Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - The Historian Who Explains Why the Middle East Is Messed Up - Simon Sebag Montefiore

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

The Middle East didn’t become a cauldron overnight, and to understand what’s happening there today, you have to understand the history that brought us here. Simon Sebag Montefiore joins me to unpack the revolutions, empires, wars, and extraordinary personalities that shaped the region, and why decisions made decades ago still reverberate around the world today. Simon Sebag Montefiore is a historian whose bestselling books have been published in forty-eight languages and have won numerous awards, including the Costa Biography Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His books include Catherine the Great and Potemkin; Stalin; Young Stalin; Jerusalem; The Romanovs; The World; the acclaimed Moscow Trilogy of novels; Written in History; and Voices of History. He received his Ph.D. from Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. I love all of Simon's books, but this might just be my favorite: The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. Pre-order my next book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, out on the 17th of September in the UK and the 22nd of September in the US: ⁠https://www.scaramucci.net/allthewrongmoves Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

979 is the key date in modern Middle Eastern history. You've got to think of 1979, like we think of 1776, or 1917 or 1789. It's one of those mega-revolutions that change everything. And it changes the destiny of Iran, but it also changes the Sunni Arab world too, and it unleashes and promotes a newly potent version of Islamism, which is anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Israeli resistance radicalism. It turns out that those people are extremely incompetent at running their states, but then they kill huge numbers of people, and that works as well for them,

and it's extremely miserable to live in their countries often. But blaming America for 1979 means blaming America for the Shah. And the Shah was long regarded in leftist discourse as one of the great villains of all time. The only thing I have to say on that is this. In the entire reign of the Shah, he ruled for 41 years. approximately 4,000 people were killed violently. In the first days of the Islamic Republic, far more than that were murdered. And in about three days in January, this year at 2026, the Islamic Republic killed approximately 30,000 to 40,000 young people.

And that is many, many, many multiples more than the Shah killed in 41 years. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. joining me today is Simon Sabag Montevore. He's an internationally bestselling author. He's a prize-winning historian. He has a number one book out right now. A Times bestseller went to number one this week, The Cauldron, the making of the modern Middle East.

And I have to tell you that I'm a big bibliophile. I'm a big fan of yours. I've read many of your books, Simon. Thank you. But I think this one really is one of the topers for you because you've You've explained the Middle East, I mean, the title is there. It's a cauldron. But I want you to tell us what that image captures for you that maybe the conventional descriptions of the Middle East do not capture. I mean, I've called it the cauldron because, as you can see at the moment, the cauldron is boiling. There is a ferocious struggle for power and influence happening there. And the cordon suggests that struggle for security and power. that is turbulent, that is violent, but a cauldron can also be cooking fascinating,

colorful, delicious ingredients. And this book is not just about the wars and coups and terrorists and fanaticism and empires of the Middle East. It's also a celebration of poetry, the open view of the Middle East, another tradition in the Arab world, in the Turkish world, that looks openly to the world. world that takes in influences and ideas and philosophies and there's two-way traffic. And so we too often think of the dark side of the Middle East. This book is a celebration of both. The reason why I wrote it is because this book didn't exist. And as my hero, Benjamin

Disraeli always said, he always said, when I want to read a book and I can't find it, I write it myself. So I've written this because this book doesn't exist. Even though there are millions of books on the Middle East. Most of them are about the end of World War I, like the famous Fronkin book that we've both read, but or about Israel-Palestine. But this book is from Iran all the way to Morocco, from Turkey to Israel and Egypt and Yemen and Sudan. And it's 19 countries. And many of them are Arab and Muslim, but some of them are all. Turkish speaking and Persian speaking and some of them are Jewish, some of them are Christian,

have large Christian populations. And it's really about all of those states and all of the ethnicities and sects that are at home in the Middle East that make it the cauldron. Well, I mean, it's just so much here, and it's just a great history. And I would implore anybody to read this book because it'll get them up to speed.

And to your point, I have a ton of clients in the Middle East. I go often. I love the countries and the hospitality. And I've even been to places like Iraq and Afghanistan on troop support missions when the American military had presence there. You start the book out, though. I was dying to ask you this since I finished it this summer. We're starting in January of 1902 in a palm grove outside of Riyadh, I guess, right? I mean, there's a raid happening. Why'd you start there? Well, one of the narratives about the Middle East is that it's all about American and

British and French colonialism. These are all victims of imperialism. And that is the only way to understand the Middle East even now. And I reject that totally because it rejects the agency of these peoples. And so that's partly why I started it. in 1900 and 1902, when much of the Middle East, most of the Middle East was still ruled by the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic Empire. And I started it particularly in 1902 when a young man in his early 20s who is extremely tall, six foot three or four, his name is Abdelaziz al-Saud.

