Simon Sebag Montefiore on the Origins of the Modern Middle East

Simon Sebag Montefiore is a historian and author. His latest book is The Cauldron: The Origins of the Modern Middle East.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Simon Sebag Montefiore discuss how the collapse of the Ottoman Empire gave rise to modern nationalism and ethnic cleansing in the Middle East, how the region’s history has shaped today’s conflicts, and the long-term impact of October 7.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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Yascha Mounk: I really look forward to this conversation. It’s a very ambitious book. Tell us about the origins of the modern Middle East. As in many parts of the world, the origins of a modern world are in a way the story of the fading of the imperial world that preceded it.

Simon Sebag Montefiore: In this case, I think you have to look at the old world. You have to look at the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire to understand the Middle East today, and that’s why I begin with those empires. In 1900, the Ottoman Empire was crumbling in Europe, but still pretty formidable in Asia. That’s the story of The Cauldron. That’s how the book begins.

Mounk: Tell us a little bit about how the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the fading influence of the British Empire in parts of the Middle East set up the basic structure that started to emerge at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Sebag Montefiore: The Ottoman Empire was fading. It had lost most of its Balkan territories and most of its North African territories, except Libya, except Tripoli. But it still controlled what is now Turkey and the whole Arab world essentially, all the way to the border with the Persian Empire. So it was still a pretty formidable institution. In World War I, it proved to be surprisingly resilient militarily, and it defeated the British in two pretty significant battles. So it was still pretty important.

But what is the Ottoman Empire? The Ottoman Empire lasted for over four hundred years, and there were many versions of it. It started as a conquest state based on the enslavement of Christian children who were recruited to be its soldiers, its civil servants, and so on. And of course, to its harems. Then it went through massive crises and remade itself several times.

In the last period, which I deal with in The Cauldron, which is really the opening of the twentieth century or the 1890s, it had been through a period of reform when it had allowed its many peoples, sects, and ethnicities to have equal citizenship. It was tightening itself into an Islamic and nationalistic, Turkish nationalistic entity with a kind of almost proto-Nazi ideology.

So by World War I, it was ruled by the Three Pashas, who were kind of eugenicist, social Darwinist people who believed that war was a purifying struggle for races to perfect themselves. It was they who embarked on the genocide against the Armenians and other peoples too, like the Greeks and the Maronites and so on. That was a sort of Götterdämmerung, if you like, of the Ottoman Empire.

The great myth that you read about all the time, about the great tolerance of the Ottoman Empire and how everyone lived together in a cheerful, peaceful, charming way, spouting poetry, is rubbish really.

Mounk: Walk us through that. It is rubbish, because there were very strong forms of exclusion and discrimination built into those empires. But the strange thing about empires does seem to be that as they fade, you get those periods of ethnic cleansing. You obviously get that extremely strongly in the Middle East, with the Armenians and others, but also in other parts of Europe. It’s in the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of nationalism and the attempt to create those more coherent national states that you then get all of the expulsions and ethnic cleansings that define a lot of the first half of the twentieth century.

Tell us about the era of the Three Pashas and the ideology that drove them, and in what ways those were preferable to the Ottoman Empire and in which ways perhaps they weren’t.

Sebag Montefiore: You’re putting your finger on it. In the West, we decided, I guess, sometime during the nineteenth century, that the nation-state was the best form of government. But the creation of these nation-states always included exclusions of people who either didn’t fit into the new national definition or who didn’t want to fit. The creation of nationalism is always about the exclusion of people who are the other in some way or other. All the national states that were created in Eastern Europe involved excluding Muslim citizens from them, and they had to leave and go into the Ottoman Empire, in their hundreds of thousands.

The same process took place in Eurasia and in the Middle East. That’s what happened in the Ottoman Empire. The idea moved from Ottomanism, which was meant to be a definition of a broad citizenship involving all sorts of peoples, to a much tighter one, a sort of Turkish definition. You had to be Turkish, you had to be Islamic, you had to speak Turkish. That excluded the Arabs, who were millions of people, as well as the Jews and of course all the Christians in the empire. They were huge communities, including the Armenians.

All of these peoples in the Middle East started to embrace the idea of nationalism because that was the flavor of the times. Once they did that, you were entering into a game in which there was a struggle for supremacy and over who would create their version of the state. That’s still going on in all of the countries in the Middle East. It’s one of the themes of this book and of this history.

