature. Its moralistic president, Woodrow Wilson, had made clear in his “Peace Without Victory Speech” in January 1917 that he opposed formal colonialism and that he would work to stop any postwar transfer of territory that did not enjoy the consent of those affected. Thus, to the consternation of British officials, their effort to secure control of Palestine appeared to be stillborn.

However, despair turned to hope not long after Wilson’s speech. The key was Zionism. British officials began to perceive Zionism at that time as a possible way to get around its allies’ opposition to its designs on the Holy Land. That is, they came to believe that support for the movement could, if properly presented, neutralize both American and French objections and thus permit London to add Palestine to the empire.

They first used Zionism to disarm French opposition. The key was the situation in Russia. In March 1917, frustration with the war effort and the management of the economy had resulted in a revolution that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II. Initially, revolutionary Russia remained committed to the war; as the economic and military situation continued to worsen over the course of 1917, however, its enthusiasm began to waver. This state of affairs deeply troubled London, and, especially, Paris. If Russia concluded a separate peace, Germany could redeploy its eastern armies to the Western Front and thus shift the balance of forces in France, enough, possibly, to tip the balance in the war. British statesmen were quick to take advantage of its ally’s concern. Beginning in the spring of 1917, they began to argue to their French counterparts that Entente support for a Zionist homeland in a British-controlled Palestine would lead Russia’s substantial Jewish population to press the revolutionary government to remain in the conflict and would thus ensure against the possibility that Germany could concentrate its forces in the west. Rattled by the prospect of a renewed offensive by a reinforced enemy, Paris found this argument persuasive and softened its previously firm opposition to British control of Palestine.

Support for Zionism also neutralized Woodrow Wilson’s objections to London’s acquisition of the territory. British policymakers had deduced that they could avoid American opposition to their territorial aspirations only if they could credibly present those acquisitions as selfless acts aimed at preparing disenfranchised peoples for autonomy or independence. Zionism permitted them to do just that in Palestine. By backing the movement, Britain could cloak what was an act of plain-and-simple imperialism as a selfless effort to help the long-suffering Jewish people at last acquire a home. It was an effective ploy. The American president not only refrained from opposing the British action but even formally endorsed the Balfour Declaration.

Thus, while the Balfour Declaration appeared on the surface to focus on achieving the Zionists’ goals, its real purpose was to provide the ideological cover Britain needed to advance its imperial interests. This is not to suggest that the Balfour Declaration was anything less than a major victory for the Zionists; in fact, as we shall see in Chapter Thirteen, the statement gave their movement a degree of international legitimacy that it heretofore lacked and thus marked a critical turning point in its evolution. Rather, it is only to stress that Britain’s motives were rooted fundamentally in promoting its self-interest rather than in supporting an idealistic cause. The verbiage of the Balfour Declaration made this reality clear. London was not calling for a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine but was instead proposing the establishment of a mere “national home” for the Jewish people. This choice of language was very deliberate: Balfour and the cabinet drafted the declaration to ensure that the Zionist project would be incorporated within a British colony rather than emerge as an independent state. London’s support for Zionism was thus, at root, a cynical strategy for colonial aggrandizement. As such, it succeeded smartly.

Unsurprisingly, London’s myriad efforts to secure new allies in the Middle East would land Britain in an awkward position immediately following the war. Simply put, it had entered into three wartime agreements regarding the Ottoman Empire’s Arab lands that promised the same territory to different parties. Paris and London expected to rule certain areas directly, the northern coast of the Levant in France’s case; Basra, Baghdad, and Palestine in Britain’s, and to divide the interior into a series of Arab client states. For their part, the Zionists saw the Balfour Declaration as merely a first step that would lead quickly and inevitably to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Finally, while Hussein had grudgingly agreed to accept French control of Lebanon and coastal Syria, he had also justifiably come away from his negotiations with McMahon believing that Britain had pledged to recognize independent Hashimite rule in a territory that included Palestine and inland Syria. In other words, the promises that London had made were irreconcilable: in zero-sum fashion, each party could obtain its territorial aspirations only at the expense of the others. The result would be bitterness, feelings of betrayal, and outright conflict between the various parties following the war, particularly in Palestine, or, as some were coming to call it, the “thrice-promised land,” that continue to reverberate to the present day.

The Allies Victorious

The problems that the wartime agreements created were ones of the future, however; in the meantime, the Allies first had to win the war. Doing so seemed as far away as ever at the start of 1917. The Western Front remained a brutal stalemate in which the British and French sacrificed ever-larger numbers of young men in a futile effort to break Germany’s seemingly impenetrable trench lines. The situation was little better in the Middle East. Checked at Kut and Gallipoli by the sultanate’s surprisingly tenacious armies, the British had been unable to take any Ottoman territory beyond the small amount that they had secured in 1914. It is true that the tsar’s armies had made substantial inroads in eastern Anatolia over the course of 1915 and 1916. Thanks to Russia’s gradual, post-revolutionary disengagement from the war, however, the Ottoman military had even succeeded in stabilizing that front.

To London’s relief, the military situation in the Middle East began to change in 1917. First, in Mesopotamia, a reinforced army of Indian troops erased the lingering stain of Kut by taking Baghdad in March 1917. More dramatically, General Edmund Allenby’s (1861-1936) Egyptian Expeditionary Force mounted a successful offensive aimed at taking possession of Palestine late in the year. It was, by the standards of the First World War, a lightning campaign. Breaking through the Ottoman lines along the frontier with Egypt in November 1917, Allenby’s troops advanced rapidly northward into the Holy Land. The drive was a major success, one made all the sweeter by the capture of the symbolically important city of Jerusalem on December 11.

The Arab Revolt that the Emir Hussein had launched in June 1916 played a small supporting role in this campaign. Under the command of Hussein’s sons, Faisal (1883- 1933) and Abdallah (1882-1951), Arab irregulars attacked Ottoman troops defending the Hijaz Railway east of the Jordan River in a series of operations designed to disrupt Ottoman supply lines. While the revolt’s actual contribution to the war was comparatively minor, it came to assume an outsized role in popular understanding of Allenby’s Palestine campaign thanks to the work of Faisal’s British liaison officer, T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935), better known as Lawrence of Arabia. An effective self-promoter and a man of great imagination, Lawrence created the impression that the Arab Revolt had been pivotal in winning the campaign in Palestine in his exaggerated account of his service in the Middle East, the book Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), on which the award-winning film Lawrence of Arabia (1962) was based.