And he gallops in with 40 friends. And it's a wild sort of, um, wild moment. He climbs over the wall in a palm grove. As you said, he hides in the harim of the governor of this small town, which is called Riyadh. And when the sun comes up, him and his friends burst out, kill the governor in open warfare with their swords and spears and seize Riyadh. And that is the founding of what became Saudi Arabia 30 years later.

And the reason why I started is because it's an Arab moment. It's a moment of Arab swashbuckling agency. And it is the founder of what is now the center of the world and one of the major Arab powers, the leading Sunni power, the guardian of the two sanctuaries, Ameka and Medina. And so it's the founding of one of the big players by one of the most successful nation builders. or state builders in this story, which is full of these kind of titanic figures, Ataturg, and Ben-Gurian and Reza Shah, and many others. So that's why I chose it. I wanted to make a point.

I also like to open my books with a kind of cinematic moment of swashbuckling drama. But it has to be a scene that is revelatory and relevant to the themes of the book. And then one of the big themes of this book is, These states have been independent for 80 years or more in the case of Saudi Arabia. And you've got to understand the Saudi Arabian kingdom of today is the third Saudi state. And you've got to know the history and all of it is in here. And that's why I started with that story. Well, listen, I brought it up for that reason.

Because I think your frame has also changed my frame of reference in my view. But I want to go to Sykes Picos for a second. and I want you to the extent that you can in a short moment is to explain it to people because many people, frankly, including Donald Trump, didn't know what, you know, when I was traveling with President Trump in 2016, he did not know what the Sykes-Pecos Treaty was. And he's the type of person where you can't explain it to him by lecturing him because he gets pissed off because he then thinks you think you know something that he doesn't know. So you have to sort of like weave it into a story.

So how did you? I'd love to hear at some point how you weaved it in. No, I basically said to him, you remember Lawrence of Arabia? And he goes, oh, you mean, with Peter O'Toole, oh, what a great movie. The music was fantastic. I said, yeah, do you remember the plot? Do you remember the plot? No, I don't remember the plot.

And then I took him through the Sykes-Pico's screen. That is so clever. But the answer is, the fascinating thing about Sykes-Pico is an obsession. And everyone's heard of Sykes-Pi-Speaker. The reason why they've heard of it is because it represents a certain sort of imperialistic mindset where you can divide up whole regions of the world with three or four men in a room. A bit like what's happening in the world at the moment, by the way. But anyway, but the idea about Sykes-Pico was it was between the French and the British and they were dividing up the Middle East,

but they weren't just dividing it between France and Britain. The real name of Sykes-Piko is Sykes-Piko Sazanov. The other player in Sykes-Piko was Russia, and Russia was going to get even more than Britain and France. was going to get most of what is now Turkey and Constantinople. France was going to get Syria. Armenians and Russia were going to get eastern Turkey. And the British were going to share Palestine with the Russians and the French. So Sykes Speaker actually wasn't going to give Palestine to the British. It's going to give Palestine to the Russians, the British and the French.

But the interesting about Sykes-Picos, it never. happened. That's the big news about Sykes Pico, even though everyone's furious about it, what actually happened were the treaties of San Remo and Severa, and they divided up the Ottoman Empire. And by then, Russia had had a Russian revolution to Bolsheviks and seized powers. Russia was out of the game. So instead, in Turkey, the Allies gave most of Turkey to the Greeks to make a new Greek empire, sort of Basinian Empire, and they were going to give the Kurds and the Armenians eastern Turkey, and all the Turks were going to get was a little bit around Ankara.

And that was strongly resisted by Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who changed his name to Ataturk, father of Turks. He defeated all of them and created Turkish nationalism, Turkish Republic, in a brutal ethnic war in which hundreds of thousands of people were expelled and massacred and that created Turkey. And the creation of Turkey is actually very similar to the creation of Israel and the creation of India-Pakistan. The other part of those treaties was the traditional Levant, the Middle East,

where the British got Iraq and Palestine and the French got Lebanon and Syria. and that was how they divided up the Middle East. But that period only lasted 30 years, and then those countries got independence in various ways. You know, I was dying to ask you this question over the summer, so I'm going to take the liberty to ask it now. Was there an alternative map that would have made for more peace? Or is that a bunch of nonsense as well?

