Speaker 1Welcome back to the Iran Breakdown. I'm your host, Mark Dubowitz. My guest today is Simon Sabag Montefiore, one of the world's most celebrated historians and historical storytellers. Simon is a historian of Russia and the Middle East, whose books have been published in more than 40 languages. He received his PhD from Cambridge and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His acclaimed books include Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar, Young Stalin, Jerusalem, The Biography, The Romanovs, and The World, A Family History of Humanity. His work has won the British Book Awards, History Book of the Year, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, and the Costa Biography Award. His new book is The Cauldron, The Making of the Modern Middle East. It's a sweeping history of the region from 1900 to the present, from Morocco to Iran, told through Shahs. It's a story of the revolutionaries, soldiers, poets, terrorists, and peacemakers who made the modern Middle East. And Iran is not a side story in the cauldron. It's one of the central stories, from the Qajar and Pahlavi Shahs, through coups and revolution, to Khamenei, Khamenei, and Islamic Republic. That makes Simon an especially important person to speak with at this moment, because one of the questions hanging over today's war is where should we actually begin the clock? For Israel, one obvious starting point for the current regional war is October 7th, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, followed by war in Gaza and the opening of additional fronts involving Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iranian-backed militias, and eventually Iran itself. In June 2025, Iran and Israel moved into sustained direct warfare, and the United States then struck Iran's most important nuclear facilities. But there's an even longer historical frame, the confrontation between the Islamic Republic, the United States, and Israel that reaches back to the revolution of 1979, to the seizure of the American embassy, the rupture of Washington, the new regime's hostility to wars in Israel, and the revolutionary project that followed. So perhaps this is a war that began in 2023, or perhaps it became a direct Iran-Israel-U.S. war in 2025, or perhaps we're watching the latest and most violent phase of a conflict whose origins go back nearly half a century. And that's exactly why I wanted Simon here. Simon, welcome to the Iran Breakdown. Great to be with you. That was a hell of an introduction. Thank you. Well, well-deserved, Simon. Really, an extraordinary book, extraordinary life work, and it's great to have you on the Iran Breakdown. I know you've done a lot of podcasts, spoken about your book in many venues, but I want to zero in on the question of Iran. But before we do that, let's begin with the title. You call this, Extraordinary History, The Cauldron. What is the cauldron? What are the forces, empire, religion, nationalism, ethnicity, ideology, foreign invention, that keep colliding in this region? And why, in your telling, is Iran so central to the making of the modern Middle East?
Speaker 2Well, well, the cauldron, I came up with the cauldron just off the cuff when we were talking about this with my publishers, Knopp, for the first time in New York, just about two years ago. And the idea of the cauldron is that Iran is a country that is a country that is a country that is a good one because, in one sense, the cauldron is a bubbling, menacing, venomous, witch's brew of dark and noxious poisons and evil substances. On the other hand, the cauldron can be a a, you know, a bowl of beautiful, of beautiful ingredients, you know, enriched, enriched and nourishing and inspiring and delicious. And that is exactly what this book is about. It's about, it's about the Middle East, a broad, a very broad definition of the Middle East, really from Iran all the way to Morocco, from, from Turkey, via the Levant, down to Sudan and Yemen. And, and it's now 19 countries, more or less. Depending what happens, in Sudan and Yemen, among other places. But the concept is just to write a history that puts everything in its place, that in as balanced a way as is possible, tells a story really without ideology and without a preset rigid framework to place everything in. So of course, this is neither a capitalist history, nor an imperialist history, nor an Islamist history, nor a Marxist-Leninist history, nor a decolonialist history, nor a