The conclusion of the war in the Middle East came with startling suddenness in October 1918. The endgame began in September when Entente armies launched simultaneous attacks against Ottoman forces on multiple fronts. Their first big breakthrough came in Palestine. After a long pause to bring forward supplies, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force punched though the Ottoman defenses north of Jerusalem on September 19 and raced toward Damascus. To the jubilation of people on the home front, Australian troops occupied the city just twelve days later. However, that account was not the story that London chose to present to the world. Instead, it concocted an elaborate ruse in which it pretended that Faisal’s troops rather than the Australians had been responsible for the city’s capture.

What accounted for this move? Why did London seek to elevate the Hashemite contribution to the war effort in Syria? It did so in service of the new, more expansive objectives that the British government had come to seek in the Middle East. Prime Minister David Lloyd George was the primary proponent of the change in London’s goals in the region. By early 1918, he had come to conclude that the British Empire’s future security required it to assume a position of hegemonic dominance in the Middle East following the war, a situation that would only work if it prevented France, a potential future enemy, from having a substantial presence in the region. Accordingly, he directed his subordinates to claim that Faisal’s forces had been instrumental in taking Damascus, an achievement that, fake or not, would entitle the Hashemites to keep Syria after the war and thus ensure that the territory came under the control of a pliable British proxy rather than the rival French Empire.

Meanwhile, Allied armies in the Balkans were scoring an even more decisive victory. In late September 1918, a multi-national army under French command shattered the Central Powers’ defenses in southern Bulgaria and began racing toward the undefended city of Istanbul. With no reserves remaining, the Ottoman government was out of options and had little choice but to sue for peace. However, tt was not the Three Pashas who surrendered the empire. Aware that they would be compelled to answer for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians, Enver (1881-1922), Talat (1874-1921), and Djemal hurriedly resigned and slipped out of Istanbul on a German torpedo boat. Thus, it was a new government that on October 30, 1918, signed the draconian Armistice of Mudros that formally ended the First World War in the Middle East.

Dividing the Spoils

Sorting out the Middle East following the fighting was not going to be easy. Even with Russia’s claims voided as a result of its exit from the war, the various agreements that London and Paris had made to secure new allies and to achieve their own territorial aspirations in the region promised to render efforts to establish a durable settlement in the Middle East difficult. Adding to the challenge was the fact that the victors had begun to fall out over the spoils. As we just saw, the imperial rivalry between France and Britain had rekindled during the waning days of the conflict as London moved to keep the French out of Syria in service of Lloyd George’s goal of assuming hegemony over the Middle East. Likewise, jockeying for control of southwestern Anatolia, Italy and Greece were eyeing each other with growing suspicion. Ultimately, however, it was a pair of epochal events that occurred well outside the Middle East, the Bolshevik Revolution and the emergence of Woodrow Wilson as the globe’s dominant political figure, that did the most to complicate the victors’ efforts to arrive at a stable settlement in the region.

The Bolsheviks

From the very start, the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 greatly confounded French and, especially, British efforts to secure dominion in the Middle East. It did so in two ways. First, Commissar for Foreign Affairs Leon Trotsky (1879- 1940) revealed the hypocrisy of the French and British governments’ claims that they fought to spread democracy and to help advance the interest of small and weak nations by publishing the secret treaties that the Allied states had concluded with one another, including the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Coming on the immediate heels of the Balfour Declaration, the revelation of this nakedly imperialist treaty embarrassed London and Paris and raised doubts in the Hashemite camp about whether they could trust the British. Second, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin (r. 1917-1924), who had long called for self-determination for the many millions of people across the globe living under foreign rule, had stepped up his criticism of imperialism after his party seized power in Russia in November 1917. In doing so, Lenin was being disingenuous. His opposition to imperialism sprang far-less from any interest he may have had in helping people living under the yoke of colonialism secure their independence than from his desire to weaken the capitalist states. However, that he was being duplicitous was ultimately unimportant in the immediate postwar era. What mattered was that his words helped create the expectation among people ruled by a foreign power or facing the prospect of being incorporated into a colonial empire that they could and should enjoy self-determination in the aftermath of the war.

The “Wilsonian Moment”

The Bolsheviks thus posed a serious ideological challenge to the democratic- capitalist states, one that Woodrow Wilson, who had brought his country into the war in April 1917, felt he needed to counter. The result was his most important address: The Fourteen Points Speech that he gave before Congress on January 8, 1918. In it, he outlined four general principles that he argued should govern international relations in the postwar world including open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, free trade, and disarmament. He also proposed the establishment of a new, supranational institution, the League of Nations, that would be empowered to enforce peace and prevent the outbreak of another general war, and he outlined nine specific territorial adjustments designed to achieve self-determination and the equality of nations. His twelfth point dealt specifically with the Middle East. It called for the creation of a Turkish state, but also stipulated that the other nations in the Ottoman Empire should have “an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.”

It was a bravura performance. Well publicized by the US government, Wilson’s call for a new system of international relations based on the Fourteen Points captured the imagination of people across the globe. Coming from the leader of the world’s most powerful state, it dramatically overshadowed Lenin’s message and led people to believe that an Allied victory would remake the world along liberal-democratic lines. It thus set the stage for what the historian Erez Manela calls the “‘Wilsonian Moment’”: the period between November 1918 and March 1919 when colonized people, whose expectations had risen dramatically as a result of Wilson’s call for self-determination, shifted from their earlier calls for limited reforms or autonomy to demands for outright independence.

The Paris Peace Conference, January-June 1919

In two critical ways, Wilson’s Fourteen Points address dramatically altered the global diplomatic landscape. First, it inspired nationalists to take their case to the Paris Peace Conference at which the postwar order was to be determined. Indeed, believing that they had the support of the American president, dozens of unaccredited groups, individuals, and officials arrived in France to press for independence in the winter and spring of 1919. From the Middle East alone, delegations came from Armenia, Syria, Lebanon, and Persia seeking to enlist the support of the United States in their newfound efforts to secure self-government.

