The Making of the Modern Middle East

In this episode of The Cipher Brief’s State Secrets podcast, host Suzanne Kelly sits down with award-winning historian and bestselling author Simon Sebag Montefiore to discuss his new book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East — a sweeping history of roughly 125 years that traces how the region became what it is today.

Drawing on a lifetime of research, writing and travel throughout the Middle East, Montefiore explains why he wanted to write a book that brought the region’s complicated history together in one story — from the final years of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of modern Saudi Arabia to the creation of Israel, the 1979 Iranian Revolution, America’s growing role in the region and the power struggles shaping the Middle East today.

Kelly and Montefiore explore some of the central arguments in The Cauldron, including why he believes the familiar story that Western powers simply drew arbitrary borders after World War I and created the modern Middle East is incomplete. Instead, he puts greater emphasis on the agency of the region’s own leaders, peoples and empires and tells much of that history through the larger-than-life personalities who shaped it.

The conversation moves from Ibn Saud, Atatürk, Reza Shah and David Ben-Gurion to Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ayatollah Khomeini, while also examining the historical forces behind Iran’s role in the region, Russia’s centuries-old interests in the Middle East and the challenges outside powers have repeatedly faced when trying to shape events there.

At its core, The Cauldron is an effort to answer a deceptively simple question: How did we get here? Montefiore explains why understanding that history may not allow us to predict what happens next — but can give us critical context for understanding the people, decisions and forces driving the Middle East today.