141: Why Western ideas crash and burn in the Middle East, with Simon Sebag Montefiore

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Aug 24, 2026

Simon Sebag Montefiore, bestselling historian of Stalin and The Romanovs, offers a sweeping look at modern Middle Eastern history. He traces state formation from Ottoman collapse to oil, explores how foreign ideologies unravel on contact with local loyalties, and examines the rise of dynasties, Islamism, and the Arab Spring in shaping the region.

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INSIGHT

Start In 1900 To Restore Local Agency

The book reframes agency away from imperial powers to native leaders across the Arab world and the Gulf starting around 1900.
Montefiore argues modern Middle Eastern outcomes flow from Ottoman collapse and indigenous state-builders like Ibn Saud and Atatürk.

ANECDOTE

Ibn Saud's Raid As Arabia's Origin Story

Simon Sebag Montefiore opens the narrative with Ibn Saud's 1902 raid on Riyadh as a hinge moment for modern Arabia.
The raid shows a founder-state born from conquest, family alliance, and religious-political partnership with the Al Saud and Wahhabi movement.

INSIGHT

Saudi Arabia As A Conquest Family State

Saudi Arabia's state identity stems from dynastic conquest and a formal Al Saud–Al Wahhabi pact, making it a family-run conquest state.
Montefiore links the family's origin to its contemporary confidence and governance style.

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Why does the West misunderstand the Middle East? Best-selling historian Simon Sebag Montefiore returns to the pod to discuss The Cauldron, his sweeping new history of the region, from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of its modern states to oil, Islamism, revolution and the Arab Spring.

The book is a kind of prehistory of present-day Western stumbling in the Middle East. Western powers repeatedly arrive with grand political theories — imperialism, nationalism, socialism, liberal democracy — only to watch them change beyond recognition or collapse on contact with the region’s deeper identities, loyalties and social contracts. It is a conversation about the states that endured, the ones that failed, and why the Middle East remains so intensely debated in the West — and so poorly understood.

This episode is sponsored by the Technion.

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Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.