Second, in making clear Wilson’s strong opposition to formal colonialism and his determination to prevent the peace settlement from turning into a land grab, the Fourteen Points address placed significant limits on the ability of the Allies to take territory from the defeated Central Powers after the war. In assessing Wilson’s ability to limit the Allies territorial ambitions it is important to understand that, while powerful, the American president was not in a position to dictate to the Allies, and that he, too, faced constraints. Most notably, the need to secure the Allies’ approval of the League of Nations, the centerpiece of his global vision, compelled Wilson to repeatedly agree to vast transfers of territory that violated the spirit of the Fourteen Points. Still, as the leader of the world’s most powerful state, a country to which the Allies owed almost- incalculably large sums of money, he was more than strong enough to compel them to justify the acquisition of any new territory and to pay at least lip service to the idea that they were acting to help the affected people achieve self-determination, as we will shortly see with the Mandate System.

Britain was far-better positioned to do so in the Middle East than were its imperial rivals. Indeed, the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence and the Balfour Declaration allowed London to portray its territorial ambition in the region not as a land grab but instead as a selfless effort on its part to help Zionists and Arabs alike achieve self- determination. Britain was thus able to win the Wilson’s approval for its territorial acquisitions in the Middle East and was even able to secure his assistance in its efforts to deny Syria to the French. Paris and Rome, in contrast, had no similar agreements that they could use to disguise their expansionist goals in the region and faced an uphill fight in persuading Wilson to give his blessings to their imperial ambitions. Thus, as the peace talks heated up in the spring of 1919, Britain appeared to have smartly outmaneuvered its erstwhile allies, casting them as naked imperialists at the very moment, ironically, that it was massively expanding its own empire in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Wilson further complicated the disposition of the Ottoman Empire by preventing the victors from simply adding newly gained territory to their colonial empires. Great Power pressure and his own deeply held racist beliefs may have compelled Wilson to accept the Allies’ acquisition of territory after the war, but he remained implacably opposed to traditional imperialism. Indeed, he forthrightly insisted that any territorial gains had to be temporary and that the affected places had to be administered in the best interest of their inhabitants. The result was a compromise solution known as the Mandate System. Overseen by the League of Nations, it designated the former German colonies and large sections of the Ottoman Empire as mandates: territories that were not-yet ready for self-rule and thus needed tutelage under an established power. It then assigned each to a so-called mandatory power and tasked those states with preparing the peoples that they administered for eventual independence. The Mandate System thus reconciled Wilson’s opposition to formal colonialism with the Allies’ insistence that they acquire territory at the end of the war. If it was a compromise, however, it was one that leaned heavily toward traditional imperialism. d\Despite the rhetoric about preparing the people of the mandates for self-governance, it amounted in practical terms to little more than a perpetuation of the existing colonial system under a new name.

Given this background, the negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference in the winter and spring of 1919 proved to be disheartening for the Arabs. Wilson’s acceptance of the Mandate System for the Arab part of the Ottoman Empire at the start of the conference had already taken genuine independence off the table. Meanwhile, the president’s refusal to meet with the unaccredited delegations from the Middle East denied the Arabs any opportunity to plead their case for self-determination.

Even in the rare instances in which the Arabs enjoyed diplomatic successes, their achievements came with significant caveats. With London’s help, for example, Faisal had succeeded in assuming the title of king of Syria and in establishing a government in Damascus. Exploiting his dependence, however, British officials significantly undermined those achievements by compelling him to sign the Weizmann- Faisal Agreement in which he formally accepted the terms of the Balfour Declaration and effectively ceded Palestine to the Zionists. Likewise, the King-Crane Commission, a fact-finding mission sent to the region to determine the wishes of its residents, accurately reported both Syrian hostility to the prospects of France becoming the mandatory power over their country and Palestinian-Arab opposition to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the mandate and thus raised hopes that Wilson might rein in Paris and London. However, thanks to the president’s continued need for French and British support in his efforts to secure the League of Nations, the commission’s report had no impact on the disposition of Arab territory.

Meanwhile, even as the Arabs were reduced to bystanders, the talks over a final settlement in the Middle East dragged on. The primary holdup was Syria. With France and Britain at loggerheads over which would take possession of the vilayet, precious little progress could be made regarding the final disposition of Ottoman territory. In the end, it took two significant changes to the global diplomatic situation to break the deadlock. First, with Wilson incapacitated by a severe stroke, the US Senate rejected membership in the League of Nations in November 1919. As a result, the Europeans were now free to structure the peace among themselves without having to adhere fully to the president’s demands. Second, with costly crises in Ireland, India, and Egypt straining the treasury, the badly overextended British government concluded that it needed to trim its commitments. As part of that retrenchment, Lloyd George and his colleagues decided to abandon Faisal and permit the French to occupy Syria.

The Treaty of Sèvres, August 1920

With London having decided to give up Syria, representatives of Britain, France, and Italy were finally able to arrive at an agreement regarding the Middle East. Meeting in the Italian resort town of San Remo in April 1920, they hashed out the terms of what would later become the Treaty of Sèvres, the peace settlement that would formally end the war between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire. It stipulated the division of the Arab portion of the defeated empire along what amounted to a modified version of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. France would assume separate mandates over Syria and Lebanon but agreed to cede Mosul to London in exchange for the rights to a one-quarter share of the province’s oil. Paris also indicated its willingness to have Faisal continue to serve as king of Syria, albeit in a strictly titular capacity. For its part, Britain would acquire a mandate over a new country, to be named Iraq, that encompassed the vilayets of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra; it would also become the mandatory power for Palestine where it was formally tasked with implementing the Balfour Declaration. Further north, the treaty partitioned the south coast of Anatolia between France, Italy, and Greece and established an autonomous Kurdish region and an independent Armenia. Both the city of Istanbul and the straits would fall under international administration. Finally, what little remained of the Ottoman Empire would be compelled to accept the reinstitution of the capitulations.

The treaty was thus a draconian one that effectively dismembered the empire, a bitter pill for a dynasty and state that had once held substantial territory on three continents. With the capital literally under the guns of the British navy, however, it was also an agreement that the defeated Ottomans were in no position to refuse. Accordingly, desperate to hang on to power, the final Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI (r. 1918-1922) signed the treaty in August 1920.

London was, without question, the primary beneficiary of the Treaty of Sèvres. With it, British officials had obtained the arc of territory stretching from the Sinai Peninsula in the west to the Persian border in the east needed to prevent a rival from threatening the vital communications that connected India and Britain. They had also gained direct or indirect control of all of the Middle East’s known oil reserves, a commodity that had demonstrated its enormous strategic value in the recent war. As such, London had achieved the position of hegemonic dominance in the region that Lloyd George had sought.