No. I mean, there were a million ways these maps could have worked. I mean, in World War I, everyone knows that the Arabs were promised independent states and the Jews were promised a homeland in Palestine, whatever that means. Could have meant many things, by the way. But at the same time, they made promises to the Armenians, the Kurds, the Greeks, the Italians, the Russians, as we've already discussed. The Kurds and the Armenians never got their states, partly because all the Armenians had been killed by the term. essentially. The Greeks were expelled from Anatolia completely, so they vanished, and the Kurds never got their state, and they're closer to getting it now than they ever have before. But the rest of

the map, the way it was drawn, could have been drawn in many different ways. So the French, for example, ruled Greater Syria. And they were planning then not to divide it into Syria. and Lebanon like we see today, they were planning to divide it into five or six different states. And those states were going to be one for the ala whites, one for the Druze, one for the Christians, and two for the Sunni Muslims in Aleppo and Damascus. So that would have been a five-state solution. And instead they decided to put a lot of it into a greater Lebanon, which was a sort of one-state solution in which they stuffed.

the Maronite Christians, the Druze, Sunnis and Shia. So that was, that was, that that could have, that state could have had many, many different shapes. And in fact, the creators of Greater Lebanon wanted to take the Galilee as well, which is northern Israel. At the same time, the British created Iraq. That could have gone in many different ways. It had never existed before. And, but the Turks hoped to get Mosul and the Kurds hoped to get Mosul. but neither did. It was put in Iraq.

Palestine included Jordan then. And both, in other words, the East Bank and the West Bank of the Jordan. So that could have been structured differently. And they might not have given independence to Jordan at all, in which case Palestine would be much bigger. So all of these countries, I think the key thing to understand, because people in the present environment of this obsession with the Holy Land and Israel, what they don't realize is, A, Israel is no newer than any of the other states in that

region. They're all newly invented. They all became independent after World War II. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan had never existed before. I mean, sometimes they were historic names. The word Palestina and Syria are Roman names for Roman provinces. But these states had never existed before. and they were drawn by imperial statesmen who could have drawn them very differently. Since you started this, Anthony, talking about Israel, Palestine, I think. And I think the key point of that is that it was very difficult to have two states just in the narrow land of the Holy Land, which is a tiny territory. But the more intelligent ideas always involved a Jewish entity,

and an Arab entity in a bigger state. And that is still, I believe, the most sensible way to go forward. And I think in the end, if ever this is solved, and I think one day it may be. And when I say solved, I mean resolved rather than solved completely, because it's insoluble. But many of the sensible plans, and just to point to two or three, like in 1920, for example, the early Zionists who really didn't dare dream of an actual state, their ambitions were to create small socialist farming communities, which they bought. And one large group of faction in the Zionists went to Damascus to see King Fasel, who was then King of Syria, to ask if they

could be part of his Arab kingdom. And by the way, he was very friendly to that idea. He also met with Haim Reitzman to discuss the same thing. In 1936 with the Peel plan, which was the first partition plan, there was going to be a tiny Jewish entity, but there was going to be a much larger Arab state that would join up with Jordan, the Kingdom of Jordan, and with a Palestinian Arab prime minister, that would have worked extremely well.

That would have worked better. And again, in 47, even with the completely disastrous and flawed UN plan for the partition, which was unworkable, a terrible plan from the very first. The British agreed with King Abdullah again

that he would control and govern the Arab parts of that and the British agreed, the Jews agreed and that would have been a workable solution that would have worked and the whole of the Middle East would look different

and Israel would have developed into a very different sort of country. So there are all the way through, and you'll see in the book, plans and possibilities that could have been very different and ideas that can be different in the future too.

Guys, thank you so much for listening and subscribing to Open Book. You know we've got 200 authors on this show. It's been a lot of fun for me, but I'm also an author now too. And I've got all the wrong moves available. Go to scaramucci.comnet backslash all the wrong moves. You can buy your copy today. It's a lot of fun and lots of

commentary about what's gone on in the U.S. over the last three decades. I think it's an important question to talk about London, Washington, the roles that these colonial leaders or the imperialistic side of this thing had. Because I don't necessarily think you're exonerating. Then when I read the book, I felt like you were just presenting all of the information and its fulsomeness as opposed to the standard pros. The knee-jerk reaction is, well, Sykes-Pico screwed it up. They're going to fight forever. That's not really what happened.