Zionist history. It's just as close as I could get to the story, though all of those isms, of course, explained it, as you suggest, Pan-Arabism, Ba'athism, and many others. And it's also written to be read by people who aren't experts on this and who may never have read another book on the Middle East. It's also meant to be enjoyed. It's meant to be entertaining, and you can read it as an epic sweeping saga of, as you put it, empires and shahs, and ayatollahs, and presidents. America's a big part of the story as well, of course, as is Russia, as is Britain and France and Greece and other countries. So that's the idea of a cauldron. It's a metaphor that works positively and negatively. And I think it always depends which bit you're reading. And the book is full of words. War and massacres and fanaticism, but it's also full of poetry and food and singers and has novelists in it as well as killers. So, you know, the cauldron, the making of the modern Middle East is just a way of looking at the region. And of course, the whole point of it is, it's not just the Arab world. It's also the Turkish world, the Hebrew world, the Persian world as well. And that brings us to your subject. I mean, when I was writing this, I was looking for books that covered this. And there are lots of books on the Arabs. There are lots of books on the Jews. There are two brilliant books on both those, one by Eugene Rogan, one by Simon Sharma. And of course, there are lots of individual books about different countries, Iran or, Syria or Morocco or whatever, Israel. And of course, there is a huge industry of books on Israel-Palestine. And the most recent efflorescence of that has been Gaza-ology, just endless books on Gaza itself, which now has its own ology. It's Gaza-ology as a sort of new sort of literature, a sort of strange, moral literature about Gaza. And so anyway, I looked around for a book that included everything, including Iran, and I couldn't find it. And as Benjamin Disraeli said, when I want to read a book and I can't find it, I write it myself. So I wrote this. And yes, Iran is absolutely central to it. Iran is one of the main players in this, as it has to be.
Speaker 1So let's talk about Iran and kind of one of the great turning points, is 1979. And Simon, how did an elderly cleric in exile in France manage to overthrow one of the most powerful monarchies in the region? And what did the Shah and Washington and Khomeini's secular Iranian opponents really fail to understand about this man, both as a religious figure and as a political operator?
Speaker 2I think the tragedy of the Shah was that um, when it comes down to it, the over-centralization, the, you know, the, the intensive, the intensifying autocracy is, is so often a very bad idea. It's such a temptation, but it's such a bad idea because ultimately it puts immense pressure and, and blame on one person. And if things are going well, that's great. They get a, they, you know, they get kudos, they have prestige and popularity, but as soon as things start to go wrong, decisions. Everyone, you know, everything in Iran was organized by the Shah so that no one had the initiative except him. And that was great when he was young and doing bold things like the white revolution, which had some success and some failure. But, you know, when he's been in power for decades, he lost his political awareness. And though he was incredibly effective in foreign policy right till almost the end, within Iran, he was in part a victim of his own success in terms of his agricultural and land reforms, which led to an enormous number of people, millions of peasants moving to the cities where they found them. you know, where they found, um, you know, you know, appalling mismanagement really. And so gradually, um, he also became more, more unwisely vain, if you like, um, the famous party, um, to celebrate 2,500 years of Iranian Persian empire, for example, was in a massive, um, tone deaf mistake, but there were others too. And, um, so gradually we've no ability, we've no access to any ability to, to perform as a legal opposition. Gradually, everyone looked outside the, you know, the, the officials are the shah's official system. And that was a great opportunity for, for Ayatollah Khomeini, who'd been, who'd, who was a cleric who'd had an incredibly long career. Um, he was sitting in the parliament in the matchless in, in 1925 or 24 when, um, when they voted to bring in a new, to create a new monarchy