What is more, the British did not anticipate facing significant challenges to their rule in the region moving forward. Instead, the cabinet was quite confident that the Arabs would quickly accommodate themselves to trading the corrupt and inefficient rule of the Ottoman Empire for the stability, progress, and order that they believed London’s mastery of the region would bring. Indeed, at the time that the prime minister signed the Treaty of Sèvres, he and his colleagues expected that the people of the region would not merely welcome Britain’s enlightened administration but would also enthusiastically cooperate with their new imperial rulers.

Resistance

These assumptions proved to be almost comically off the mark. The people of the Middle East sought not tutelage or exploitation, but instead independence and the opportunity to freely develop their economies and political institutions. Accordingly, rather than producing the gratitude and the positive, cooperative relationship between the people of the region and their new masters that British officials had anticipated, the efforts to secure hegemony over the Middle East birthed a series of vigorous resistance movements in nearly every part of the region. Popular demands for rapid postwar demobilization in Britain and insistence that the cabinet trim expenses so as to return the government to a balanced budget and the gold standard greatly complicated London’s ability to respond to these challenges. As a result, while these resistance movements lacked the power to expel the British and its allies from the Middle East, neither could London impose its will on the region.

Egypt: the Wafd Party

That the resistance to the Treaty caught the British unaware is surprising in light of the fact that it first emerged more than a year before the formal signing of the Treaty of Sèvres. It did so in Egypt, and it occurred as a result of the hopes that Wilson’s call for self-determination had raised. Until nearly the end of the First World War, Egyptian nationalists had sought comparatively modest goals such as greater autonomy and a larger Egyptian role in the administration of the protectorate. As was the case in other parts of the world, however, Wilson’s Fourteen Points Speech had dramatically altered expectations in Egypt. Thereafter, nationalists no longer hoped for mere autonomy but instead anticipated that their country would, with the president’s help, win complete independence following the war.

Accordingly, in November 1918, a group of nationalists led by the former Minister of Justice, Saad Zaghul (1859-1927), requested that Britain permit a delegation, or wafd, to travel to Paris to present Egypt’s case for independence. Their demand alarmed British officials. Implacably opposed to granting independence to Egypt, they flatly refused to permit the wafd to leave Egypt for France. However, the nationalists were not easily dissuaded. Anticipating that Wilson would help them once he learned of their plight, they responded by organizing rallies, collecting petitions, and forming a new political organization, the Wafd Party, to mobilize the people in support of independence. Still, the British refused to budge.

The standoff turned to open revolt in March 1919. Fearing that the nationalists’ campaign was making inroads with the Egyptian masses, High Commissioner Reginald Wingate (1861-1953) arrested Zaghul and several other Wafd Party leaders and deported them to the island of Malta. It was a bold move, and a counterproductive one. Rather than quelling the growing opposition to British rule, the arrests outraged people throughout the country and sparked a province-wide mass uprising called the Revolution of 1919. Over the next few months, Egyptians rioted, participated in protests, tore up railways, cut telegraph lines, and went on strike to make clear their opposition to Britain’s detention of the Wafd leaders and its refusal to discuss independence. The demonstrations were enormously popular and enjoyed support from all elements of Egyptian society. They brought Muslims and Christians together and, in a break with longstanding custom, even involved substantial numbers of women. Both the protests and the British response were violent. By the time the colonial authorities managed to restore some measure of order in April, eight-hundred Egyptians and sixty Britons had died in the unrest.

London responded by replacing Wingate with the more diplomatic Allenby in late March. Aware that the arrest of Zaghul and his colleagues had amounted to heaping fuel on a raging fire, the field marshal announced in short order that he was releasing the Wafd leaders. The move worked. To London’s relief, even while the Egyptians continued to seethe at the British, stability returned to the province.

Meanwhile, now free to plead Egypt’s case before the peace conference, Zaghul and his colleagues traveled directly from Malta to Paris. They got there too late. Just before the delegation finally arrived, the US formally declared that it was recognizing Britain’s protectorate over Egypt. It was a sobering moment for the nationalists. Not only had Egypt failed to gain its independence, but Wilson, its purported champion, had repudiated their call for self-determination. Importantly, however, the president’s apparent retreat from the principles that he had outlined in the Fourteen Points Address did not lead the nationalists to revert to the more-limited demands that they had held before the Wilsonian Moment. Instead, they pressed on with their call for nothing less than full independence.

Syria and Transjordan

Resistance to the Treaty of Sèvres next appeared in Syria. It did not, at least initially, come from the top. With the treaty having assigned Syria to France, the British had instructed Faisal to work out an agreement with Paris. Faisal was furious with London for abandoning him, but he was also a pragmatist. As such, he was open to accepting Paris’s proposal that he serve as king of Syria in a titular capacity under French protection. However, Syrian nationalists were far less flexible than the king. On the contrary, adamant that Syria become a genuinely independent state rather than a nominally autonomous part of the French Empire, they pressured Faisal to adopt a hard line. They also began firing on French troops along the border between Syria and French-occupied Lebanon. Paris was not amused. Determined to assert control of Syria, it ordered High Commissioner Henri Gouraud (1867-1946) to invade Syria from Lebanon in July 1920. Disciplined and well-armed, his powerful army easily brushed aside a much smaller Arab force on July 24 and established control of Syria. A strident nationalist, Gouraud promptly set the tone for French rule by ostentatiously going to the Mausoleum of Saladin and declaring “‘arise Saladin, we have returned, and my presence here consecrates the victory of the Cross over the Crescent.’”

The Hashemites felt justifiably betrayed. London had first browbeaten Faisal into accepting the separation of Palestine from Syria and had then abandoned him to the French despite its earlier promises of support, a move that had resulted in Faisal fleeing, humiliated, into exile. Indeed, with his expulsion from Syria, the only provision in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence that London was still honoring was the one calling for it to formally recognize Hussein’s Kingdom of the Hijaz, a territory, the Hashemites pointed out, that they had controlled long before they had begun negotiating with Britain in 1915. However, the family was not entirely without recourse. In November 1920, Faisal’s brother Abdallah, the future king of Jordan, and a small force of irregulars moved to contest Paris and London’s overbearing actions by occupying Transjordan: the anarchic, lightly populated no man’s land that lay on the eastern side of the Jordan River. While there, he announced that he was recruiting volunteers to join him in a campaign aimed at expelling the French from Syria and at restoring his brother to the throne. It was a bold action, one that greatly alarmed the British, who feared that the French would use his attacks as a pretext to add the territory of Transjordan, which the Sykes-Picot Agreement had assigned to Britain, to its Syrian Mandate.

