Looking at the Middle East, there is not much in terms of borders that makes sense — they neither reflect national divisions, nor religious ones. They are lines in the sand — the legacy of a rapacious colonial era kept together after the colonial powers left by even more rapacious dictators.

The only exception is Israel — but that is another story, and its success rests with the secrets of the modern nation state, where democracy roughly coincides with ethnicity. Everywhere else, stability was bought at the price of oppression — which made stability fragile and ultimately untenable — or ethnic cleansing. Cyprus is stable today because the warring tribes have been forcibly separated, both physically and politically. Lebanon hangs by a thread, with everyone ready to retreat to the hills and pull out the guns at a moment's notice. Iraq could explode again soon: its ethnic mosaic cannot be easily disentangled, but then again, one could have said the same of Yugoslavia in the 1980s.

Stability returns to such places after the grim harvest of ethnic hatred leaves no room for survivors to return to their former homes.

Could this tide be stemmed in Syria?

Early on in the crisis, it could have been, at a high price, had we had a dog in the fight, or one that we wanted to claim as our own. But the West decided, as in the former Yugoslavia for three long years, to sit this one out. The new order will thus not be created by idealists intervening. Ethnic cleansing will eventually draw the new borders as Syria falls apart.