Who REALLY Made the Modern Middle East - with Simon Sebag Montefiore

**Dan Senor** (0:00)
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**Simon Sebag Montefiore** (0:26)
It used to be one of those hot takes that if you know the Middle East, you know that Sunnis and Shias can't work together. Well, that's nonsense, they really can.
Ayatollah Khomeini was among his many incredibly clever moves, was to use Israel and anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism to rally an Arab world that had become disaffected and disillusioned with the pan-Arabism of NASA that had been defeated by Israel in 1967 And what Khomeini offered was a steroid-injected Islamism, of Sunni Islamism. And it really looked to Islam rather than the Arab nation as the way that estates could be run could be run like this. And so Yasser Arafat is one of the first to fly in to see Khomeini when he takes power. And all over the Middle East, Iranians, despite being Shiites, start to back these entities. Where it really takes off is long after the death of Khomeini, who dies in 89
In 89, he makes sure his successor is chosen. And Khomeini is still in power 37 years later until this very year.

**Dan Senor** (1:45)
It's 730 p.m. on Friday, August 27th in New York City. It is 230 p.m. on Friday, August 27th in Israel, as Israelis begin to wind down for Shabbat.
Before today's episode, a quick housekeeping note. On Thursday, October 22nd, just five days ahead of the Israeli elections, Call Me Back will hold a live taping at the Streicker Center in New York City, where I'll sit down with Dan Shapiro, Dahlia Scheinlin and Brett Stevens to discuss what's at stake in Israel's 2026 election and what its results will mean for the U.S.-Israel relationship. Tickets have just gone on sale, so if you want to join us, please follow the link in the episode description. Now on to today's episode. For more than a century, there has been a familiar way of telling the story of the modern Middle East. The Ottoman Empire collapses, Britain and France draw borders across the map. New countries are created, Israel is born, America and the Soviet Union move in. Ever since, the region has been living with the consequences of decisions largely made somewhere else. There's a lot of truth to that story. But Simon Sebag Montefiore argues that it is also radically incomplete.
His new book, The Cauldron, tells the story of the entire Middle East, from Morocco to Iran, from 1900 to the wars of 2026
In between are the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the creation of modern Turkey and the Arab states, the birth of Israel, the Cold War, Nasser and Pan-Arabism, the Shah and the Iranian Revolution, the rise of Islamism, the American era in the region, the emergence of Erdogan and Mohammed bin Salman, the long reign of Benjamin Netanyahu, October 7th, the Gaza War and the wars with Iran.
And one of its central ideas is that we give outsiders far too much credit for making the region and the people who actually live there, far too little agency.
The Middle East was not simply acted upon, it was shaped by Ottoman sultans and Saudi kings, Arab nationalists and Iranian revolutionaries, Zionists and Islamists, generals and monarchs, tribes and religious movements, all competing for power, territory, survival and legitimacy. And many of the forces we tend to think of as modern may actually be much older.
Empires never really disappeared. Great powers often discovered that their supposed clients had agendas of their own. And the European style nation states may have been an awkward fit for a region whose societies were historically far more mixed, ethnically, religiously and politically, than the borders suggested.
Today, Simon argues, the story may be turning again. Iran, Turkey and Israel have become the region's leading military powers. Saudi Arabia has replaced Egypt as the dominant Sunni Arab state.
Similar, smaller Gulf monarchies project power thousands of miles beyond their borders, and conflicts once neatly separated into the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Europe are beginning to collide. So perhaps the question isn't simply who made the modern Middle East. Perhaps it is whether the Middle East we have known for the last hundred years is now coming to an end. I can think of few books more important to read since October 7th, 2023 than Simon's new book, The Cauldron. He is a prolific writer. His biography of Joseph Stalin and his history of Jerusalem are among my favorite history books. And now so is his latest book, The Cauldron. This conversation, no pun intended, covers a lot of ground. And we would not do it justice by compressing it into a single episode. So today we're dropping part one. Part two will drop on Thursday, unless dramatic developments take priority. My conversation with Simon Sebag Montefiore will be right after this short message.