under the, under the shah's father. So, you know, this, this guy had been around, he was a very young man there, but he'd been around for a long time. And, um, he, you know, he'd, he'd resisted the shah's white revolution in 63 and in the end been sent to exile in, in, in Iraq. And right before the revolution, Saddam Hussein rang the shah, rang the shah and offered to kill Khomeini. And, um, he even sent his half brother, uh, who was head of his secret police to, to Tehran to offer again. And the shah must have regretted that decision. But anyway, uh, the French took him in. And by this point, um, Khomeini had perfected, uh, a sort of moral criticism of the monarchy, but, but one which really avoided revealing any actual political program, even though nine years earlier, he'd published, um, an ideological work, ideological theological work, which proposed that, um, an Islamic scholar should govern Iran as a sort of, as a sort of sacred monarch, um, in the absence of the, of the sacred Mahdi who, who had disappeared or been occulted for a thousand years. And no one really took this seriously. And even his closest, his closest allies wondered if this was even a serious idea, because of course that scholar would have to be Khomeini himself. And once he appeared on the world stage, um, while sending back, um, eloquent and damning cassette recordings of his speeches and sermons, um, in terms of international affairs, and that the Americans, I guess, mainly. He was incredibly subtle. And he really put into practice General de Gaulle's comment that the best art of politics is silence. And this enabled him to hold together a coalition of really virtually all of Iranian society, except the most devoted of the shahs, the shahs' backers and followers of the regime. And this included everyone from, obviously, Khomeini's kind of devoted, devout Islamists, Islamist radicals, but then it included Islamist Marxists. They actually existed. You know, moderate Islamists who probably would have liked to have a sort of democracy with an Islamist flavor. All the way through to really kind of democratic liberals like us. And all of these people believed that because he hadn't said exactly what he wanted, that he would deliver what they wanted. And the Americans were also guilty of this. There were secret negotiations with the Americans while Khomeini was staying in a village outside Paris, right? He had made his headquarters. And he gave them the feeling that, you know, there would be no, the Americanism, anti-Americanism was merely a vibe. And that he would still sell oil to America. The only thing he wouldn't do is sell oil to Israel, which the shah had done, of course. But otherwise, he implied that the regime would not be that radical. But what he asked for in return was a guarantee that the regime would not be that radical. And he said, you know, that the army wouldn't prevent his taking power. And the Americans, you know, were in close contact with the army. And they gave that guarantee. And sure enough, when he went back, after some initial clashes, the army retired to their barracks and has never come out again since, effectively. But his genius was just, was opportunistic, but also private. his absolute rigid and focused devotion to creating a new sort of country, a new sort of political entity. And he was helped in this by ethnic rebellions around Iran by Kurds and Arabs and others, which allowed him to rally the sort of national card. While at the same time, he really presented himself as an Islamist ruler, not just a Persian nationalist, an Iranian nationalist. And at the same time, the Saddam invasion worked extremely well for the regime. It almost destroyed the regime. But once they'd survived the initial attack from Saddam, it really rallied the regime in a kind of cult of martyrdom and passionate. Passionate Islamism. And young people rushed to join the army and to offer their lives. There was the famous cemetery with the red fountains of blood. And the young men, among the young men who joined in the early 80s in that war, were the generals who rule Iran now.
Speaker 1Simon, let's talk a little bit about, again, about Khomeini. And 79. I mean, is it ultimately such a central part of your book because it's really more than about Iran? Is it about a model of revolutionary power that changed political Islam and the entire trajectory of the Middle East? Is it fair to say that it was that seminal and that consequential?
