this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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What happens if the War in the Middle East ever stops generating obscene profits?
An actual historian can chime in if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the middle east has had some sort of internal or external conflict going on for all of history. So the answer to your question is likely "still war".
Prior to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East enjoyed centuries of peace and prosperity. From the 13th to 20th centuries, you were far safer in Damascus or Baghdad or Tehran than Paris or Berlin or Rome. Europe was in a continuous state of civil conflict during this period.
The Middle Eastern states were a popular refuge for European civilians fleeing the 30-Years-War, the Napoleonic Wars, the various wars of consolidation and independence following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the World Wars. Countries from Morocco to Iran were all common destinations thanks to their unaligned status and divorce from the conflicts in Europe. More common even than the Americas. In fact, a big early appeal of the Palestinian Mandate was that it allowed Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike to escape the pogroms north of the Mediterranean.
In the early years, at the start of the Cold War, a number of the former European colonies broke away from their now-destitute colonial masters. This lead to brief civil struggles, largely centered around the capitals where all those European WW1/2 refugees had piled in. But by and large, the democratization of the Middle East was far more peaceful than the democraticization of Europe.
It wasn't until the 1950s, when spy games between the US and the USSR began to topple unaligned governments, that war in the Middle East became commonplace. But what we're seeing today is a novelty of the 20th/21st century. You're ignoring centuries of peaceful coexistence and fixating on a few ancient (Crusades) and a few very recent (Soviet/Post-Soviet) violent flare ups.
So I checked Wikipedia, and the list of conflicts in the middle east in the years between 1300 to 1800 is far from empty. I know it's easier to blame everything on the US, but you are ignoring dozens of different conflicts that occurred during that span of years.
Show me a conflict within the borders of the Ottoman Empire that killed more people than the Napoleonic Wars.
Trying to explain to the judge that blaming Jeffrey Dahmer for all those bodies in the fridge is the easy answer and the jury needs to approach things more critically.
I mean, if it makes you feel any better, the blame falls off the US once you spin the clock back before McKinley. The societal collapse during the 17th and 18th centuries are largely a consequence of imperial policies of England, France, and Spain.
Why would I do that? It would have nothing to do with anything I said.
Middle eastern history nerd here!
https://youtu.be/1vaIK8wlAl0
The horror!
World ~~piece~~ peace tour!