A Peace to End All Peace

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East
By David Fromkin
Published in 1989, Updated in 2015
635 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 5/5

Introduction

Over the last four months, I have read half a dozen books on the fall of the Ottoman Empire. This one is, by far, the best.

First, the writing style is excellent. Fromkin uses a simple Spartan style that avoids unnecessary attempts at poetic descriptions, academic nitpicking, and eschews the many distractions that you find in poorly written histories. It is to the point, and concise. This is how all history books should be written.

In terms of the content, the fall of the Ottoman Empire is extremely complicated and multi-faceted. Many unrelated events occur at once, only to intertwine and interact later. For example, the shadowy British “Milner Group” which secretly controlled the British Empire during the tenure of Prime Minister Lloyd George interacts in strange ways with the Soviet Revolution, which in turn interacts with the Armenian genocide. Complicating the matter is that the Milner Group, the Soviet revolution, and the Armenian genocide are otherwise unrelated events. Against all odds, I was able to follow as Fromkin explores these - and many more - parallel strands.

I am not going to summarize the entire fall of the Ottoman Empire and European colonization of the Middle East in this book review. Instead, I will cover three very interesting details covered at various points in the book: the rise of Arab nationalism, the diplomatic relationships between the Soviet Union and Ottoman Empire, and the Milner Group’s influence over British politics.

Artificial Arab Nationalism

One of the most mind-blowing stories in the book was the revelation that Arab nationalism is a completely artificial concept. For a student of history, like myself, this makes complete sense. There is no organic “arab” nation anymore than there is a “white nation” or an “east asian” nation. In fact, white nationalism is repulsive to the overwhelming majority of whites the same way that the WW2 era Japanese East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was to most East Asians.

Arab nationalism is a concept that was created by British agents during World War One. The British, who were at war with the Ottomans, quickly realized that they would need something to replace the Ottoman Empire once it fell. The problem was that the people of the Levant, Arabia, and Mesopotamia had only been unified under multi-ethnic and supranational medieval caliphates. Traditional Islamic concepts of nation do not favor ethnonationalism or the nation states; instead Islamic empires have historically been multinational, multi-lingual, and multi-ethnic.

British agents wanted to create a synthetic “arab caliphate” that would be led by their puppets, the Hashemite family of Mecca. To do this, British propagandists subverted Arab liberals and leftists. The British propagandists managed to convince many Arab intellectuals that the only way to create a secular modern state in the Middle East would be to reject Islam in favor of ethnonationalism, along the lines of the artificially created Yugoslavia which also appeared at roughly the same time.

Ultimately, the British attempts at creating the caliphate imploded. Representatives of the Hashemite family were placed on the thrones of Mecca, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. Almost immediately, they were overthrown in Syria. In Iraq, they would be overthrown a decade later. Another pro-British group (the House of Saud), operating against British orders, fought a war with and eventually drove out the Hashemites from Mecca and Medina, creating a state that we today call Saudi Arabia. Today, Jordan and its royal Hashemite family are the last remnants of the attempt at creating a British Caliphate.

Interactions Between the Ottomans and Soviet Union

Historically, the Ottoman Empire and Russian Empires had been fierce rivals for control of the Black Sea. Geographically, the conflict is inevitable: Turkey controls the only access point for Russia’s Crimean and Ukrainian warm water ports.

In 1917, a liberal revolution overthrew the Tsarist regime. Several months later, the liberal revolutionaries were themselves overthrown by communist radicals, and the Soviet Union was born. The communist revolutionaries faced a very tough decision: how to square their radical idealistic ideas with the cruel realities of statecraft.

Notably, Lenin argued on the basis of communist ideology that all of the Turkic Islamic peoples of Central Asia and the Far East should be allowed to secede if they wanted to. Not all communists agreed; most notably Stalin believed that they should be even further integrated into Russia.

Around the same time, Turkish nationalists had created the ideology of pan-Turanism. The core idea behind pan-Turanism was uniting all of the various Turkic peoples into a single megastate that would include all of the former Ottoman Empire and all of the Turkic speaking areas of the former Russian Empire. During the time of the Russian revolution, Turanist ideas were spreading in the far east.

The communist revolutionaries realized that the Turkic states wouldn’t just be lost if they were allowed to secede - but would actually be liable to join into a renewed Ottoman Empire, which was a historical rival.

The Communist Russian government responded by enlisting former Ottoman official Enver Pasha. Enver Pasha was a known anti-communist, as well as one of the key perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. However, after the Kemalist uprising in Turkey, he found himself in exile in Germany. From there, he went on a long and perilous journey through war-torn Eastern Europe to Moscow, where he would be captured and imprisoned several times by various nationalistic Polish and Lithuanian military groups. After a year-long journey, he arrived in Moscow, where he was shunned.

He offered his help to the Soviets in exchange for support in defeating the Kemalists at home. The Soviets accepted, and sent him on a mission to suppress Turanist sentiments in Central Asia and the Far East. Ultimately, he was killed while working for the Soviets in Bukhara in 1922.

The Milner Group

The last fascinating part of the story could be mistaken for a wild conspiracy theory if it wasn’t so well documented.