Speaker 2I believe it was. You know, the fun thing about writing, you know, this sort of book is that, you know, perspective, perspective, the stepping back a little bit and looking at a longer period and a wider panorama gives you perspective that you don't have if you're just focusing on, you know, Iran today or, you know, Israel in a certain period or, you know, or just or Egypt under NASA, for example. And when you step back and look at this, this period and, and I, you know, I, I kind of enjoy this. I quite enjoy the luxury of doing this. And that's the book I wrote before this was, was a history of the whole world, which again enabled you to sort of see things more clearly. And, and so, you know, when I, when I was writing this, I sort of realized that 1979 is such an important, is such an important year. And, you know, in terms of the Middle East, the book starts in 1900 and goes right till this year. Um, but it, you know, you know, people normally think of the fall of the Ottoman Empire as the key date. Um, and that was a very important moment. Um, but this is, this is, this is, this 1979, the Islamic revolution of Iran is important, um, for exactly the reasons that you suggest that, you know, this is, this is much more than just an Iranian revolution. Um, you know, Iran is, is, you know, probably one of the most important countries in the region. Um, and it's got more and more important, um, you know, during, during the period of this book and more and more, um, more and more possessing the ability to, to destabilize the whole region. And anyone's got to look at 1979. And when you read the book and you look at the history, it's clear that 1979 really belongs up there with the great revolutions of, of world history. You know, uh, 1776, 1789, the French revolution, 1917, the Russian revolution, and so on. It's right up there. And the reason is because not only did it, um, turn Iran on its head and in launch a completely new era, 47 years ago, um, but Khamenei's, um, credibly shrewd, um, direction of, of the revolution. And by the way, you know, Kamenei, the success, Ali Kamenei, his successor, you know, also was, um, though not so much the revolutionary statesman that Khamenei was, but the revolutionary statesman that Khamenei was, um, the revolutionary statesman that Khamenei was. With the authority that Khamenei had, but over time, he also gained great authority and, and, um, was a sort of cunning, was a cunning director of the different factions under the regime in the end, backing the more extreme of that. But, you know, the clever thing that they did was to identify that this could be more than just an Iranian revolution. And as I said at the beginning, they deliberately eschewed Iranian nationalism, presenting themselves as Islamists first and foremost, and despising pre-Islamic history where some of the great rulers of Iran had built great empires like the Aqmanids and the Sassanids. Who was Oroastrians and were pre-Islamic. But they understood that they needed to appeal to a wider audience, to a wider constituency. And by identifying anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, Jerusalem itself, the mission to retake the holy city of Jerusalem, they were able to tap into a much wider Arab Sunni community. And they realized that this Islamism, which is a kind of new ideology, really, it always presents itself as a sort of, oh, you know, we're going back. It's a revival, a revivalist concept returning to the 7th century or the early periods of Islamic purity. But actually, the modern version as practiced. As practiced by the Iranians and their vassals and proxies. It's really a new concept with aspects of, encompasses some nationalism, some fascism from Europe, from the West, and of course, some parts of traditional Islamic theology. But putting it all together. It's really a unique concept. And it really appealed to Arab radicals who'd been disappointed by pan-Arabism and who wanted to, you know, were radicals but needed a new framework. And this Islamism served almost like pan-Arabism in the sense that it had no borders. And it offered a. A fresh version of the ideology, but with Islamism providing a broad, borderless, a broad, borderless ideology that applied to the whole region. And in that way, it worked extremely well. But for it really to go into effect, they needed 2003 or, you know, they needed 9-11 and the Iraq war to happen.
Speaker 1So that. Brings me to the war we're living through now, Simon. Because as I said in the introduction, I think it, it, the starting date matters enormously. You know, do you date this from October 7th, 2023? Do you date this from June 2025, when Israel and Iran entered a sustained direct confrontation and the United States struck Iran's nuclear facilities? Or do you date it from the Islamic revolution of 1979? And as an historian. When do you start the clock? Because I think choosing the wrong starting point will often cause us to misunderstand the current war itself.
