US Hegemony In The Middle East Is Over, West Asia Will Define Its Own Future, US Amb. Chas Freeman

Essay available here: Many thanks to the Middle East Forum of Falmouth (MEFF) for the fantastic talk Check out their talks at Beginning of Ambassador Freeman s Essay: Title: The Middle East is Once Again West Asia Date: August 6, 2023 Names make a difference. Those who confer them reveal their perspectives on the places and peoples they are naming. Over the course of the 16th to the 19th centuries, Europeans conquered and colonized the world, imposing their selfcentered perspectives on its geography. For them, the Ottoman Empire was the Near East, a region encompassing West Asia, Southeast Europe, and Northeast Africa. Then, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the United States became the preeminent component of the selfstyled West, a transAtlantic perspective supplanted the European one. From the point of view of Americans, the lands within the collapsing