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Look at the time line of the last few years and trace a finger across a map.

NATO dispatches troops to Bosnia, Kosovo and now Macedonia. Sentiment builds within the G-8 to send forces to the West Bank and Gaza to control the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Russia reasserts its claims to the Caucasus, despite condemnation by the United States and its allies.

At first glance, these appear to be unrelated events. In fact, though, they are intimately connected. Each intervention by Western powers is on behalf of Islamic movements; a peacekeeping force in the West Bank would merely be the latest. Even Western opposition to Russia in the Caucasus is more of the same.

A step back reveals an important geographical and historical overlap: The United States and its allies are in the process of trying to occupy significant portions of the old Ottoman Empire. They are using sufficient forces only if unopposed and catastrophically insufficient forces when they are opposed. And the Western powers are, interestingly, intervening on behalf of Muslims against Christians and Jews.

Governments from Paris to Washington, as a result, are adopting old imperial responsibilities as the new century unfolds. Like other empires, they will not be thanked by anyone. And as policy goes, this one has not been explicitly stated; it is neither clear nor backed by sufficient force with an understanding of risks and rewards.

Of course, no policymaker will confess that this is policy; these governments are merely adopting a neutral, peacekeeping stance. That is their sincere intent, at least. But there is always a gap between intentions and reality. And the reality, however unintended, is mind-boggling in scope, cost and risk -- and can easily swallow the ambitions of more than one political leader and even his nation.

It would be easy to create some strange scenario in which NATO forms an alliance with the Islamic world to defend Islamic communities.

But this is a case where the intentions and the outcomes have nothing to do with each other. The intention is what it is stated: the creation of a stable region in which no entity must choose between being victim or victimizer and in which NATO or some other American-led entity serves as honest broker and disinterested umpire.

The reality now unfolding is, of course, different. All peacekeeping interventions are on behalf of the weaker party. The weaker party benefits from the security provided by a third party and it is the stronger that is thwarted by that intervention.

But the regions in which interventions are taking place or are being contemplated all have the same geopolitical root. Each was, at one time or another, part of the Ottoman Empire, which collapsed at the end of the First World War. The Ottoman Empire, in turn, was an Islamic power that ruled, along its outer reaches, non-Muslim populations, particularly Catholic and Orthodox. The empire also planted Muslim communities throughout this periphery.

As the empire contracted, the regional balance of power shifted and the legacy Muslim communities were placed at a disadvantage. In the wake of the Cold War, these communities came under intense pressure from Christians and, in the case of Palestinians -- from Jews. As the weaker parties, the Mulsims became victims.

Western intervention, whatever the intent, was to protect the weaker party. Therefore, NATO and the United States undertook an unintended policy: the support of Muslim communities throughout the former Ottoman Empire. Why does the accident of geography -- a long-dead empire -- matter?

With their capital at Constantinople, the Ottomans ruled an empire that at its height, stretched from the Persian border to the gates of Vienna, and from the northern foothills of the Caucasus to the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. The empire was heir to the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and it was also the western half of the Islamic world. The empire brought a kind of peace to a part of the world that had rarely known any sort of peace.

By the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was in decline.

The Ottomans were pressed from the northwest by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and from the north by the Imperial Russia. Rotting inside, the Ottoman Empire contracted and following World War I collapsed, leaving in its wake modern Turkey, and a melange of religious and communal chaos.

There were two characteristics to the debris left by the Ottomans. First was an incredibly complex intermingling of Muslim and Christian communities, in mosaics that could only be understood under a geopolitical microscope. Second, because of the way in which the Ottoman's managed their affairs, none of these communities -- too small to be regarded as self-contained nations -- had clearly defined borders.

All overlapped. None was economically autonomous. Finally, having been manipulated over the centuries, these communities hated and feared each other --almost always with good reason. Each community had a library of grievances against the others, stretching back to the beginnings of the old empire and beyond.

Wherever you look around the periphery of modern Turkey, you see the same thing. Whether it is the Balkans, or the Levantine coast of the eastern Mediterranean, the legacy of the empire is the same. Christian and Muslim communities, deeply fragmented by clans and religious sects, intermingled, without any clear borders.