Speaker 2I think you've got to start it in 1979. And that's what I argue in the book. But for it to really, for Iran to really be able to threaten Israel, something else had to happen. And that's why I mentioned 2003. Because whatever you think about George W. Bush's Iraq war. The Iraq war of 2003, those arguments are still going on about, you know, in all sorts of, in all sorts of directions. But based, in effect, from my point of view, it knocked out Iraq out of the, out of the, the, the, the game of the tournament of power in the region. It just, you know, the insurgency and the, and the overthrow of Saddam meant that Iraq ceased to be a player. I mean, before 2003, even after 99, after even after 91, even after the first Gulf War, you know, Saddam and Iraq still had the power to, to block and, and alarm the Iranians. And of course, you know, since independence, since the independence of Iraq, and we need to talk about Iraq here, since the independence of Iraq from the British mandate period, when it became. a Hashemite kingdom, and then various military coups after 1958, and then the Ba'athists, and then the emergence of Saddam Hussein as its dictator. You know, this was a major Arab power, you know, one of the major Arab powers up there with Egypt, really. And, you know, it had the power to hold back and block Iranian ambitions, you know, towards the Levant, towards, towards. the fulcrum of the sort of traditional Middle East. And you've got to remember, when you look back at history, I mean, Iran had many times had great influence in that region. You know, you can, first of all, you can, you know, you can go back to the, to the Aqmanids, Cyrus the Great, and Darius the Great, you know, Darius the Great. You can go back to the Sasanians, who shortly before the rise of Muhammad, had conquered the entire Middle East, all of, all of it, including Egypt and Jerusalem. And most of Turkey, before their own downfall and conquest by the Arab Muslims. But, but, and, and from then until now, the Iranians had never had, had never had the power to, to reach that region. And that really changed when you knocked out Iraq out of the, out of the structure. Suddenly, there's like this free corridor with no great power to stop the Iranians. Between the Gulf and the Mediterranean. And so after 2003, this was the condition to reach the period that we're in now. Taking out, for better or for worse, this is one of those, of course, this is one of those unforeseen circumstances, consequences, rather, of, of, of a war. But the moment 2003 happened, the, the Americans were limited to trying to control the insurgency. And, and suddenly the Iranians were able to project this, what I call the informal empire. King Abdullah II of Jordan called it the Shia Crescent. But, you know, basically they, they managed to set up all these militias that really controlled the state in, in Iraq. They were able to, they, they backed prime ministers like Maliki, who were very close to, who were very close to Iran. And the Americans weren't able to do much. About it. They were so keen to get out. Um, and, and of course the Shias in Iraq became the dominant community, um, in that state too. And of course they were, they had special links to Iran, obviously. And then they had a long alliance with Syria, uh, with the Alawite Baathist, um, dictate dictatorship of the, of the, of, of, of the Assads. And that was based on your enemy, you know, your enemy's enemy, et cetera, et cetera. And so that was a long alliance because the Baathists of Iraq and Syria hated each other and were, were, were close to war at various times. Um, but they've managed to build on that relationship even more deeply. And then of course they, you know, Hezbollah had been founded in 1980, in the, in, in, in the early eighties, uh, not to resist Israel, but to actually promote, um, Lebanon becoming or joining the Islamic Republic. Um, and it was only when the Israelis invaded and, and the Israelis stayed in, um, in South Lebanon that this, it was, that they, that they also encompassed an anti-Israeli war, jihad against Israel, um, as part of, as, as, as, as a ruling, as a ruling mission of, of Hezbollah. So this took them right up to the Mediterranean and then, and then of course they had. Palestinian Islamic jihad and, and Hamas in Gaza as well, who were Sunnis, but, um, whose Islamism fitted very well with Iranian Islamism. And so 2003 was essential because of essentially after, until 2003, the Iranians really were a long way from Israel. And after 2003, they were increasingly on Israel's border. And once that happened, this war was inevitable.
Speaker 1I believe. So Khamenei builds this, this Islamist regional order. Khamenei extends it. Um, certainly Qasem Soleimani plays a critical role operationally and, and militarily in doing that. Um, since the war started, it's this ring of fire in some respects has been doused. Um, a number of these terror proxy armies have been degraded. And it gets me, Simon, to the next question about this war. And I want to ask the question I think everybody asks. but you can answer it in historical terms rather than in scoreboard terms, who is gaining, who is losing, you know, what does Israel need to achieve for this war to have been strategically successful? What does the United States need to achieve? And what does the Islamic Republic need to preserve in order to claim that it has survived and prevailed? And so, you know, measured against those objectives, what each side has gained, what each side has lost, what is your assessment so far in the Iran war?