On the eve of World War One, a shadowy cabal of high-level British politicians, businessmen, and military figures started gathering in secret dining clubs. This group has variously been referred to by historians as “Milner’s Kindergarten,” the “Milner Group,” or the “Round Table club.” The name comes from its informal leader, Lord Alfred Milner. Their goal was to centralize the British Empire into a commonwealth, with the eventual idealistic goal of creating a sort of proto-fascist Anglo-Saxon world government. This scheme combined both socialist economic ideas with eugenics and Anglo-Saxon ethnic supremacy. Although this book doesn’t cover this group’s origins with British business magnate Cecil Rhodes, it discusses their involvement in the partition of the Middle East at length.

Although it isn’t discussed in this book, the context is key. Lord Milner had spent the years from Cecil Rhodes’ death in 1902 until 1909 training a group of young men to play leading roles in the British government.

The Milner Group mostly existed as an idealistic informal collection of dining clubs before World War One, and any power or influence that it wielded was mostly incidental.

A Peace to End All Peace picks up in 1916. With this additional context, I found the extensive discussions about the Milner Group to be very interesting.

In late 1916, the conservative government of conservative liberal British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith collapsed due to failures in the war. Asquith resigned. As a result, a complete political outsider - the radical David Lloyd George - was elected to lead the liberal party. One month later, in December 1916, he was elected to replace Asquith as prime minister of the UK.

Lloyd George had only held marginal political roles, and lacked the network or power to effectively govern. In many ways, his tenure can be seen as loosely similar to that of US president Jimmy Carter. Lloyd George was very close friends with Lord Milner, and enlisted Milner’s help to staff his new government.

Milner happened to have personally trained, groomed, and selected many young men in the previous decade for potential government jobs. These included figures such as future Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Nelville Chamberlain, as well as prominent businessmen and intellectuals such as Llionel Curtis.

As a result, some of the young men groomed by Milner ended up in key government roles during Lloyd George’s ministry. Although most of the Milner Group formally stayed out of government, they corresponded very closely with the members of Milner Group who had stayed out of power. As a result, the Milner Group would become the informal deep state of the UK from 1916 until the end of World War Two in 1945.

The second half of this book extensively draws upon the private correspondence of members of the Milner Group with government officials. For example, Leo Amery, who would be a prominent politician during the interwar years and World War Two, held significant informal sway during the waning years of World War One.

Most fascinatingly, many members of the Milner Group seemed to be under the impression that they were fighting a second, secret deep state composed of Jewish former Freemasons. They believed that this group was behind both the Young Turk revolution in Turkey and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. On the basis of this information, they discussed internally whether this group needed to be destroyed or appeased. One of the key reasons why the Milner Group decided to create Israel was an attempt to appease this group.

I was shocked to read that it appears that at least some Jewish former Freemasons actually were behind both the Turkish and Russian revolutions. Russian born British spy Alexander Halpern supported both the Turkish and Russian Revolutions, as well as promoted zionism in the UK. Halpern helped spread rumors of a Jewish Freemason conspiracy, because it allowed him to lobby the Milner Group more effectively. It is important to note that, for the most part, it seems like the existence of a Jewish Freemason deep state was mostly exaggerated.

At the end of the war, the Milner Group also began successfully influencing domestic politics in the United States. Many individual members of the Milner Group had extensive family ties with American families, and in particular, with the Woodrow Wilson administration. When Woodrow Wilson came to the UK, his long time advisor the Rockefeller lobbyist Edward Mandell House was coaxed by British agents to abandon the president. Isolated, Wilson found it difficult to meaningfully participate in the Paris Peace Conference. Lloyd George’s agents studied Wilson very closely, and helped Lloyd George frame all issues in terms that Wilson would find favorable. Wilson was a major supporter of the right of national self determination - the idea that each ethnic group deserved its own territory. The Milner Group’s main goal was to extend the influence of the British Empire. During the conference, the Milner Group framed all proposed peace treaties in terms of creating independent ethnic nation states that would merely be temporarily protected by Britain. Furthermore, British agents gave Wilson misleading ethnic, historical, and demographic information to support their claims. As a result, President Wilson publicly opposed British and French Imperialism; but ultimately greenlit many of the Milner Group’s proposals. This gave British imperial claims the veneer of legitimacy, as they were being pushed by the United States. The ultimate result was that, for the most part, Britain got everything it wanted in the Middle East.

Conclusion

There are many, many, many more fascinating stories discussed in this book. For example, I had no idea that France and Germany were covertly attempting to outmaneuver each other to gain control of the Middle East in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. France and Britain went as far as fighting proxy wars, using unwitting Arabs as their pawns. I also had no idea that the Egyptian British protectorate was a bitter rival of the Indian protectorate, and both covertly lobbied the Milner Group to extend their influence over mesopotamia. Finally, I didn’t know that there was a failed communist revolution in Islamic Iran.

This book was a never ending series of fascinating insights and revelations. As advertised, it gave me a window into World War One and the creation of the modern Middle East. But it also gave me insight into how a modern deep state might quietly operate.

It is a shame that the author, David Fromkin, died in 2017. His incredible contributions are needed more today than ever before.

If you want to learn more about the chaotic last days of the Ottoman Empire, then I recommend this book very highly.

​