Decade after decade, century after century the Middle East has been a disaster for anyone thinking peace can be achieved. Would it not be better to just leave the Middle East to its own devices and everyone else stay out of it all?
Last Updated: 21.06.2025 03:49
Or, at least, over the long run the Middle East hasn’t been meaningfully less peaceable than, say, Europe. The idea that the Middle East has always been a place of violence and chaos is basically a bad case of presentism. For several centuries, for example, the Middle East was under the control of the Ottoman empire. It was not free of unrest and conflict, but the same can be said for just about any large state at the time. During the early Middle Ages, from the emergence of Islam to the rise of the Fatimids, it was similarly mostly peaceful because it was part of the caliphate. They had at least as many if not more conflicts in western Europe, what with the fragmented nature of the Holy Roman Empire, France and Italy consisting of a variety of small states, and so on. Europeans only stopped fighting one another in 1945. Mostly. Except for conflicts in the Balkans. And the former USSR.
It hasn’t, though.
None of which is to deny the issues currently in play in the Middle East or to make a specific case for or against involvement, but read enough history to get some perspectives before making sweeping statements about what’s happened over the course of centuries.