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Throughout all of our lifetimes, the Middle East is a region that has been nearly synonymous with Warfare instability, and conflict.
You've heard nearly every single year of your life about some kind of conflict going on in this place, regardless of when you were born, because conflicts have been raging here without a pause for nearly the entirety of the past century.
Just since the turn of the 21st century alone, there have been major wars fought across the territories of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Yemen that have variously attracted the military involvements of Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and powers from even beyond the middle east like the United States, United Kingdom, France and Russia.
These 21st-century conflicts in the Middle East alone have claimed the lives of millions of people and forced millions more into exile and refugee status while costing trillions of dollars making the Middle East arguably the most geopolitically turbulent region anywhere in the 21st-century world.
But why is this part of the world the way that it is?
Why do you always hear about wars and conflicts taking place here and why will you probably continue hearing about wars and conflicts taking place here for the rest of your life?
The answers to those questions are complex because the modern Middle East is the most geopolitically complicated chessboard in the world to really understand with dozens of different actors and competing interests all variously working against each other at some times and then working together at others.
But in order to understand the root cause of the modern Middle East's many problems, you only have to rewind the clock a little more than a hundred years ago to learn how the Middle East borders we know today came into being and why they have guaranteed more than a century's worth of forever wars and misery for the entire world ever since.
For many centuries, the Turkish Ottoman Empire dominated practically the entirety of the Middle East and enforced its own rule of law across the land.
