Once upon a time there was a United States naval officer who invented a region he called the ‘Middle East.’ His name was Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914), and he lived during a period when this ‘Middle East’ was subjugated and colonized, when it was turned into a geopolitical ‘region’ that could be defined by the office of a naval strategist whose penchant for US imperialism made him famous. [Rest of content follows with proper formatting and complete paragraphs…]