Simon Sebag Montefiore on the Origins of the Modern Middle East
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Why times can differ in your player
The creation of nationalism always always is about the exclusion of of people who are the other in some way or other. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. Whenever I try to understand what is happening in the Middle East, whether that is the Iran war that is still dragging on, whether that is the horrible attacks of October 7th and the bloody aftermath, whether that's other events throughout the region, I realize that I need to understand the history of those countries better to really get the shape of these modern conflicts. And thankfully there is a new book on this subject
that really helps me think through that. It's called The Cauldron, The Making of the Modern Middle East by Simon Sieback Montefiore. I asked Simon to come on the podcast. We spent a good amount of time at the beginning setting up the downfall of the empires, the Ottoman Empire, the British and French empires. the way that that shaped the modern Middle East in the beginning of the 20th century.
We talked about the rise of communism and fascism in World War II and the way in which that transformed the region, how competing great powers, particularly the Soviet Union and the United States, tried to shape the region after 1945, the influence of pan-Arabism and how that went wrong, the growing preeminence of the United States in the region after its main rival, the Soviet Union, disappears in the 1990s, and why it is that American plans to reshape the regions don't really work out. And then finally, In the part of this conversation reserved for paying subscribers, we talk about the impact of October 7th, the impact of the Iran war on the region. And I push Simon to explain to us a little bit why it is that this region, which he describes beautifully in the book, with a lot of richness, uh, a lot of history and literature and uh culture, has relatively underperformed.
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