Palestine

In the meantime, opposition to British rule and the Treaty of Sèvres had spread to Palestine. The Balfour Declaration’s formal expression of support for a Jewish homeland was the primary source of this resistance. Though the statement had forthrightly declared that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” the Arabs feared that London’s pledge of support for Zionism would leave them a subordinate people in an alien and hostile state. A surge in Zionist immigration and an uptick in Jewish land purchases following Britain’s assumption of control of the territory confirmed these concerns and rapidly raised tensions in the mandate. The mounting frustration finally boiled over with the outbreak of massive anti-Zionist riots in Jerusalem in April 1920 and Jaffa in May 1921. The intercommunal violence shocked the British. Resulting in the deaths of sixty-four Arabs and ninety-five Jews, it made clear to them for the first time the depths of Palestinian hostility to both Zionism and Britain and led at least some officials to begin to question the wisdom of the Balfour Declaration.

The Iraq Revolt, 1920

The most serious resistance to Britain’s play for dominance in the Arab world occurred in Mesopotamia in the summer of 1920. The territory, which British officials had taken to calling by its old Arab name, Iraq, was something of a Frankenstein creation. London had fashioned it by joining the heavily Kurdish vilayet of Mosul to the predominantly Arab vilayets of Basra and Baghdad. While the latter pair had strong historical links, ethnically distinct Mosul had only limited economic connections with them, a fact that suggested to some that welding the three vilayets into a coherent state would be a serious challenge. Indeed, one American missionary cautioned that merging them together was tantamount to “‘flying in the face of four millenniums of history.’” Such warnings were prescient. As we shall see, the union of these vilayets would prove problematic. However, their merger was not the reason that Iraq erupted in the summer of 1920.

Instead, the revolt was a product of London’s heavy-handed approach to the administration of the territory. Britain’s establishment of a mandate without any consultation with the region’s inhabitants quickly aroused intense nationalist sentiments among urban Arabs. More importantly, the imposition of levies designed to cover the costs of the mandate’s administration infuriated the tribal Arabs of the rural areas who had not previously had to pay taxes. As a result, in early July, a thawra, or revolt, broke out along the Lower Euphrates River and quickly spread north to the region around Baghdad. The British were almost completely unprepared for it. Failing to grasp the degree to which Iraqis opposed the mandate, London had sought to maintain order in the territory with a garrison that was inadequate even in times of peace. Thoroughly overmatched by a rebellion supported by an estimated 131,000 nationalists, it could do nothing to prevent the guerillas from seizing huge swaths of territory in central Iraq.

London acted quickly to regain control of Iraq. Deploying reinforcements from India, it used a combination of overwhelming force and divide-and-conquer tactics to roll back the revolt. The British campaign was as brutal as it was effective. With the assistance of aircraft that dropped both conventional and mustard-gas bombs on villages believed to be supporting the nationalists, British and Indian troops were able to restore control over the main population centers and lines of communication by October. Additional operations further suppressed the rebellion to the point that by February 1921, the British had succeeded in fully extinguishing the thawra.

However, putting the revolt down had proven very costly. The fighting had resulted in the deaths of 500 Indian and British troops and an estimated 6,000 Iraqis. Worse, in the eyes of the budget-minded cabinet, it had set the exchequer back a whopping £40 million, a sum larger than the amount Britain had spent on the entire Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in 1917 and 1918.

More broadly, the revolt revealed the tension that existed between London’s expansive goals in the region and the more-limited resources it was willing to expend to attain those ends. That gap was substantial. On the one hand, popular demands for demobilization and elite insistence on a balanced budget resulted in the government cutting military expenditures in half every year from 1919 to 1923. On the other, Lloyd George’s cabinet was determined to secure the fruits of Britain’s victory in the Middle East by establishing control of the territories that its armies had taken possession of during and just after the war, a task that appeared to require a great deal of money and troops. The revolt thus brought the contradiction between Britain’s limited means and its expansive objectives into clear focus. Simply put, hegemony in the Arab Middle East along the lines outlined in the Treaty of Sèvres demanded money and troops that Britain was unwilling to spend.

Türkiye

Meanwhile, the most successful and consequential opposition to Britain’s effort to achieve hegemony in the Middle East occurred in Türkiye. The resistance there was so effective, in fact, that the country was able to renegotiate the peace that the victors had imposed on it, something none of the other members of the Central Powers would manage to achieve. That it was able to do so was astonishing in light of the feeble position that the Ottoman Empire occupied immediately following World War I. Brutally one sided, the Armistice of Mudros had compelled the Ottoman Empire to demobilize its military forces and gave the Allied powers carte blanche to occupy any territory they deemed strategic, thus allowing the victors to completely dominate the Ottoman Empire and its government. The armistice agreement also included provisions permitting the Allied powers to take control of key territories and to internationalize the straits. By early 1919, as a result, the Turks had hit rock bottom. Crushed militarily and diplomatically and lacking a genuinely autonomous government, they appeared to be a thoroughly beaten people, powerless to resist further territorial demands.

Ironically, their revival was the unintended consequence of a dispute among the Allies in early 1919 over the disposition of Turkish territory. At issue was the predominantly Greek city of Smyrna that both Italy and Greece coveted. Annoyed with Rome’s increasingly expansive territorial aspirations, Wilson and Lloyd George had sought to preempt an Italian move on the city by authorizing the Greek government to deploy troops to occupy it in May 1919. The decision delighted Greece’s nationalistic prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos (r. 1917-1920). Committed to achieving the megali idea, he wasted no time in sending a substantial army to Smyrna. Upon its arrival, it received a hero’s welcome from a Greek community that was ecstatic that the city was going to become part of Greece. Unsurprisingly, the Turks did not share their enthusiasm. On the contrary, the deployment of Greek soldiers to Asia Minor aroused widespread anger and produced a surge of nationalist sentiment among Anatolia’s Turkish majority. In fact, it was the arrival of Greek troops that catalyzed the emergence of Turkish resistance to the peace plan. As future President Mustafa Kemal (r. 1923- 1938), later wrote, “[if] the enemy had not stupidly come here, the whole country might have slept on heedlessly.”