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In the Ottoman Empire, the Three Pashas were Young Turks. The Young Turks was a movement that had liberal democrats on one side and ultra-nationalists, kind of authoritarians, on the other, and they were of the latter faction. They got control of the Sultanate. There was still a Sultan, but they were the dictators effectively. They took the Ottoman Empire into the war, and they believed this was the only way to save the Ottoman state.

At the same time, many peoples were beginning to embrace nationalistic ideologies, and that meant also having support from outside powers. That was the Armenian dilemma. The Armenians decided that they too were a nation, they needed a national state, and the only way they could get that was with help from, say, the British, but even more from the Russians, who were their Orthodox brothers. That way the Ottoman rulers started to regard them not just as Christians and therefore possible outsiders with mixed loyalties, but actually traitors working for the main enemy, the Russians. That’s what led to the massacres of World War I.

Mounk: Let’s go a little bit forward in time. You have the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. You have these nation-building projects, which often go hand in hand with these forms of ethnic cleansing, the attempt to build these coherent nation states that often involve these forms of violence, as they did elsewhere in the world. You then obviously have a period of World War II and the competing claims of fascism and communism on the allegiance of local political actors.

Tell us a little bit about the shape of the Middle East after these nation-building projects, who the major players are, and how they respond to the rise of the Soviet Union and to the rise of Hitler in Germany.

Sebag Montefiore: What the Allies wanted to do after World War I was punish the genocidaires who had killed the Armenians. They felt they had no obligation to the Ottomans or the Turks or whoever they would turn out to be. The Sultanate still existed at that point. This is probably one of the most important parts of the story—what is now Turkey.

They had decided that they would embrace the nationalisms of all the peoples who had suffered under the Turks or the Ottomans. The irony about these great imperialists like Churchill and Balfour and Lloyd George and Clemenceau was that they combined an imperial view of the world, in which they wanted to create new states that were friendly or client states to them and would allow British troops to remain, with nationalism. They believed that they were backing peoples who had been prisoners of the Ottomans and victims of the Ottomans. That was their general plan.

But in what is now Turkey, they decided that the Turks would have a tiny rump state around Ankara. The western part they gave to the Greeks and Italians, but mainly the Greeks. They said to the Greeks, you can create a new empire, almost like a new Byzantine empire. The Greeks poured troops into that area and started to conquer even the parts that they hadn’t been given by the Allies. In the east, they basically promised states to the Armenians and the Kurds.

This immediately started to go very wrong because the Turks, under Mustafa Kemal, who later became Atatürk, father of the Turks, rallied and promoted a new nation, a new state that he wanted to call the Turkish Republic. He inherited an intact, fully equipped Ottoman army that was still a pretty impressive military contingent. With this he turned around and defeated the Armenians, of whom there were hardly any left after the genocide, the Syrians who were in Cilicia, and the Kurds, and then turned round and defeated the Greeks. When he came to face the British, who still occupied Constantinople, they blinked and caved. They weren’t ready for another war against these quite capable military forces, and that brought down Lloyd George’s government in 1922.

Out of that was formed a new nation state, the most important of these nation states, at least in this early period: the Turkish Republic. But they wanted much more. They weren’t satisfied with what they got in 1923. They wanted to get Mosul. They wanted to get the Vilayet of Mosul, which is northeastern Iraq. They also weren’t happy with Syria. They wanted northern Syria, but the French kept that. That’s why we see what’s happening now with President Erdogan and this new Ottomanism that he is promoting, because all along the Turks felt they had been done out of their natural imperial power domain.

Mounk: They have a form of imperial hangover, which in some ways is comparable to Russia and other countries around the world.

Sebag Montefiore: It’s very like Russia, so that’s part of it.

Mounk: This is what’s going on in Turkey at the time. Tell us about other parts of the Middle East at that moment, and then I want to get a little bit of forward momentum. What’s happening, for example, with Saudi Arabia, being conquered by Saud, and the establishment of a House of Saud?

Sebag Montefiore: The rise of the Saud family is a very different process. The Ottomans in Arabia controlled the western coast of Arabia, which is Mecca and Medina, the holy cities, the Hejaz. Normally they controlled Yemen, but actually they only really controlled the capital. If you go around the south of Arabia, the British controlled Aden and Hadhramaut, which is also part of Yemen, and then what is now the Sultanate of Oman. If you keep going around the coast, they controlled the Trucial States, which were all the little emirates, which is now the UAE and Kuwait and Bahrain and Qatar and so on. So the British were one imperial power in Arabia, and the Ottomans were the other, but in the middle, there were family dynasties who controlled their own emirates that were vaguely allied to the Ottomans or the British, but often to the Ottomans. The Ottomans kept a very close eye on these people because they knew that much of the prestige of the Ottoman monarchy came from controlling the pilgrimage, the Hajj, to Mecca and Medina.

