War and Partition — How the Borders Were Drawn

Through the middle of the desert runs a perfectly straight border. In a place with no mountains, no rivers, and no boundary of peoples, there runs a line that could only have been drawn with a ruler. Why was such a line drawn? The answer lies in a European conference room a century ago.

When oil became “the star of war”

When the First World War broke out in 1914, the face of the battlefield had changed utterly from what came before. In place of horses, tanks plowed through the mud; aircraft wheeled overhead; and at sea, warships running on oil left the coal-burners behind. As we saw last time, the Royal Navy had switched its fuel from coal to oil on the eve of war. That gamble paid off.

The more mechanized the weapons became, the more it was not “ammunition” alone but “fuel” that decided victory and defeat. The trucks hauling shells to the front, the planes scouting the enemy lines — without a single drop of oil reaching them, they were nothing but lumps of iron. Indeed, again and again during the war, a shortage of fuel swayed the course of a campaign. The old saying “an army marches on its stomach” was being rewritten into “an army marches on gasoline.” Toward the end of the war, words like these are said to have escaped the Allied side.

Oil was no longer a mere commodity, but a strategic resource holding the life and death of nations. And the land where vast oil lay sleeping — the Middle East — had become a target of the great powers even before the war was over.

A Middle East drawn with a ruler

During the war, one great power was crumbling: the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled across the Middle East for centuries. Anticipating the defeat of the Ottomans, who had fought on the German side, Britain and France talked over their postwar shares early.

In 1916, the British diplomat Mark Sykes and France’s Georges Picot drafted a secret arrangement — the Sykes–Picot Agreement. In it, the two countries drew lines carving up the Arab regions of the Ottoman Empire into spheres of influence.

The trouble was that those lines all but ignored the realities on the ground. The same sect or people was torn between two countries, while peoples in conflict were instead crammed into the same “nation.” The outlines of countries like Iraq and Kuwait were decided on desks in London and Paris.

Why were the great powers so fixated on the Middle East? It was, of course, a strategically vital region — but the expectation of the oil sleeping underground was a powerful motive too. The great Persian gusher we saw last time had shown that this whole area concealed tremendous wealth. Who took which land meant almost the same thing as who took which oil field. To the inhabitants these were “national borders”; to the great powers they were “boundaries of concessions.”

What is more, Britain had heaped up contradictory promises to different parties: independence to the Arabs, a homeland in Palestine to the Jews, partition to France. Later called the “double-dealing diplomacy,” this contradiction too would cast a long shadow over the Middle East to come.

The vast wealth beneath the desert

While the map was being redrawn, another quiet upheaval was under way: the development of oil fields in Saudi Arabia.

This kingdom, founded only in 1932, was a poor desert country. The coins dropped by pilgrims and a little trade kept it going — that was Saudi Arabia before oil. But in 1933, King Ibn Saud granted development rights to an American oil company. Drilling in the searing desert went on missing for years, and talk of withdrawal stirred. Even so, in 1938, at Dammam in the east, commercial-scale oil finally gushed up. It was the moment a single well rewrote a nation’s destiny entire. This land would in time prove to be one of the largest oil-bearing regions in the world.

What matters here is that the one who carried it out was an American company. Middle Eastern oil had until then been held mainly by Britain, but through the Saudi concession, America entered in earnest. The development company would later change its name to Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Company) and grow into a force that moved the postwar world.

A handshake aboard a warship

The Second World War made oil’s importance more decisive still. Tanks, bombers, transport ships — all ran on oil. The enormous oil sleeping beneath Saudi Arabia would be indispensable to postwar economic recovery too — of this America became convinced.

In February 1945, having concluded the Yalta Conference, the American president Franklin Roosevelt received one man aboard a battleship near the Suez Canal on his way home. It was the Saudi king, Ibn Saud. A king of the desert leaving his own country for the first time to face the head of a great power upon the sea — a historic meeting.

By the time the war ended, then, the skeleton of the modern Middle East was all but complete: the artificial borders the great powers had drawn, the immense wealth sleeping beneath Saudi Arabia, and the rivalry between America and Britain over oil.

One decisive problem remained, however. Nearly all the wealth gushing up from underground flowed not to the local countries that had struck it, but into the hands of the great Western oil companies that controlled the development. Before long, the producing nations would begin to wake to that injustice. Next time: the story of the “seven sisters” who ruled the world’s oil, and of one prime minister who defied them and fell.