They must do business with each other, so a true separation is impossible, but they fear and hate each other with a passion made possible only by generations of living together in impossible circumstances. Whether Kosovo, the Chouf Mountains of Lebanon, or Chechnya, you see the same thing.

Following the collapse of the empire, the region experienced three states of political affairs. In one, an outside power imposed order on a particular region because it was in its interest to do so. So, the Soviets imposed an order on the northern Caucasus. So too, the British imposed an order on the Arabian Peninsula, manipulating the tribes in the region.

The second state was the creation of order through a regionally dominant power. For example, Yugoslavia created order in the Balkans through a combination of complex political maneuvering among the constituent elements and brutal suppression of opposition. The third state, as could be seen in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, or in the Balkans and Caucuses today, is simple chaos.

This chaos is the natural condition of all of the former Ottoman regions, if they are left to their own devices. The roots of this chaos are not in the moral failings of the people but in the unstable micro-geopolitics of the regions. Internecine strife is simply unavoidable. The chaos that reigns all around the borders of Turkey today is both highly differentiated by local conditions and of a single fabric.

Even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is essentially a post-Ottoman conflict. The former Syrian province of the Ottoman empire is today divided arbitrarily between Lebanon, a country invented by the French after World War I, Jordan, invented by the British to provide the Hashemite Bedouins a home, Syria, a rump state, and Israel. The rest of the region is a melange of Christian and Moslem sects, allied and divided by microscopic and kaleidoscopic interests and differences, flaring into breathtaking brutality.

Israel, intended by its founders to be both a modern European state inserted into the region and above these conflicts, has become Ottomanized. First, its relationship with the Palestinians has degenerated into the Ottoman model of two communities incapable of living together and incapable of living apart. Second, the experience in Lebanon showed the Israelis being sucked into the Ottoman mode of inconclusive, brutal conflict.

There are three possible outcomes.

All are rooted in the experience of these regions. The first is that the conflicts will continue to go on without resolution. The second is that regional powers will arise that will brutally impose a peace on their neighbors. The third is that outside powers will impose empire on the region.

The last option is most interesting. Without outside intervention, the most likely outcomes would be the re-imposition of Serbian power on the Balkans, possibly in alliance with Greece; the re-imposition of the Russian empire on the Caucuses; an Israeli pax, perhaps with an expansion of a covert alliance with Syria in Lebanon through the region.

Yet, it is the policy of the United States and of NATO to prevent the rise of regional powers. It is also their policy to bring an end to the endless violence. Given this position, the only option is the third option: direct intervention by an outside force intended to impose order throughout the former Ottoman Empire.

This is an enormous task. It is not an undoable task, but it is a task that would outstrip the current military capabilities of NATO. The quantity of troops needed to impose a pax NATO in the former Ottoman Empire is enormous. More importantly, the needed force would require levels of effort that would outstrip not the capabilities, but the interests of the powers involved. Only Russia has an organic interest in bringing order on any part of the region, and the Russians are opposed -- remember -- by the United States and Europe.

The United States and NATO have framed the intervention as something that will require only marginal forces. They operate on three assumptions. First, that they will go there only after an agreement is reached on the ground as umpires welcomed by both sides. Second, that as umpires, their presence would not shape the political evolution of the region, but would merely provide a secure framework that would allow an organic political resolution to take place. Finally, that no party would risk the consequences of engaging and harming western forces, so that overwhelming force would not be necessary.

These are not tenable assumptions. First, if there were a genuine agreement between the parties, there would be no need for an external force to monitor the agreement. Moreover, there can never be a comprehensive agreement since some factions would always find it in their interest to violate the agreements. Second, the presence of outsiders by its nature creates an unnatural condition in which an organic resolution is impossible. In almost all cases, the Muslim communities, as the weaker party, will -- indeed must -- use the presence of international forces to strengthen their political hand.

Finally, history suggests otherwise. The Marines dispatched to Beirut by the Reagan administration -- of the Rangers caught in Mogadishu during the Clinton era -- can testify that peacekeepers are indeed assailable.

NATO has been extraordinarily fortunate in its intervention in the Balkans, that the Serbs in particular have been cautious about engaging NATO. Expecting this to continue in the Balkans or in the Palestinian territories is simply unrealistic.

George Friedman is the chairman and founder of STRATFOR, the global intelligence company.

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