30 years is a pretty short time horizon to look at. Western meddling as a driver of chaos and authoritarianism in the Middle East stretches back at least a century or two.<p>If Europeans hadn’t drawn completely arbitrary national borders all over the region after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, if Palestine had been left to its Arab inhabitants instead of displacing them in favor of European Jews, if the British and Americans hadn’t put so much emphasis on securing the Suez Canal via support for friendly dictatorships nearby, if the US hadn’t toppled the Iranian democracy under Mosaddegh in 1953 to reinstall the Shah, if Western European, Russian, and American guns hadn’t been handed out on all sides like candy, etc., the region would certainly be far different from now.<p>But it’s impossible to guess exactly what the effects of some counterfactual foreign policy over the past century would be.