But tell us about Washington, and what would you say about the American responsibility for something like what took place in Iran in 1979? Well, I don't think America has responsibility for what happened in 1979. I think America has a, of course, has a role, and the Americans and the Soviets play a huge role in the Middle East. Both of them are what they call themselves anti-imperialist powers, but of course they both behave exactly like imperial powers did before them. And both the Soviets, we forget this now because we're all about. so much of the discourse is about criticizing American power and colonialism and imperialism. We forget, of course, that the communist Soviet state was appallingly bullying and arrogance and extractive.

And both powers behave pretty appallingly and clumsily in the Middle East. Both backed their own vassal states and proxies. and in both cases, it turns out that the local leaders, people like NASA in Egypt or Ben-Gurian in Israel or the Shah in Iran, or Saddam Hussein, for that matter, in Iraq, were all brilliant at playing off these two superpowers against each other and against their rivals. And that is the real story of the region. the real story of the region is brutal but often able leaders playing off the superpowers in order to promote their own importance, their own power, and to get benefits that the superpowers could give them. And so in 1970s, look, 979, you've got to understand is the key date in

modern Middle Eastern history. It's a pivotal moment. You've got to think of 1979, like we think of 1776 or 1917 or 1770s. It's one of those mega revolutions that change everything. And it changes the destiny of Iran, of course. But it also changes, it also changes, well, either the Iranians are Shias, but it also changes the Sunni Arab world too. And it unleashes and promotes a newly, a newly potent version of Islamism, which is anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Israeli, um, resistance.

resistance radicalism. And it turns out that those people are extremely incompetent at running their states, but then they kill huge numbers of people. And that works as well for them. And it's extremely miserable to live in their countries often. But the blame, blaming America for 1979 means blaming America for the Shah. And the Shah was long regarded again in leftist discourse as one of the great villains of all time. The only thing I have to say on that is this. In the entire reign of the Shah, he ruled for 41 years. Approximately 4,000 people were killed violently. In the first days of the Islamic Republic

far more than that were murdered. And as we know this year, in about three days in January, this year at 2026, the Islamic Republic killed approximately 30 to 40,000 young, often beautiful

people. And that is many, many, many multiples more than the Shah killed in his entire in 41 years. So the Shah is a fascinating character he's a big character in the book his father's a key character in the book Reza Shah

the Shah was in many ways very successful he was also vain and dogmatic and ultimately concentrated so much power in himself that he he crushed and he crushed the political life of Iran and destroyed

all the moderate oppositions that could have played a role in Iran. And when things started to go badly, he was exhausted and ill with cancer. And there was no one else that there was no kind of viable opposition that he could turn to. And the entire body politic of Iran was excluded from power and had joined the opposition that was united under Ayatollah Khomeini. I don't think, I don't know what America could really have done other than a massive intervention militarily. When you have six million people in the streets.

I learned that from you, actually. I mean, also, you know, I read Anderson's book, the King of Kings. And it was way more complicated than we obviously presented today. I got so many questions for you, Simon, but the one I want to end with before I go to the five words that I usually bring up in these podcasts is the Tanker War. because that was quite revelatory for me. Iraq hits 283 ships. Iran gets 168.

The Saudis end up building that East-West pipeline as a result of the tank of war to bypass or moves. But did Iran learn something in the 80s that it can close the straight without strangling itself? Is that something that we missed in this new war? I think there's a sense that the experts on this subject were consulted this year when they should have been. And you'll know more about that than I would.

But Iran learned a series of lessons. I mean, first of all, the people who are now in control of Iran are not a sort of completely new military regime like everybody is claiming. These guys have been at the top since the beginning. They joined the war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 80s. that you're referring to them. All these guys, generals Vahidi, generals Jafar, these are the guys who are now in power.

And as young men in their 20s, they often raised their own little brigades and took them to the front. And they've been at the top of the Iranian state ever since in the Revolutionary Guards. And they learned a series of things in this history. Okay, first of all, they learned in the Iraq war, they learned that you can have a convention,

army with lots of big tanks, lots of heavy metal fighter planes like the Iraqis had. And actually, the Iranians had it too. The Iranians didn't know how they had lost the ability to use it. And the Iraqis found that this was less helpful than they expected when faced with human waves of resistance. And so that was lesson number one. You can beat a conventional army. then they learned also that they could take control of the Straits of Wormuz,

and that was a geographical asset that Iran really controlled, and some of that was due to gains made by surprise, surprise, the Shah of Iran himself who they hated. The third lesson they learned was after 2003 and George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, and there they learned that they could really human, the greatest military power on earth that had ever existed, the United States, and they could do it with IEDs and insurgents and proxy militias, and they could withstand all the brilliant,

all the brilliant high-tech heavy pounding that America could offer. They could resist that, and they could, they would be able to withstand that. You've got to add into this two things. One is these are Shias, and Shia theology really contains a heavy strain of martyrology and an idea of an apocalyptic messianic showdown. You definitely made that clear as well. And many of them believe that. And many of them actually believe this. So they're not afraid of a big war. And so they've put all these things into practice.

