Sublime

The least successful region has been the Middle East. It was the venue of the first challenge of the era, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Saddam Hussein’s aggression was repelled, but he remained in power, as did autocrats in nearly every other country of the region. Efforts to promote peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians mostly failed. Iran

The Middle East is home to just over half the world’s proven oil reserves; Saudi Arabia has the second-largest oil reserves (after Venezuela), is second to the United States in oil production, and is the world’s largest oil exporter.

The total population of the region today is around 450 million, approximately one-third the population of either China or India. The distribution of people is uneven; Egypt has a population on the order of 100 million, while Bahrain numbers under 2 million. Most are Arab, an ethnic designation for those people descended from the region’s tribal

Many of the most powerful members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, the cartel that has so influenced world oil supply and prices for nearly sixty years, are to be found in the Middle East.

back to the late eighteenth century. There was the long, slow decline of the Ottoman Empire, with its base for much of its existence in present-day Istanbul and which over some five centuries stretched over a good deal of what today constitutes the Middle East, North Africa, southeast Europe, and parts of Asia. The second trend was the emergence of

The Middle East has been, is, and quite likely will remain the most tumultuous of the world’s regions. Its history since World War II (when most of its countries gained their independence) is more often described in terms of various wars than anything else. Even a partial list would include the 1948 war between the Arab countries and the newly

The Middle East is a terrible mess. I think that France and Britain have made a terrible mistake. Of course, nothing in the region would be so difficult to solve except for the underlying cause of the unrest that exists there—that is the Arab-Israel quarrel. This quarrel seems to have no limit. Everybody in the Moslem and Jewish worlds are affected