Determined to prevent the carve up of Anatolia, Mustafa Kemal assumed leadership of an embryonic Turkish nationalist movement in May 1919 in the former provincial capital of Ankara. A veteran of the Gallipoli campaign, he quickly established a new political infrastructure and a reformed military force in Anatolia. He also oversaw the drafting of the National Pact: a declaration of principles that renounced the Arab portion of the Ottoman Empire while simultaneously calling for the establishment of a Turkish state free of foreign interference in those areas that had a Turkish majority, including Armenia and Kurdistan.

Even as Mustafa Kemal steadily gained the support of a growing number of Turks in 1919, the British remained oblivious to the rapidly maturing resistance he led. In fact, they only awoke to the danger that his movement posed to their designs for the Middle East when the newly elected Ottoman Chamber of Deputies formally adopted the National Pact in February 1920. Finally grasping the threat that the nationalists posed, Lloyd George moved quickly to crush the movement by ordering the occupation of Istanbul and the dissolution of the Ottoman legislature in March 1920. However, this attempt to hobble the nationalists backfired badly. The occupation destroyed what little credibility the sultan still possessed even as Mustafa Kemal’s movement gained legitimacy thanks to its resolute opposition to the Allies, particularly after he made Ankara the new capital by convening a new legislative body there in April 1920 called the Grand National Assembly. Collectively, these events dramatically raised the nationalists’ standing. From that point forward, the sultan’s regime may have enjoyed international recognition, but it was Mustafa Kemal’s government that possessed popular support, and thus genuine sovereignty, among the Turks.

With his seizure of Istanbul having failed to arrest the nationalist movement, Lloyd George found himself caught in a steadily worsening situation. By June, Mustafa Kemal’s increasingly aggressive soldiers were menacing British troops guarding the neutral zone that the Allies had set up around the straits. Compounding the situation, the British government’s self-imposed fiscal restraints and prior military commitments meant that the prime minister had no reserves with which to reinforce them. Nonetheless, Lloyd George refused to scale back his goals in Asia Minor. Instead, seeking to uphold the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres, he authorized Greece, effectively Britain’s catspaw in the region, to march its army out from Smyrna and secure the coastal plain. Venizelos happily complied. Eager to pursue his country’s irredentist claims in Anatolia, he ordered the Greek army to occupy the lowlands of western Asia Minor, a move that compelled Mustafa Kemal’s forces to retreat to the central plateau. It was an impressive victory on paper, one that both secured control of substantial territory and protected the straits. However, it had no substantive effect on the strategic balanc,. So long as the nationalists maintained an army in central Anatolia, the peace settlement on which Britain’s grand designs for the Middle East rested could not be guaranteed and was thus incomplete.

Despite the mounting risks, Lloyd George and the Greeks continued to bet on a military solution. Thanks to two significant shifts in the balance of power, it was a gamble with ever-worsening odds. First, seeking to curb Britain’s influence in the region, the USSR joined the Turkish nationalists in conquering the independent Armenian republic in late 1920 and followed by agreeing to supply Ataturk’s forces with arms. Second, a concurrent nationalist diplomatic effort aimed at peeling off London’s allies began to bear fruit. Having concluded that Mustafa Kemal’s movement could not be beaten at an acceptable cost, the French and Italian governments agreed in 1921 to evacuate their troops from Asia Minor in exchange for economic concessions. As a result, the nationalists, now vastly better armed thanks to the USSR, were able to free up substantial additional forces for use against the Greeks.

Unwilling to cut their losses, Athens and London pressed on. With Lloyd George’s blessing, the Greek army launched an offensive toward Ankara in June 1921 aimed at destroying the nationalist movement. It was a long and brutal campaign in which the Greeks systematically burned Turkish villages in order to secure the supply lines needed to sustain their army so far from its bases. Finally, at the end of the summer, the invaders compelled Mustafa Kemal’s nationalist military to stand and fight along the Sakarya River just fifty miles from Ankara. While the Greeks prevailed in the first few days of the battle, a powerful Turkish counterattack broke their morale and compelled them to retreat to a new line on the edge of the Anatolian plateau. It was a huge triumph for the nationalists, one that further solidified the movement’s political standing among the Turks.

The nationalist campaign of resistance ended in victory the following year. In August 1922, Mustafa Kemal defeated the Greek army so completely that it first retreated in disorder to the coast and then abandoned Anatolia altogether. Retribution soon followed. Most notoriously, after Venizelos’s forces withdrew, a massive fire destroyed the Greek quarter of Smyrna and rendered hundreds-of-thousands of its residents homeless. Facing the prospect of further violence, nearly all of them fled Anatolia for Greece as refugees. More would follow. Finally, in October, the arrival of Turkish troops opposite British positions guarding the straits at Chanak put Britain and the nationalists on the brink of war. Some of the hardliners in the British government wanted to fight, but, this time, more moderate voices prevailed. As a result, London and the nationalists agreed to a ceasefire that called for the Turkish army to stand down in exchange for a British promise to renegotiate the Treaty of Sèvres. However, Lloyd George would not be involved in those talks. Coming on the heels of the other problems that his aggressive policies in the Middle East had created, the Chanak Crisis brought down his government and ended his stint as prime minister.

The Settlement of 1922

The extent and intensity of the resistance to British hegemony that culminated in the Chanak Crisis compelled London to rethink its approach to the Middle East. Not only had Lloyd George’s plan for regional dominance failed, but it had imposed costs that the British government was unwilling to shoulder. However, London did not completely abandon the former prime minister’s drive for regional hegemony. Instead, it articulated in piecemeal fashion the Settlement of 1922, a new approach toward the region designed to replace the Treaty of Sèvres with a new arrangement that could, by meeting the minimal demands of the region’s peoples, sustain London’s control of the Middle East. It was a complex settlement, one that included a renegotiated peace agreement with the Turkish nationalists, nominal Egyptian independence, and, crucially, an effort by British officials to reconcile the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, the Balfour Declaration, and the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The settlement was successful in the short run insofar as it helped London achieve its goal of retaining a dominant position in the Middle East during the interwar period at a cost that London found acceptable. However, it did not set the stage for the region’s long-term stability or development. On the contrary, it bred resentments, undermined prospects for the institutionalization of representative governments, and created states whose legitimacy, and even their very right to exist, remained widely questioned.

