Withthestrategicgeopoliticalstatusandabundantoilreserve, the Middle East'suniqueculture and historymake the regiontake a extraordinarypositionin the internationalsystem.
If a benign geopolitical environment was the bedrock of the 19th-century empire, it was the catalogue of geopolitical disasters of 1940-42 that demolished the British world-system once and for all.