The Middle East

The Middle East is the most used and least agreed-upon regional name in the world, and the trouble starts with the name: middle of what, east of where? The phrase was coined around 1900 in the British and American strategic press, from a vantage point in London, to describe the ground lying between the Near East of the Ottomans and the Far East of India and China. Everyone who uses it inherits that European standpoint. Its membership shifts with the source. Egypt is usually in, though nearly all of it sits in Africa. Turkey and Iran are in for some and out for others. Afghanistan appears on a few maps and vanishes from most. The region is real; its edges are an argument.

What holds the usual seventeen countries together is a physical fact: this is the pivot where Africa, Asia, and Europe meet, and it is overwhelmingly dry. The Arabian Desert covers most of the peninsula, the Zagros and the Taurus wall off the northern rim, and life concentrates along the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Mediterranean coast, and the Iranian and Anatolian plateaus. Damavand, in Iran's Alborz range, is the high point at 5,610 meters. Beneath the sand lies the largest concentration of conventional oil and gas on the planet, roughly half of proven reserves, which is why the region's internal geography has been overwritten for a century by outside interest in its subsoil.

About 500 million people live here, most speaking Arabic but many not: Persian, Turkish, Kurdish, Hebrew, and Azeri are each the first language of millions. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam began within a few hundred kilometers of one another, and the first cities, the first writing, and the first farming appeared in the same ground. The modern map is a century old, drawn largely by Britain and France as the Ottoman Empire fell, and the seams still show, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Yemen. Since February 2026 a war between Iran and the United States and Israel has spread across the Gulf, and Iran's restrictions on the Strait of Hormuz have choked the oil trade that built some of the highest incomes on earth.