In the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, Middle Eastern rulers tried to modernize their states to compete more effectively with the European powers. In 1912, the Kingdom of Italy seized Libya and the Dodecanese islands, just off the coast of the Ottoman heartland of Anatolia. The British Empire also established effective control of the Persian Gulf, and the French colonial empire extended its influence into Lebanon and Syria. By 1700, the Ottomans had been driven out of the Kingdom of Hungary and the balance of power along the frontier had shifted decisively in favor of the Western world. Large parts of the Middle East became a warground between the Ottomans and the Iranian Safavid dynasty for centuries, starting in the early 16th century. By the early 15th century, a new power had arisen in western Anatolia, the Ottoman emirs, who were linguistically Turkic and religiously Islamic and in 1453 captured the Christian Byzantine capital of Constantinople and made themselves sultans. In the early 13th century, a new wave of invaders, the armies of the Mongol Empire, mainly Turkic, swept through the region. The dominance of the Arabs came to a sudden end in the mid-11th century with the arrival of the Seljuq dynasty. From the 7th century, a new power was rising in the Middle East, that of Islam. From the 3rd century to the course of the 7th century AD, the entire Middle East was dominated by the Byzantines and the Sasanian Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire, now commonly known as the Byzantine Empire, ruled from the Balkans to the Euphrates, became increasingly defined by and dogmatic about Christianity and gradually creating religious rifts between the doctrines dictated by the establishment in Constantinople and believers in many parts of the Middle East. In the 1st century BC, the expanding Roman Republic absorbed the whole Eastern Mediterranean, which included much of the Near East. From the early 7th century BC and onward, the Iranian Medes, followed by the Achaemenid Empire and other subsequent Iranian states and empires, dominated the region. Mesopotamia was home to several powerful empires that came to rule almost all of Middle East, particularly the Assyrian Empires of 1365–1076 BC and the Neo-Assyrian Empire of 911–609 BC. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh. The Sumerians became the first people to develop complex systems that were to be called "civilization" as far back as the 5th millennium BC. Conversely, in countries such as Iraq, Syria and Egypt, widespread popular resentment of the status quo and the regimes that enforced it both increased the likelihood of political instability and the appeal of the Soviet Union as an ally.Contemporary political map of the Middle East A map showing territories commonly considered part of the Near East ![]() Where these regimes maintained the consent, or at least obedience, of the societies they governed, as in Jordan, the gulf states, or Turkey, this orientation remained. ![]() Thus, monarchies across the region that benefited from their relationship with the British stayed with the West, while Turkey, having secured its independence, saw Western support as a way to maintain it against the risk of Soviet expansion. To the extent that at the outset of the Cold War countries - both their regimes and their populations - were content with and, therefore, invested in maintaining the status quo, they were more likely to side with the West. First, the political challenges some states faced may have left them predisposed to both instability and siding with the Soviets.
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