Speaker 2Well, you discuss this all the time on this podcast and in your think tank. And, you know, it's a very, very difficult judgment to make because of the immense complexity and speed of the world today and the interconnected nature of this region. And the way that, you know, this is no longer just Middle Eastern, but there's been, you know, as I argued at the end of the book, there's been this convergence of theaters, which means that, you know, it's not just about Iran. I mean, China, Russia, you know, India and Pakistan, everybody is now involved in this in some way. So it is much more complicated. But the bottom line is for America is, you know, A, there can be no nuclear program in the future. And if it comes out with that, that would be successful. But obviously, the second front is what we called in the 80s war, the tanker war, but, you know, the war for control of the Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz. That's really about a blockade. And, you know, I would argue that, you know, the American administration would have done better to start with an armed blockade of Iran, because, you know, it's a blockade. And, you know, it's a blockade. And, you know, that is the way that you turn their chief asset, Straits of Hormuz, into a liability for the Iranian regime. And that is what they're now trying to do with surprising discipline. And even though no one would call President Trump a shrinking violet, he has nonetheless been been increasingly focused on this. And, and on basically strangling the Iranian economy. You know, revolutions, when you look at revolutions, they happen when, you know, they need various things to happen. And one of them is that, you know, the guy in a small, in a sort of middling Iranian city, who works for the government, who's earning a salary, who's got children and a family, he's not going to really join the, he may hate the regime, but he's not really going to join any revolution. And, you know, he's not going to join the regime. And, you know, he's not going to join the revolution. And, you know, he's not going to while he's still earning that salary. It's a sort of simple example, but there comes a moment in, there comes a moment when, when the government can no longer pay that, that salary. And when that happens, you know, people of the, of the middling sort, let's say, can join a revolution or will join a revolution. And of course, that's what needs to happen. And that's what they're trying to do. They're stopping the Iranians sell their oil, or even put their, their oil to sea. And hopefully they're blocking the Northern exits as well, which are road, which are essentially road links. And, and if they succeed, then they will force the, they will force the regime to, to negotiate A and B, they may bring down the regime because if they, if the regime, when the shooting stops, the regime loses a lot of its advantages in terms of its image as a radical warrior regime that, that fits very well into, into Shiite theology, that the Mardius apocalyptic scenario that some of these top people believe in, we don't know how many, but the moment that the moment, the sort of the big shooting stops, you know, the regime then has to start trying to govern the country. And it's done that extremely badly. And it's going to, it's going to look very, very bad. Once they get back to trying to run it. The problem is that after the death of, after the assassination of the Supreme Leader, who's ruled for 37 years, it's very hard for any leader to reestablish, to establish themselves with the credibility to negotiate at all. And we're really, this is a bit like the death of Stalin, you know, or the death of Mao, except in China with the death of Mao, you had Deng Xiaoping, who was the first person to die. Who was this massive figure respected by all, who, who, who kind of, who relatively easily assumed the leadership. But after the death of Stalin, no one ever replaced Stalin and, or not for a long time. And that's the, that's the situation we're in with Iran. So, so, I mean, the blockade could ultimately bring down the regime. And as for Israel, you know, Israel ideally wants to see them, you know, the fall of the regime, because the regime is always going to be a threat. But if it agreed to give up its nuclear weapons or put it on, put it, if there was some sort of deal that completely, that effectively limited it, then that would be a success and allow Israel to finish off the rest of the proxies. And, but, but I think there is a sort of big challenge in Israeli strategy here, because, I mean, of course, Israel with its wonderful and spectacular air force and security services can assassinate the leaders of these organizations. In Gaza, it can assassinate virtually every single one of the, of the, the, the terrorists who invaded on October the 7th. They've, apparently they've, they've killed, they announced that today, I think they've killed 4,000 of the 6,000 who invaded, which, which, which, you know, is, is, is the work of intelligence gathering, among other things. But it's also true, and this is a kind of, this may sound like a kind of blip thing to say, but, you know, a state can't assassinate everybody. It can't assassinate all its enemies, and enemies