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Western Asia
The UN's bureaucratic name for most of the Middle East
Western Asia is the UN's careful, neutral name for a region almost everybody else calls the Middle East — a phrase the statisticians avoid because it is a leftover of European map-making, defined by its distance from London. The eighteen members are Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Cyprus, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. About 313 million people live across 4.8 million square kilometers. The categories do not line up cleanly: the Middle East as commonly used also takes in Egypt and Iran, which the UN files elsewhere, and it rarely includes the Caucasus, which the UN files here.
Deserts dominate. The Arabian Peninsula, the largest peninsula on earth, is mostly sand and gravel, and the Rub al Khali is the biggest continuous sand sea anywhere. Along the northern edge the land rises into the Anatolian Plateau and then into the Caucasus, where Mount Shkhara on the Georgian-Russian border reaches 5,193 meters and Ararat stands over the Turkish-Armenian frontier at 5,137. The Tigris and Euphrates rise in the Turkish highlands and cross Mesopotamia to the Gulf; the Jordan drops into the Dead Sea, at 430 meters below sea level the lowest exposed land on the planet. Water, not oil, is the region's scarcest strategic resource.
Agriculture, writing, cities, and law all seem to have begun here, in the Fertile Crescent, and the region is the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Ottoman rule ended after the First World War and Britain and France drew the modern borders; oil, discovered in the Gulf in the 1930s, then rearranged everything, converting fishing sheikhdoms into the richest states on earth within two generations. The wars have been continuous — Israel and its neighbors, Iran and Iraq, Iraq and Kuwait, Syria's collapse, Yemen's famine — and the region sits on roughly half of the world's proven oil reserves, which is why the rest of the planet has never been able to look away.