Historical and strategic importance of Middle East since World War I

                

          The middle East is a transcontinental area located primarily in western Asia. And it also connects to some of the parts of the African and European continent. The western borders connect to the Mediterranean Sea where Israel, Lebanon, and Syria rest opposite from Greece and Italy in Europe. The Red and Arabian Seas surround the southern part of the center East. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Oman border these waters, with Iraq and Jordan connecting them to the western part of the region. In the middle of the center, East rests the Persian Gulf, cutting into the region and giving it its hook-like shape. Countries along the Persian Gulf include the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Iran. The Middle East is also called, "land of the seven seas." The world's three biggest religions originated in The Middle East, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And many civilizations took birth in the region making it one of the most culture-rich regions in the world. By the eighteenth century, the two major political entities in The Middle East, the Ottoman Empire (centered in what is today The Republic of Turkey) and Safavid/Qajar Persia (centered in what is today the Islamic Republic of Iran), enjoyed relative strength and security. The Ottoman Empire was a vast multiethnic, multilingual, and multi-religious polity that at its peak stretched from central Europe all the way to Yemen and across North Africa to Morocco. It compared favorably with the expanse of the Roman Empire at its height. The Safavid/Qajar domains stretched from the Caucasus to what is today Afghanistan, and they too hosted a myriad of different ethnicities and religions. The nineteenth century saw a number of challenges to Ottoman and Qajar power. The resulting pressures convinced the Ottomans and to a lesser degree, the Iranian Qajar’s to undertake substantial political and economic reform during the course of the nineteenth century. These reforms were accompanied by cultural and religious modernization movements that generated new intellectual and ideological perspectives for the people of the region. In the twentieth century, World War I (1914–1918) was a cataclysmic event in the Middle East. It resulted in a redrawing of the map of the entire area and laid the foundation for a series of rivalries and conflicts that reverberate up until the present day. Anti-colonialism, nationalism and the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union as superpowers after World War II added new dimensions to these questions. Finally, the increasing importance of the politics and economics of oil and the regional role of the states that produce it emerged as a major question in the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The Middle East not only holds significant religious divine places Mecca and Jerusalem but also its the uppermost crude oil production area in the world. The value of the region increased when the British Royal Navy starts using oil engines instead of coal, and the immense discovery of oil in the region made it mandatory for the British to hold a grip on the region. Since world war one The Middle East has seen many religious, political conflicts over and over again. Every global power tried to influence the region to control its vast reservoirs of oil and gas. To control the region which was before a part of the Ottoman empire in 1916, during the First World War, the British and French entered into a secret agreement known as the Sykes-Picot agreement. They decided to secretly carve the Middle East into Spheres of influence. Most of the boundaries of the modern Middle East are the creation of the agreement and many believe the chaos and instability in the region are because of the agreement signed over a hundred years ago. Today in The Middle East, the Persian Gulf countries hold 28% percent of world oil production including the topmost oil producer countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq, UAE, and Oman. It also has many chokepoints to put world trade on a halt. The Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf are the chokepoints of world trade and they bring a significant advantage to the Middle Eastern countries expanding their authority on world trade. This is the reason why The Middle East is in turmoil today with so much oil and natural resources and chokepoints it is being targeted by the entire world to seize command across the region. (LUST, 2020)