Don’t Blame Sykes-Picot for the Middle East’s Mess
Don’t Blame Sykes-Picot for the Middle East’s Mess
Steven A. Cook, Amr T. Leheta
Sometime in the 100 years since the Sykes-Picot agreement was signed, invoking its “end” became a thing among commentators, journalists, and analysts of the Middle East. Responsibility for the cliché might belong to the Independent’s Patrick Cockburn, who in June 2013 wrote an essay in the London Review of Books arguing that the agreement, which was one of the first attempts to reorder the Middle East after the Ottoman Empire’s demise, was itself in the process of dying. Since then, the meme has spread far and wide: A quick Google search reveals more than 8,600 mentions of the phrase “the end of Sykes-Picot” over the last three years.
The failure of the Sykes-Picot agreement is now part of the received wisdom about the contemporary Middle East. And it is not hard to understand why. Four states in the Middle East are failing — Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. If there is a historic shift in the region, the logic goes, then clearly the diplomatic settlements that produced the boundaries of the Levant must be crumbling. History seems to have taken its revenge on Mark Sykes and his French counterpart, François Georges-Picot, who hammered out the agreement that bears their name.
The “end of Sykes-Picot” argument is almost always followed with an exposition of the artificial nature of the countries in the region. Their borders do not make sense, according to this argument, because there are people of different religions, sects, and ethnicities within them. The current fragmentation of the Middle East is thus the result of hatreds and conflicts — struggles that “date back millennia,” as U.S. President Barack Obama said — that Sykes and Picot unwittingly released by creating these unnatural states. The answer is new borders, which will resolve all the unnecessary damage the two diplomats wrought over the previous century.
Yet this focus on Sykes-Picot is a combination of bad history and shoddy social science. And it is setting up the United States, once again, for failure in the Middle East.
For starters, it is not possible to pronounce that the maelstrom of the present Middle East killed the Sykes-Picot agreement, because the deal itself was stillborn. Sykes and Picot never negotiated state borders per se, but rather zones of influence. And while the idea of these zones lived on in the postwar agreements, the framework the two diplomats hammered out never came into existence.
Despite Enticing Narratives, the International Community Has Fueled Bosnia’s Instability
In 1984, during the Sarajevo Winter Olympics, Bosnia and Herzegovina was presented to the world as Yugoslavia’s poster child—a picture that would fall apart only eight years later.
Read more
Democracy in Iraq: A Facade for Corruption and Human Rights Violations
To guarantee the protection of the rights and freedoms of its people, the Iraqi government must be a true democracy.
Read more
CIRSD Hosts Horizons Discussion with Professor Andrey Sushentsov on Russia’s Global Role and the Future of Multipolarity
Belgrade, April 2025 — The Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development (CIRSD) hosted a special edition of its acclaimed Horizons Discussions series, featuring an in-depth conversation between CIRSD President Vuk Jeremić and Professor Andrey Sushentsov, Dean of the School of International Relations at MGIMO University and one of Russia’s most influential strategic thinkers.
Read more
Jeremić for China Daily: Collaborations urged amid turbulence
“You gotta wait for the rain to stop in order to fix the roof,” he said in an exclusive interview with China Daily, adding that Europe had been under anesthesia for decades. “Europe should have woken up many, many years ago. Sadly, it hasn’t,” he said, referring to Europe-US relations.
Read more