"Any Near Future Maps Of The Middle East?" Topic

I found this one by chance. Made me wonder if there were other people making similar speculations of what the Middle East might look like (on paper, at least) in the next couple of decades.

Dan
link

Hmm. When I saw the title I was going to recommend the Peters map, which I see is the one you're using. I used to know Ralph Peters a little. Please note that, in contrast to your link's comments, it not only wasn't official, it wasn't even a proposal. Peters had been what the Army calls a "strategic scout" in the area, and he drew the borders about where he felt they'd be if you actually divided up the territory on linguistic and confessional lines, more like real European nations. He commented later that locals were trying to move his borders distances which were less then the width of the markers he used.
A predictive map--not national borders based on who lives there now, but state boundaries based on who can be expected to gain or lose territory--might be quite different.

A side note of an observation I had. I see that the Persian Gulf is labeled as the Persian Gulf on these maps. If you look at any Department of Defense map the Persian Gulf is labeled as the Arabian Gulf. I'm guessing this was not a labeling mistake, but by intentional design. Maybe a very minor detail, but words (Names) are important.

I like the "future" map. If that region was to even closely resemble the map, it would be a boiling quagmire for 10 generations.

As opposed to what it's been for the last three generations, Greylegion? Actually, I thought Peters did a pretty good job of marking out "natural" as opposed to Sykes-Picot borders. Such a Middle East might be quite a bit more stable--if you could get there by redrawing borders, instead of the more usual wars, mass expulsions, forced assimilation and irridentism.

People really prefer not to read about how those nice homogeneous European states got to be that way.

It would be interesting to compare these maps to an even earlier map of the Middle-East before the European powers carved it up and drew their lines post WWI.

USAFPilot

Is this 1914 map back far enough? :)

Dan

Here's 1648.

Dan

Dan, thanks for posting. It is interesting to see the ebb and flow of borders over a large time period.

Mike

This site has probably one of the best cartographic views of the region: link

The map of ethnic groups in the region is mind boggling:

Still can't direct display png files?

It's only really our military and the Arab Gulf states who call it the Arabian Gulf. The historically and intnernationally the consensus of pretty much the rest of the world falls on the side of calling it the Persian Gulf.

It's the source of much nationalist asshattery, but it's mainly calling it Arabian that's contentious. There a big wikipedia article on it.

link

Thanks Caedite Eos, I didn't know that discussion was on wikepedia. I knew that the DoD maps had intentionally labeled the Persian Gulf as Arabian Gulf because of our military alliances with Arab Gulf countries and our poor relations with Iran. That is just one example of names being changed because of petty politics. He is another one: The Obama administration always referred to ISIS as ISIL, even though most everyone else including western media called them ISIS. Why? Because names are important, and once again it is about subtle politics.