Can the EU help prevent further conflict in Iraq and Syria?

Abstract:

As the battles for Aleppo and Mosul rage on, the wider Middle East appears to be in free fall. So-called Islamic State (Daesh) and the proxy wars between regional powers in Iraq and Syria have drawn the US, Russia and European states into the vortex and up-ended former alliances.

Grand visions about a new security architecture are utterly unrealistic because the forces that have been unleashed are beyond any power’s control now. Any intervention in the Middle East’s nation-building processes risk backfiring. Even those insisting on the two-state solution for the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have come to realise this.

If the Middle East has indeed embarked on a thirty-year war, then the regional order established by the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement at the end of World War I has only just started to unravel.