The Unraveling of Sykes-Picot

The Unraveling of Sykes-Picot

Vladimir Lenin discovered the Sykes-Picot treaty in the czar’s archives and published it, so the world might see what the Great War was truly all about. Sykes-Picot proved impossible to reconcile with Woodrow Wilson’s declaration that he and the allies – the British, French, Italian, Russian and Japanese empires – were all fighting “to make the world safe for democracy.”

Imperial hypocrisy stood naked and exposed.

Wilson’s idealistic Fourteen Points, announced early in 1918, were crafted to recapture the moral high ground. Yet it was out of the implementation of Sykes-Picot that so much Arab hostility and hatred would come – and from which today’s Middle East emerged.