In a book called “Global Crisis” Geoffrey Parker discusses the 17th Century, a series of world-wide humanitarian disasters, nowadays understood to be principally caused by climate change and over-population, with political unrest in Western Europe, the Ottoman Empire through to China, where the Ming dynasty collapsed. 

When I studied this period the main influence was Hugh Trevor Roper, who thought that the “17th Century Crisis” was caused by a struggle between centralizing nation states and provincial magnates who resisted the increasing power of government. For a while this idea of a worldwide crisis was abandoned in university history departments.  But the scientific knowledge of global climate changes has brought the “17th Century Crisis” back into fashion, but with rather different causes. Humanity survived a century of poor harvests and near starvation, but, as Geoffrey Parker says, at huge cost.  The threat of starvation doesn’t necessarily lead to revolt, but if you add bad decisions by governments, it can push a population over the edge.  This is what we are seeing before our eyes.

Some people believe that the fundamental reasons for the current strife in the Middle East can be found, once again, in over-population and climate change, and that the religion is only the outward manifestation of a longer term problem that will affect the whole planet.
One could argue that the politics of the Middle East has made a worsening situation very much worse.

I believe that Epicurus, were he alive today, would counsel us not to make matters even more fraught and dangerous by intervening, but instead to find ways of making life as pleasant as possible in a very unstable and dangerous epoch.