World War Two, for obvious reasons, looms large in our imagination as the biggest event of the 20th Century. The biggest, and the most significant.
But are we wrong?
It seems lately that the echos of World War One are resounding pretty loudly.
World War One smashed the old order and demolished the borders of centuries. The interbellum tried to reconstruct them, but did so in a metastasized and imperfect form, giving rise to new malignant orders that sought to fill the voids left by the death of the old imperial ones. World War Two pitted three forces against each other, fascism, communism, and democracy, with democracy and communism ultimately siding with each other against fascism. After the war, the results of the Second World War gave rise to a contest between the two victors, communism and democracy, against each other until the vitality of free societies and free markets drove the rigidness of communism to and beyond the breaking point.
And now that communism is dead and gone, buried alongside its evil cousin fascism, the old unsolved questions of the Great War are back. The rights of small nations, including those with out countries, against the possessions of older larger ones. The demise of great empires giving rise to smaller ones. Nationalism of all stripes against everything else.
It's 1919 all over again.
Indeed, rather than do that, it fought it out.
It can't be blamed. The Greeks had a quasi legitimate claim to Smyrna, but only quasi. A lot of ethnic Greeks lived there, which is no surprise as Anatolia had been Greek. The Ottoman's were invaders to the region, finally taking it in the 1450s. But it had a large Ottoman population that they were bloodily brutal towards and they engaged in conquest, with the help of their Western allies, in Anatolia proper, seeking in a way to reverse what was lost centuries prior.
The Italian claim, moreover, to islands off of Turkey was absurd.
But the Armenian claims to their lands weren't.
The region sought of Armenia marked for a plebiscite is Kurdistan. The Syria that ran to the sea and down to Palestine was an Ottoman province carved away from the Empire. So was the Mesopotamia, i.e., Iraq, that appears on the map.
In 1990, the United States intervened in the Middle East to force Iraq, the British post World War One creation, out of Kuwait, a desert province that the British had protected during their stay in the Middle East, launching operations, with the assistance of others, from that region of Arabia named for the Sauds, that Arabian family that spent the Great War and the immediate interbellum consolidating power at the ultimate expense of the Hashemites, that Arabian noble family who had made war on the Turks. The British dolled out kingdoms to that family as consolation prizes, with the Hashemites taking Iraq and the Transjordan. The French got to administer Syria, a region that it claimed an historical affinity to, with the British taking administration of Palestine and Egypt, both of the latter having been Ottoman provinces although Egypt was long administered by the British in an arrangement that nobody can possibly grasp.
And so now, the old fights, and the interbellum struggles, reappear. The peoples not accorded nations would like to have them. The old empires would like to keep their domains. Borders drawn by European nations, with the help of Woodrow Wilson, are treated as real, when perhaps they were never correct.
