{"id":56499,"date":"2026-05-04T14:52:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T14:52:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/56499\/"},"modified":"2026-05-04T14:52:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T14:52:14","slug":"sykes-picot-order-should-give-way-to-trump-netanyahu-vision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/56499\/","title":{"rendered":"Sykes-Picot order should give way to Trump-Netanyahu vision"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1916, as the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, the British and French foreign ministers secretly sat down with a pencil and ruler, drawing lines across the map of the Middle East<\/a>, \u00a0dividing its Ottoman territories into British and French spheres of influence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They ignored natural borders, tribal loyalties, ethnic clusters, and religious fault lines. The resulting agreement of Sykes-Picot created Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and other modern Middle Eastern states.<\/p>\n

The region has bled ever since.<\/p>\n

Sykes-Picot was forged by the dominant powers of its time. It should now be replaced by a framework forged by the leading powers of today \u2013 call it the Trump-Netanyahu Agreement \u2013 resting on four pillars: Security, Geography, History, and Justice.<\/p>\n

Security<\/p>\n

For decades, Israel absorbed blows, retaliated, and returned to the same vulnerable position, waiting for the next impending conflagration.<\/p>\n

\"USUS President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hold a press conference after meeting at Trump\u2019s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, US, December 29, 2025. (credit: REUTERS\/JONATHAN ERNST)<\/p>\n

October 7 ended that never-ending cycle. The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust made clear that deterring genocidal regimes and managing threats was no longer sufficient.<\/p>\n

What Israel has done since is systematic: Hamas\u2019s top leadership has been eliminated, and the IDF now holds more than half of the Gaza Strip. Assad\u2019s regime in Syria collapsed after Israel destroyed its air force, navy, and strategic installations.<\/p>\n

Hezbollah has been degraded and pushed north of the Litani River. Iran\u2019s regime itself has been clobbered, as has its nuclear weapons enterprise.<\/p>\n

These were not merely military operations \u2013 they are the de facto foundations of a new strategic reality.<\/p>\n

Geography<\/p>\n

Terrain is not ideology \u2013 it\u2019s physics. Israel is about the size of New Jersey. Before the 1967 Six Day War, it was nine miles wide at its narrowest point. As former foreign minister Abba Eban put it, these were \u201cAuschwitz borders\u201d \u2013 so narrow that any serious military thrust could cut the country in half. October 7 proved this in the clearest and bloodiest terms.<\/p>\n

Israel withdrew unilaterally from Lebanon<\/a> in 2000. After the 2006 war, UN Security Council Resolution 1701 required Hezbollah to disarm and withdraw north of the Litani River<\/a>. The UN never enforced it, and Hezbollah spent the next 18 years amassing over 150,000 rockets pointed at Israeli cities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s conclusion: Paper guarantees and blue helmets cannot replace defensible borders. The case for the Litani River as Israel\u2019s northern border is not expansionism \u2013 it is a hard-won, repeatedly proven necessity.<\/p>\n

History<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s claim to southern Lebanon runs deeper than Sykes-Picot. King Solomon\u2019s kingdom encompassed much of what is today that territory.<\/p>\n

While scripture alone cannot determine modern borders, the lines drawn by London and Paris in 1916 carry no greater moral authority than millennia of Jewish civilization in the same land. Sykes-Picot holds no sacred status. It was generated by colonialist interests, and modern realities should replace it.<\/p>\n

Justice<\/p>\n

For 110 years, Sykes-Picot produced one consistent outcome: a Middle East in which the Jewish state\u2019s right to exist remained a permanent open question. Every other nation\u2019s borders were treated as inviolable.<\/p>\n

Yet Israel \u2013 the one democracy to emerge from this upheaval \u2013 was the only country expected to negotiate the terms of its own survival. Attacked by Arab armies in 1948, 1967, and 1973; targeted by relentless terror and suicide bombing campaigns; subjected to decades of rocket fire from Gaza and Lebanon; and finally, on October 7 \u2013 each time Israel defended itself, the world found new reasons to question its response and curtail its efforts.<\/p>\n

Trump and Netanyahu are the only leaders willing to confront the evil of Iran\u2019s regime directly, rather than manage it behind diplomatic language. As President Trump has said, \u201cto the victors go the spoils.\u201d That is not triumphalism. It is the oldest principle of statecraft.<\/p>\n

The contours of a new framework are clear: Israel\u2019s eastern border formalized at the Jordan River Valley; the northern border redrawn to follow the Litani; Gaza<\/a> demilitarized under an arrangement that excludes Iran; and regional normalization \u2013 already underway with Gulf states and potentially with Saudi Arabia \u2013 formalized into durable agreements based on the Abraham Accords.<\/p>\n

Sykes-Picot was never a peace settlement. It was a colonial carve-up that fathered every subsequent conflict in the region. For the first time since 1916, a new order can be established \u2013 not by European empires or Cold War proxies, but by a state indigenous to this land and the global superpower that stands with it.<\/p>\n

It is time for Trump-Netanyahu to replace Sykes-Picot.<\/p>\n

The writer is head of the US office at Acumen Risk Ltd., a risk-management firm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 1916, as the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, the British and French foreign ministers secretly sat down…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16469],"tags":[244,2231,12,245,6259,2618,6305,2617,303,34165,238,21368],"class_list":{"0":"post-56499","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-benjamin-netanyahu","8":"tag-benjamin-netanyahu","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-france","12":"tag-gaza","13":"tag-hezbollah","14":"tag-iraq","15":"tag-lebanon","16":"tag-middle-east","17":"tag-ottoman","18":"tag-syria","19":"tag-the-october-7-massacre"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116516877027186682","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}