The Treaty of Lausanne, July 1923

The effort to resolve the Chanak Crisis ultimately produced the most enduring part of the settlement: the Treaty of Lausanne. Its negotiation was nearly as hard fought as the combat that had preceded it. Determined to drive a tough bargain, Britain set the tone by inviting the sultan’s government to send a separate delegation in a bid to weaken the nationalists’ position. No stranger to hardball tactics, Mustafa Kemal deftly countered that move by abolishing the sultanate in November 1922. The tough negotiations continued after the conference finally got underway. Most notably, the Turkish representative, the former general, Ismet Inonu (1884-1973), habitually signaled his opposition to London’s proposals by demonstratively removing his hearing aid when the British negotiator, Lord Curzon (1859-1925) was speaking and only replacing it when Curzon had finished.

The resulting treaty was a major victory for the nationalists. To be sure, Mustafa Kema land his allies did have to make some concessions. For example, Inonu had no choice but to agree to permit the League of Nations to determine the disposition of the vilayet of Mosul, a region that Mustafa Kemal had insisted should revert from Iraqi to Turkish control. However, the balance of the treaty more than offset such provisions. It absolved Türkiye of the burden of paying reparations, ended the much-resented capitulations, and returned the straits to Turkish sovereignty. More importantly, it assigned to Türkiye all of the parts of the former Ottoman Empire in which Turkish people composed a majority of the population and thus secured international recognition of the National Pact. Relatedly, the agreement helped the nationalists achieve their goal of making their country more ethnically homogenous. Most notably, it provided for “a “‘compulsory exchange’ of populations” between Greece and Türkiye that resulted in the eviction of 1.3 million Greek people from Türkiye and the expulsion of 800,000 Muslims from Greece in what was the first instance of internationally sanctioned ethnic cleansing following World War I. Sadly, it would not be the last.

The Cairo Conference

While Curzon directed the negotiations with Türkiye, Winston Churchill (1874- 1965), in his new capacity as secretary of state for the colonies, oversaw the restructuring of Britain’s empire in Palestine and Iraq. As Churchill knew all too well, 1920 had been a rough year for Britain’s imperial pretensions in the region. The rioting in Jerusalem suggested that it had stumbled into a costly quagmire in Palestine, while Abdallah’s threat to invade French-controlled Syria raised the possibility that the Hashemites could drag Britain into a crisis with its French ally-turned-rival. Worst of all, the revolt in Mesopotamia had turned Iraq into a money pit at a time when London was committed to aggressively cutting the budget. Coming in rapid succession, these problems were dispiriting and seemed insoluble to many observers. Indeed, the situation appeared so intractably bleak in early 1921 that some officials were beginning to quietly wonder whether Britain should abandon its Middle Eastern mandates altogether.

Churchill did not share that view. A committed imperialist, he moved with characteristic energy to find a solution to the empire’s problems in the Arab world. He had three explicit goals. First, believing that Britain’s Middle Eastern mandates were valuable additions to the empire, he sought to ensure that London retained control of them. Second, aware that Britain needed to economize in order to get back on the gold standard, he wanted to dramatically reduce the cost that they imposed on the exchequer. Finally, he hoped to undo the damage that London had done to its international reputation by failing to live up to the terms of its wartime agreements regarding the Middle East. That is, he wanted to find a way to reconcile the seemingly incompatible terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, and Balfour Declaration.

These were daunting goals, even for a person with Churchill’s diplomatic savvy. Retaining possession of the territory it had secured through the Treaty of Sèvres required the maintenance of a substantial civil and military presence in the region, one that, by its very existence, would greatly complicate efforts to reduce the budget. Likewise, harmonizing diplomatic agreements that had promised the same territory to different parties would be no simple task.

To achieve these challenging ends, Churchill convened the Cairo Conference at the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo in March 1921. The list of British officials and experts who took part was impressive. The attendees included high-ranking bureaucrats and military officers stationed in the region as well as Middle East experts such as T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), the writer and traveler who had assumed a position as a key administrator in Iraq. Tasked with resolving the problems that Britain had experienced in its Middle Eastern mandates, the attendees would make a series of important decisions that would have momentous long-term consequences for the region.

The conference first dealt with the situation in Iraq. Wracked by a costly insurgency in the countryside and by seething opposition in the cities, it was the most troubled part of Britain’s Middle Eastern empire in 1921. After vigorous debate, the attendees determined that they could best ensure the mandate’s long-term stability by shifting to a system of indirect rule, one that they believed would be more acceptable to the territory’s Arab majority. Accordingly, in August 1921, they arranged for the now- unemployed and unhappy Faisal to become the king of Iraq. In Churchill’s eyes, it was a savvy solution that neatly killed two birds with one stone: it both promised to reduce unrest among urban Iraqis and made good London’s failure to adhere to the McMahon- Hussein Correspondence, thus helping to restore Britain’s battered diplomatic reputation.

What it did not do, however, was address the urgent problem posed by the need to contain costs. How, the attendees debated, could London maintain control of Iraq’s vast rural areas in a way that was consistent with its determination to drastically pare back government expenditures? For Churchill, technology and brute force provided a way out of this conundrum. That is, Britain would uphold order and internal stability in Iraq by using airpower to coerce obedience. Cheap and powerful, airplanes could, through the threat of bombing, compel the seemingly ungovernable rural tribes to pay the taxes that would make the mandate financially self-sustaining, thus relieving Britain of the cost of administering it.

Having arrived at a solution for Iraq, the conferees next addressed the problems of Palestine. Here, London faced a series of peculiarly challenging tasks. It needed to end communal violence between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish immigrants, reconcile the conflicting promises it had made in the Balfour Declaration and the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, satisfactorily dispose of Transjordan, which Faisal had ruled as part of Syria until July 1920, and, lastly, prevent Abdallah’s presence in Transjordan from embroiling Britain in a conflict with France. After lengthy debates, the attendees concluded that they could neatly resolve all of these issues through a combination of Solomonic division and the appeasement of the Hashimites. Implemented in 1922, this new approach involved two steps. First, it split the mandate of Palestine along the Jordan River and declared that Transjordan would not be subject to the Balfour Declaration. Second, it established a system of indirect rule in that territory by installing Abdallah as Transjordan’s nominal ruler.

