ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three new nations: Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. All were created by governments newly established in all or part of the territories that they were governing by the end of the 1920s. As observed, the First World War really came to a close in the Middle East not in 1918, but in 1923, when the Treaty of Lausanne established the Republic of Turkey in the Anatolian territories of the former Ottoman Empire. An avid student of European political and military theory, Kemal began to construct a brand-new country over the next decade, which emerged as a phoenix from the ashes of the vanquished Ottoman Empire. The leadership of Kemal, a workaholic who slept only a few hours each night, put the new country on a fast course toward modernization. His leadership style was soon criticized as quite harsh and authoritarian: a paradox for someone dedicated to promoting democracy.