In the eighteenth century, the House of Saud, the Saudi family, had partnered with an Islamic revivalist who founded the Wahhabi movement, and they had actually conquered the whole of Arabia, including Mecca and Medina. The Ottomans had thrown them out and beheaded the Saudi Emir on the docks in Constantinople. In the nineteenth century, another Saudi prince built another Saudi realm, and that too had fallen apart.

Now, in 1902, at the beginning of my period, Ibn Saud, or Abdulaziz, as he is known in the Arab world, was a swaggering twenty-year-old, six foot six or something, very tall, who rode into the interior of Arabia and conquered Riyadh with forty friends and henchmen. That was the beginning of the conquest of what is now Saudi Arabia. It took him thirty years to build. What one needs to understand about Saudi Arabia is that it’s the third Saudi state. It’s a conquest state. They conquered it in a wave of wars that went on, as I said, for the next thirty years. Ultimately, the most important part of that conquest was the conquest in 1925 of Mecca and Medina, because it’s the guardianship of the holy sanctuaries that gives them their prestige in the Arab world. It has allowed them recently to replace Egypt as the leaders of the Sunni Arab world.

The creation of that state was really independent of the British and the Ottomans and the French. He had to get their backing or their acquiescence, but he was a master at playing off everybody, Abdulaziz, and he did it himself.

Mounk: Obviously there are many parts of the Middle East, and I don’t want to go through each individual country. We have talked a lot about the downfall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Atatürk, as he styled himself. We have talked about the revival of Islam and Wahhabism and the rise of the king of Saud. The third really important part to set the scene before we fast-forward is what’s going on in Persia, or as it would now be called, Iran. Tell us in particular about Reza Shah.

Sebag Montefiore: Reza Shah was such an interesting character, and he’s one of the big nation builders. You’ve mentioned a few of them there, Yascha. He actually started as a peasant. He was a peasant soldier who was striking by his ambition, his discipline, and his height. He was another giant strapping soldier. As a young man, he joined the Shah of Persia’s Cossack Regiment, which was based on the Cossacks of the Tsars of Russia and was trained by Cossacks from Russia.

Iran had a very complex relationship with the Russian Tsars and later the Soviets too. Essentially twice in the twentieth century the Russians occupied half of Iran, so it’s worth remembering that.

Opening the twentieth century, we find Persia, which is really an empire in which a lot of different minorities and ethnicities exist. They’re all Farsi speaking, but some are Persian, and many are Kurds, Arabs, and others. It had been spectacularly misgoverned and ill-managed by the Qajar dynasty of Shahs. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it had stagnated, it was corrupt, it was misgoverned, and it was falling apart.

In 1906, there was a constitutional revolution in which the Shah was forced to concede a constitution and an elected parliament, the Majlis. That didn’t last long because he fought back. There was a counter-revolution, and he was backed by the Russians in the crushing of the revolution. This meant that there were Russians in the country in World War I, and then there were British in the country. The Russians were in the north, and the Ottomans invaded from the west. There was a massive famine in which a million Persians died.

Out of this mess, when it was a World War I battlefield, and by the way, a completely forgotten theater in World War I, no one knows about it now, but for Iranians it’s important, the British looked for a candidate to restore governance and be a British ally. They found this strapping general, a self-made man, Reza Khan. In 1921, he seized power in a coup. By 1925, he had got rid of the Qajar dynasty, who had been in power since the 1790s, and he had been elected Shah of what he now called Iran. He became king, and he called his dynasty the Pahlavi dynasty.

He was an extraordinary character. He started to reform the country. He created banks, he built railways, he founded the university, he freed women from having to wear the hijab if they didn’t want to. He put the Shiite clergy in their place. All of this he did in partnership with aristocratic princes who were more sophisticated. But as his reign went on into the 1930s, he became more paranoid, more jealous, more authoritarian. He arrested a lot of them and had them murdered in prison by a very sinister doctor who injected them with oxygen, which is very creepy, or water or something.

