What does historian Eugene Rogan mean when he
says we should be “very wary of great powers taking
their pens to Middle Eastern maps”?

Rogan thinks this should serve as a warning for future diplomacy in the region, considering the huge conflicts caused by the boundaries drawn up when Britain and France divided up the Ottoman Empire between themselves.

Explanation: The Middle East often seems like it's in the throes of one huge conflict after another and historians think much of the problems could be traced to world war I. At the end of the war, Britain and France made a secret deal, called the Sykes-Picot Agreement, creating Middle Eastern territories with almost no input from the diverse groups of people who had been living there for centuries, including Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

According to Rogan, the people in the region saw the boundaries as illegitimate because they saw them as imposed on them as an act of European imperialism. Today, the areas that were carved out in the post-World War I dealings; Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and what's now Israel are still being fought over or face political unrest, hence his statement above referring to the havoc caused by dividing up the region without input from the indigenous population.

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