ABSTRACT
The Middle East has served as a tricontinental hub for millennia. Peoples, armies, merchants and ideas have flowed to, from, and across the region. Political ideology and processes in the flow were sometimes adapted and sometimes rejected but often influenced the internal evolution of these sixteen states. This chapter focuses on the state as a political-geographicphenomenon. It examines a number of topics of a more general global, regional, and/or historical nature after first putting the region into the broader context of the Heartland of the Tricontinental Hub. Evolution of sixteen current states as independent units a highly varied process and mainly influenced by post-World War I territorial settlements. Colonial subterfuge in Arab Revolt, Sykes-Picot Agreement, and Balfour Declaration. The availability, management, and sharing of the natural resource of water increasingly rival the influence of petroleum in the political geography of the area. Whereas petroleum is a valuable economic resource, water is essential to life itself.