By 1941, in World War II, he decided that he was not sure who was going to win the war, and he would remain neutral. This was a big mistake because neither the British nor the Soviets, now under Stalin, were going to take a risk with Iran. In fact, they weren’t going to take a risk anywhere in the Middle East. That’s part of the story of World War II, which is interesting.

Mounk: Let’s start to get into the story of World War II. I think we now have the scene relatively well set for the different parts of the Middle East. We haven’t quite talked about North Africa, and there are some other places we haven’t touched on, but for a big region, we’ve done as well as we can to set the scene. World War II tears the world apart. There’s an ideological competition between communism, between fascism, between democracy. The Middle East became an important theater in World War II. What role does the Middle East play in World War II, and what is the form of the Middle East that emerges from World War II?

Sebag Montefiore: The interesting thing about World War II is that in purely imperial, strategic terms, it justifies the British plan to have a big presence in the Middle East, because as it turns out, the Middle East is potentially a key war-winning theater. The Italians and the Germans are fighting their way along North Africa and break into Egypt twice. One of the times is with Rommel, the famous Afrika Korps. At the same time, Hitler is invading the Soviet Union and fighting his way towards the Caucasus, and from the Caucasus he would break into Turkey and Iraq and Persia, and then he would be in the Middle East as well. So suddenly in 1941–42, the Middle East was extremely important.

One of the key things that happens is, of course, that Hitler defeats France. Therefore, the French Empire is now under the control of the Axis, the Nazi Axis. That means that much of North Africa is controlled by the Vichy French, Algeria and Morocco and Tunisia, but also, worryingly, the key parts of the Levant, which is Lebanon and Syria. At the same time, there’s a coup in British Iraq, and a pro-Nazi government comes to power there.

As I said, Churchill decides he’s taking no chances. He launches a war and invades Vichy Syria. That’s where Moshe Dayan, the future Israeli general, loses his eye. At the same time, he launches a war to invade Iraq, and he conquers Iraq. Then finally, of course, they conquer Iran. The British consolidate the whole Middle East under what is essentially British control. That justifies itself because Churchill stabilizes the Middle East.

But as the war goes on, he realizes that he can’t keep control of the Middle East. Nationalism is ascendant. The British embrace an idea of Arab nationalism, not completely pan-Arabism, but they compromise. They want to give independence to the Arab states, including Egypt and Iraq, and force the French to do the same in Syria and Lebanon. At the same time, they want these places to be British or French satellites. Yet they embrace an idea of pan-Arab nationalism by sponsoring the creation of the Arab League, led by Egypt and Iraq, which are both British vassal states, or the British want them to be.

That’s what happens. At the end of World War II, the Middle East started to become properly independent. All of these states are new states that have never existed before. That’s the key thing to understand. One often sees in activist propaganda the claim that these are all ancient states that have been independent for centuries and then Israel has suddenly been created. No. All of these states, starting with Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, are completely new states. Only Egypt and Iran are ancient states. They all become independent.

The creation of Israel is very like the emergence of Turkey twenty years earlier. It starts with a partition, a brutal ethnic war, the driving out of large numbers of refugees, their fleeing from their homes in the face of war, and the creation of a new nationalism with a national idea linked to religion and race and ethnicity. Out of it comes a new, dynamic state. The difference between the creation of Turkey and the creation of Israel is the idiosyncratic Jewish history, of course, which is interesting and unique, but then all national histories are unique. Also, many of its citizens were settlers who had arrived from abroad, immigrants. That was how those two states were created.

Israel and the rest of the Middle East really became independent after World War II, and they almost immediately went to war. That war in 1948, in which five Arab states tried to attack the new Judaic Republic, which was named Israel, on the day of its independence, was a disaster for all concerned because it rejected the partition. Partition was an inevitable result of creating new national states. As you were saying at the beginning, there have to be borders, and there have to be exclusions of people who don’t want to be in a new country or who are rejected from the new concept of this nation state. In the Middle East, that’s almost impossible to deliver without population swaps, refugees, or creating states that are multi-ethnic, sectarian states, and therefore not strictly enforced nation states. That’s the big struggle that’s happening across the Middle East. It’s the theme that’s going on today.

