How Assad’s fall could reshape the Middle East

One hundred years after the world’s major powers conceived the landscape of the modern Middle East, the tumultuous events unfolding in Syria have the potential to enact an equally profound reorientation of the region’s political dynamics.

The Cairo conference of 1921, where Winston Churchill famously quipped that he had created the new kingdom of Jordan ‘with the stroke of a pen on a Sunday afternoon’, was responsible for creating the modern geography of the Middle East. Present-day Syria emerged from the remnants of the larger domain that had existed during the Ottoman era.

Hafez al-Assad, the Alawite founder of the murderous despotic regime that controlled Syria for more than five decades, often complained that Damascus had been cheated out of its rightful heritage by the Cairo settlement. It was this agreement which also created Iraq and laid the foundations for the eventual establishment of Israel.