Post-1918 Anglo-French control of the Middle East gave way to new contestants
Evidence
It may be useful at this point to review, briefly and schematically, the chief phases in the development of great-power influence in the Middle East. After the victory of 1918, Great Britain and France were in exclusive control of the area, unchallenged except by one another. In the 1930s and 1940s Britain and France drew together to meet and, ultimately, defeat the attempt of the Axis powers to oust them from the area. Since then, first France and then—with a change in the casting, but not in the script—Great Britain have been eliminated from most of their positions of power and influence, leaving the center of the arena to a new set of contestants. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1178
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The phase structure and ‘change in casting but not script’ read like a condensed version of the later decline-of-empire narrative in The Defeat of the Spanish Armada.