But there are limits to these methods. And, you know, bombarding and bombarding the regime and expecting it to fall was a tempting idea, especially after the Venezuela's successful operation and after the very successful limited strikes on the 12-day war against nuclear sites, which Trump did, which Trump had done efficiently and effectively. So he got overconfident and thought it would just collapse. Virtually no states claps because of air bombardment. The exception is Serbia under Milosevic, when Clinton was president. But it's very unusual.

And you've got to remember in World War II, we burned whole cities. We killed 80,000 people in Tokyo. It still didn't surrender. We wiped out Dresden. We killed 40,000 people in a night in Dresden. The journalists didn't even consider surrendering. So it doesn't work. What would have been much more effective is what they're doing now,

which is an all heavily armed blockade in force, which turns the Iranian advantage and asset of the Straits of Hormuz against Iran. And that is what they are doing now. And by the way, the press is reveling. in Trump's misfortune and misjudgment and misconduct in all sorts of ways. But this could just about work. It could just about work. And by the way, at some point, maybe not tomorrow, but at some point just when we don't

expect it, Iran, the Iran revolution will come. This regime will fall sometime. And it's like Hannah Aaron said, you know, revolutions seem impossible until they happen and then they seem inevitable. Yeah, you know, listen, I think the 66% inflation, the 35% unemployment, press isn't reporting how much pain is actually happening to the 93 million people in Iran. So listen, I'm whatever I think of Trump, I would like to see the regime for fall because I think people don't, I mean, I get it.

People hate Trump, so they like him getting his ass kicked with Iran. But it's a murderous, thuggish regime. like to see it come down. The cause is good. The cause is good. Down to the five words. I'm going to say the word, you give me a word or a sentence. Okay, you ready?

I pulled these out of your book. So I'm Ottoman Empire. You think of what? I think of the greatest, multi, multinational, multi-ethnic, European and Asian empire for 400 years. It's a pretty extraordinary what you wrote about for the Ottoman Empire. Ibn Saud. Yeah.

the most successful Arab statesman of modern times. My favorite Ibn Saud story, though, is when Roosevelt goes to visit with him, and they've got to get the goats on the naval vessel, because he's got to slaughter a goat to eat a goat before he has, you know, for dinner. That's right. And if you remember what he said to Roosevelt about the Jews, he was like, no way, NFW, I do not want a Jewish state anywhere near Saudi Arabia. I don't know if you remember that, but that was a big thing that the Saudis still talk about.

Okay, Khomeini. Comini, the monstrous figure who also has to be regarded as one of the most talented revolutionary leaders of the 20th century up there with Stalin and Lenin. Yeah, but, you know, listen, a lot of miscalculations by Jimmy Carter in terms of how serious that threat actually was. Yes, but it's very difficult to get that right. You know, look at Obama with the Arab Spring. I get it. I get it. Let me tell you.

something. I'm a failed Politico, but 11 days in Washington reading intelligence briefings, you realize how hard these decisions are. Nobody has the answer, Simon. We can pretend otherwise. It's not a Hollywood script. Okay, let's go to the word peace. I say the word peace. You say what? I say it's possible. Okay. And what about the Middle East? The Middle East is now an obsolete term. We need a much different term to express what is happening today, which is a multiplayer competition tournament of power and the convergence of many different theatres, including South Asia, India, Pakistan, Russia, Ukraine, Sahel, the Horn of Africa, all of these areas, South Europe, Greece and Turkey. So what we're seeing now is a widening of the Middle East and we need a new expression for it.

You know, Simon, I wish Professor Ben Lewis was alive so I could send him a copy of your book. You remember him? Yeah. You mean Bernard Lewis? Bernard Lewis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, you know, he's one of the great. He's one of the greats.

Yeah. I mean, I think he would have really enjoyed this book. Anyway, the title of the book is The Caldron, bestseller, the making of the modern Middle East. Simon Sabang Montefiore. Thank you so much for joining us, and I look forward to seeing you soon. Lovely, thanks. I've really enjoyed this, Anthony. Thank you.