Churchill was delighted with this solution. In his view, it deftly resolved all of the problems that had emerged in Palestine in 1920. By creating an explicitly Arab state through the division of the mandate, it would ease Arab opposition to Zionism and would thus end the resentment that had fueled the riot in Jerusalem in 1920. By making Abdallah the ruler of Transjordan, it would dissuade the emir from dragging Britain into a potentially costly conflict with France. Above all, by splitting the mandate of Palestine, his plan would, in his eyes, reconcile the commitment Britain had made in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence to foster the creation of Hashemite states with the promise it had expressed in the Balfour Declaration to oversee the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and would thus allow Britain to meet all of the obligations it had made during the war. In hindsight, of course, it achieved only the second and third of these aims. That is, while the conference’s plan did ease Hashemite frustration with London and did permit Britain to claim that it had stood by its word, it proved utterly incapable of resolving either the competition between the Zionists and the Arab population of Palestine or, more broadly, the contradiction inherent in the Balfour Declaration’s pledge to create a Jewish homeland while simultaneously respecting the rights of non-Jewish people in the mandate. However, Churchill was blind to these shortcomings, and genuinely believed that he had resolved in Cairo the issues that had bedeviled mandatory Palestine.

Thus, at the conclusion of the conference, Churchill felt that he had put Britain’s policy toward the Middle East mandates back on track. Indeed, he was quite pleased with his work. In conjunction with the renegotiation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement that had earlier taken place at the San Remo Conference, he believed that his reorganization of the terms of the mandates in Palestine and Iraq had finally reconciled the contradictory promises that Britain had made in its wartime agreements regarding the Middle East and had thus restored its tarnished diplomatic reputation. All the relevant parties had to make compromises, he acknowledged, but each also received essentially what Britain had promised them. Meanwhile, by shifting to a system of indirect, Hashemite rule in Transjordan and Iraq, the so-called “Sherifian Solution,”and by relying on the threat of bombing villages in Iraq to uphold order, he was confident that he had devised a way to ease the expense of empire to the point that Britain would be able to retain possession of its new and strategically valuable Arab territories at an acceptable cost. Unaware of the conference’s genuine shortcomings, in sum, Churchill left Cairo confident that he had resolved the serious problems that had emerged in the mandates.

Egypt: The Four Reserve Points

Meanwhile, Britain finally managed to clarify its relationship with Egypt in 1922. It had been no simple task. From nearly the start of his tenure as high commissioner, Allenby had sought to end the unrest in the protectorate by negotiating a treaty of independence with representatives from the Wafd Party. Unfortunately, despite the fact that both sides agreed that the talks should end with Egypt becoming independent, the discussions quickly deadlocked. The primary issue preventing an agreement was of the Suez Canal. London remained adamant that the final agreement permit it to maintain a permanent military presence in the canal zone; Zaghul and the Wafd Party were equally determined to end the occupation altogether. As a result, the two sides could not make meaningful progress toward an agreement and the unrest that had started in 1919 continued to grind on.

Allenby finally broke the impasse in February 1922. Unable to stabilize the situation in Egypt through negotiations, he resolved it by issuing the Unilateral Declaration of Egyptian Independence. It promised the quick termination of martial law and formally ended the protectorate, thereby making Egypt an independent state. However, the independence that Egypt acquired was incomplete thanks to a series of colonialist qualifications that Allenby included in his declaration. Known as the four “Reserved Points,” these conditions retained for Britain control of the Suez Canal, responsibility for Egypt’s defense, the authority to protect the interests of foreigners and minorities in the country, and, finally, the administration of Sudan, which Egypt and Britain had held in condominium since 1882.

Allenby’s declaration met with a mixed reception among Egypt’s increasingly nationalist-minded people. They were thrilled that their country had achieved independence, of course, but they were equally bitter in their resentment of the Reserved Points. In their view these provisions had merely transformed Egypt into a subtler kind of protectorate. This criticism had merit. While Allenby’s statement certainly marked the passing of an important milestone for Egypt on its march to full independence, it also ensured that Britain would continue to dominate their country for another generation.

For London, in contrast, the declaration was a major success. By meeting Egypt’s minimal demands, Allenby had succeeded in taking the air out of the protest movement that had threatened Britain’s position in the country. Thereafter, while the Egyptians continued to seethe with resentment, they no longer engaged in the civil disobedience and mass protest that had threatened to undermine Britain’s position in Egypt and, more critically, its continued control of the Suez Canal.

Conclusion

With the situation in Egypt having finally reached a resolution, the Settlement of 1922 was complete, and, with it, the broad outlines of the modern Middle East had taken form. Politically, it was a vastly different region than it had been at the start of World War I. The Allies had crushed the Ottoman Empire in the conflict and, in so doing, appeared to have finally resolved the “Eastern Question.” Meanwhile, the process of imperial aggrandizement, resistance, negotiation, and accommodation that occurred in the years immediately after the war had resulted in the division of the region into a series of states, albeit ones that were, in nearly all cases, de facto colonies of France or Britain. Those states still exist today; likewise, with some notable exceptions, the frontiers that the victors drew in the early 1920s continue to divide the modern Middle East.

However, this new state system would not prove to be a stable one. The French and British had chosen leaders, drawn up borders, and created political structures based on a mix of self-interest and ignorance. As a consequence, most of the governments that emerged in the region either lacked legitimacy with their people or controlled territory to which, in whole or in part, other states staked claims. Indeed, directly or indirectly, the contested peace settlement that followed the First World War gave birth to nearly all of the modern Middle East’s major geopolitical issues including, most notably, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Kurdish demands for an independent country, instability in Lebanon, and the weakness of the Iraqi state. This is not to deny agency to the people of the Middle East. After all, as we have seen, regional actors played a part in shaping the outcome of the settlement of 1922. Rather, it is to make clear the degree to which the negotiated peace reflected the imbalance in power between the indigenous parties and the imperialist states in the early 1920s. Indeed, even those Middle Eastern countries that had managed to remain independent after the settlement of 1922 found themselves compelled to walk a careful line vis-à-vis the Great Powers during the interwar era. It is to their development during that period and their efforts to remain free from Western dominance that we shall now turn.