ABSTRACT
The history of the modern Middle East is usually reckoned from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, whose dismemberment after the First World War required the reconstruction of public order over an area extending from the Black Sea to the Indian Ocean, and from the Tigris to the Sahara. That Ottoman energies had been flagging since long before the final collapse is famously true. The empire, already much diminished from its zenith two centuries before, had been dubbed the “sick man of Europe” by the Russian Tsar on the eve of the Crimean War (1854–56). What European statesmen called “the Eastern Question” was basically an extended meditation on what to do to keep the peace and promote reform once the sick man died. Yet when the end came, the puzzle had not been solved. This chapter considers the consequences of that failure in the military field, along with America’s efforts to manage them.