Mounk: Part of the interesting thing about the creation of Israel is that, especially from a European vantage point, we tend to think of it as a European story, a story that is connected to the Holocaust and the Shoah and the Jews expelled from Poland and other parts of Central and Eastern Europe with nowhere else to go, who sought refuge in Israel. That is of course a part of the story. But a part of the story is also all of the Jews who had been native to the Middle East for a very long time, often being pushed out and expelled from those countries as this process of the creation of different nation states takes place.

How well set up for success are these various new nation states, as in many parts of a post-colonial world, as you’re saying? They did not have a long history, with the exception of Iran and a few other states. Some of them contained deep religious differences within them, for example, between Shias and Sunnis. Was there a period in which these states could have become flourishing, could have become peaceful, could have become even perhaps democratic, or was the nature of many of those states sufficiently incoherent from the start that the odds were always stacked against a successful Middle East?

Sebag Montefiore: I think the odds were always stacked against them if they were trying to enforce a strict nation state. This was particularly so in a circumstance where these nations were new, and therefore the national consciousness was not yet formed. In fact, King Faisal of Iraq said that in the thirties. He said there was no Iraqi national spirit at all. But of course, these national consciousnesses have grown, and now, a hundred years later, yes, there are Syrians and Iraqis and Lebanese and so on, but that took time to develop.

All of these states, and in this way Israel and Turkey and Iraq and Syria and so on are all typical, are states with large ethnic and sectarian minorities who to various extents don’t want to be part of the new national consciousness, and with rulers who to various extents want to force them to take part in the new national project or to repress them. In Turkey, for example, they throw out all the Greeks, they kill all the Armenians, but they’ve still got the Kurds in the East, and the Kurds don’t want to be part of a Turkish state. They regard themselves as different. That leads to some seventy or eighty years of ethnic insurgency in which fifty or sixty thousand Kurdish civilians are killed. That story is still going on today.

Similarly in Iraq, they had one of the first pogroms, if you like, against the Assyrians in the early thirties, where they massacred Christians. That sets the tone for the gradual persecution of the Christians of Iraq, who numbered a million people in the year 2000 and now number 115,000. At the same time, they have Kurds, and they have Sunnis versus Shias. The Shias are a narrow majority, and that’s a tension within Iraq which Iraq struggles to control. The way they control it is with a completely brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, who keeps everyone in order. He is a Sunni, and he rules with a rod of iron in a Stalinesque dictatorship. In Syria, it’s a similar story with the Assads, except they are Alawites, part of a minority.

In many of these countries, the colonial auxiliary army created by the French or the British is the only truly national entity that founded the state. This is true all across Africa too, which is why they often end up with military rulers. There’s a contradiction in that, because the French, for example, in Syria fill their auxiliary military with minorities like the Alawites. That complicates matters further.

Mounk: That then sets up those minorities to take control of the state, as they do in Syria with the Assad family. Presumably, the rise of a kind of pan-Arabism with Nasser and other figures is in part a response to the relative weakness of the national consciousness at the time. Part of what makes the idea that we’re all Arabs and should be cooperating to a much higher extent appealing is that, at least from the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of citizens of these nations don’t feel that their primary identity is this long-standing national identity. They have huge differences to their neighbors, especially if, for example, you have Shias on both the Iranian and the Iraqi side of the border. Some of those Shias might feel, for example, in Iraq, that they have more in common with Shias on the Iranian side of the border than with Sunnis in their own country.

Sebag Montefiore: That’s exactly what happens. You have all these states just drawn by imperial powers in various combinations. Oftentimes people get on better. For example, there are Druze in Syria, in Lebanon, and in the new state of Israel who may have more in common with each other than they do with their own citizens. You gave the example of the Shias in Iraq, and that’s what happens later, in our own time, in the twenty-first century, where you have Arab Shias in Iraq who identify more as Shia and therefore are closer to the Iranians than they are to other Iraqis.

Pan-Arabism is partly an attempt to compensate for the weakness of these new states. It’s partly a way to compensate for the failure of the first pan-Arab project, which is to defeat and liquidate Israel, which fails. Rather than taking that as a lesson or a cautionary tale, the pan-Arabs double down and dedicate themselves to destroying Israel, which becomes a raison d’être for pan-Arabism. This leads them to a series of disasters. In 1956, the Egyptians are defeated, and then in 1967 they were completely routed on all fronts. At that point, Nasser, who is a highly intelligent, very interesting character, realizes that Egypt has to now make peace with Israel.

There’s a fascinating leaked conversation between him and his young protégé, Colonel Gaddafi, who’s also a major character in the book. It has just been put out in Egypt, and it’s very interesting. Nasser says, we just need to make peace. We’ve been defeated by them, and we’ll be defeated by them again. The Egyptians come first, and we need to make peace with them. Colonel Gaddafi says, no, we’ve got to go to war. Nasser says, you can go to war if you want with them, you and Yasser Arafat, you and the Iraqis and the rest, but we’re the Egyptians and we’re going to make peace with them. That’s a very interesting conversation. Of course, Sadat, his successor, later does that. That’s the end of pan-Arabism in that pure, idealistic form.

Pan-Arabism is really tainted by its complete identification with this campaign against Israel, which is completely unnecessary in terms of geopolitics and power politics. Palestine is a small entity along the Holy Land, along the coast. They could have easily recognized that there was going to be some sort of autonomous Jewish community there, and that could have been the end of it. But they defined themselves by war. That’s a very dangerous thing to do if you lose the war.

Mounk: One of the results of the relative weakness of these states and the failure of pan-Arabism is that the Middle East becomes a plaything of the great power competition that defined much of the second half of the twentieth century between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan in a failed war and tries to exercise a lot of influence over its allies, and the United States gets increasingly drawn into the Middle East. When the Soviet Union collapses, the United States in some ways becomes the defining outside regional presence. How is it that the United States reshapes the region in what you call the American era of the Middle East?

Sebag Montefiore: The American era is an opportunity. America is the most powerful state that has ever been in world history, with the greatest military. After 1991 and the Gulf War, it has won a clear victory. It’s cleverer than later wars because it has a clear aim and it has a limit, an end to it. They leave Saddam Hussein in power as a rump state with a Kurdish entity in the north protected by the Americans, just about. Some people regard this as a great failure, but all statesmanship is about being measured and limited. It’s highly intelligent of the elder Bush, Bush 41, to leave him in power there as a block against Iran, revolutionary Iran, Islamic Iran. They have a great opportunity, and it’s squandered.

Initially they try to use it in two ways. The first is that by liberating Kuwait and protecting Kuwait from Iraq, they reassert the state system of the region and say we’re going to guarantee that for another era. That has lasted to this day, but I think its days may be numbered. Secondly, they put a lot of American prestige to work to try to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is the Madrid Conference and then the Oslo Accords. This has been discredited now for all sorts of reasons, mainly because it ultimately failed. But the concept was plausible, and there were ways it could have worked too. It’s easy now to look back and analyze it. I do in the book. It needed to be quicker, it needed to be clearer, there needed to be a Palestinian state sooner. But equally the Palestinians needed to give confidence to the Israelis earlier too. It was always a two-way street, obviously. In any case, it failed and was never restored because the Americans were distracted by 9/11.

That diverted the entire American project in the Middle East into the 9/11 wars. Afghanistan was clearly justified. Iraq was waged on fake intelligence and a misunderstanding of the Middle East, I think, which is that you could redraw the Middle East and create democracy across the Middle East, which to me is a utopian pipe dream. I think what they should have done is just find a general to run Iraq, liquidate the ruling clique around Saddam Hussein, and leave it at that. Iraq fulfilled a massively important role in the architecture of the Middle East. Iraq was a major Arab state that kept Iran in its corner.

The effect of the Iraq War, which no one could have guessed at the time, was that America revealed its weakness, its short attention span, its vulnerability to casualties, its vulnerability to insurgency, and its erratic democratic nature, where we change governments every four or five years, which is of course insanity in foreign affairs. All of these things revealed to the Iranians and everybody else that America was a vulnerable giant when it put itself on the ground like that.

At the same time, it enabled Iran to fulfill the dream of both the Islamist radicals and those who aspired to Persian greatness, the Persian imperial program, when the Persians had many times in history ruled the whole Middle East in different combinations, in different empires. They were able from that to take over Iraq, in effect, through their militias, then Syria, then Lebanon, then the Houthis, then Hamas in Gaza, and to create what General Suleimani called the Six Armies. I call it the Six Armies Empire, which was really the most powerful Iran had been since Nadir Shah in the 18th century, if not since the Sasanians in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. That was set up by those Americans, and that ended the American era in the Middle East. That single mistake was so tempting to make, yet so easy to analyze as making no sense. But there it is. That’s what happens with government, I guess.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Simon discuss the impact of October 7, why the Middle East has been so unsuccessful in many ways, and how the region might change over the next 50 years. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…