are replaced. And the assassination, the assassination policy, I think, I mean, I think, you know, does it work? Has it worked? Ultimately, you know, Israel needs to, needs to build relations with the states around it. And by the way, the Iranian attacks on the Gulf powers, on the Arab moderate powers, it worked at first. Now it's becoming counterproductive and is actually helping the Americans. If you speak to the leaderships of the boutique powers of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, they are all desperate for America to be there. Doesn't mean they trust America. Doesn't mean they trust president Trump. I think they're utterly realistic about the inconsistent, the traditional inconsistencies of America over, over decades. But, but if you speak to them, they all say like, we just want America to finish them, finish this off now. And we want American protection and we want America there. Which is very different from what everyone was saying a few months ago. And secondly, they're all talking to Israel now. According to, according to people I've spoken to in the intelligence communities, apparently they are all in contact with Israel. So Israel has become this, you know, the hated, but indispensable power of the region. And, and ultimately this may, this may, this, this may sort of develop into something much deeper. And of course the challenge for Israel is like, how do you turn these successes into something, into something more stable? How can Israel cash in on these victories to build a more stable position in the Middle East where, where Israel belongs? And the massive economic and cultural benefits are waiting for Israel. To take, but to do that, the Israel needs a government that actually wants to, to develop these relationships. And that isn't the case now. Um, or at least, you know, with the, if there are people in the government that want to do this, there are others, Ben-Gavir and co who have, who have an effect, a, a veto. And that is a big problem. And it could be solved by the election at the end of this month, which is going to be fascinating. Um, Eisencott may form a government. Um, Netanyahu may form a different sort of government. I mean, predicting Israeli politics is, um, is, is almost, is almost impossible, isn't it?
Speaker 1Well, I'm going to ask you for some predictions as well, maybe not in Israeli politics, but let's get back to the Islamic Republic. So let's imagine without predicting when, or how, that the Islamic Republic eventually disappears. I guess the question Simon is what disappears with it? Would, would a post Islamic Republic Iran? necessarily abandon these regional ambitions that we associate with Tehran today, or other Iranian interests, influence in Iraq, security in the Gulf, concern about surrounding powers, desire to be treated as a major regional state? In other words, are these products of geography and history rather than Khomeiniism? Is it inevitable that Iran as a great power will be not just an influential power in the Middle East, but a problematic power? Well, the last
Speaker 2time Iran was a great regional power before the Shah was a pretty long time. It was really the 1790s. And before then, there'd been like 40, 50 years of crazy civil war after the assassination of Nadir Shah. In the mid-18th century. And Nadir Shah, who was an extraordinary character, sort of self-made monarch, self-made Shah, who sort of created this amazingly powerful tribal Persian empire. I mean, you know, he ranged far and wide, westwards into Iraq and the Caucasus, eastwards, he took, you know, he took northern India, he took Delhi. And southwards, he controlled Oman and Bahrain and the Gulf. So, the history of Iranian power is strong. If you go back even further to 1500, you know, the founder of the Safavid Shia dynasty, Ismail. I mean, you know. I mean, you know, the founder of the Safavid Shia dynasty, Ismail. So, again, Iran bid to be the Islamic power of the Middle East, challenging the Ottomans. And they lost that fight and were confined, basically, to Iran. But the point is, the answer is history. History means that, you know, Iran is always going to be a major state with major regional ambitions. Southwards into the Gulf. And eastwards into Iraq. Which, you know, if you look at the history of the Ottoman and Safavid empires, you'll see that, you know, Iraq didn't exist. Iraq was divided up between them. Baghdad changed hands many, many times in many, many wars. But that's if Iran survives this process as a state and doesn't collapse. I mean, as you know, and you'll have discussed many times on this. On this show, you know, some calculate that 50% of Iranians are members of non-Persian, non-Iranian minorities, Kurds and Arabs and what have you. And, you know, Iran could disintegrate. And that has happened before very recently. We often forget very recent history. You know, after the. After the. After the Constitution. After the Constitutional Revolution in the early years of the 20th century, Russia and Britain intervened and the state really disintegrated. In World War I, the Ottomans, the Russians, the British were all fighting within Iran, which had ceased to function as a state completely. And out of that, the Pahlavi, the first Pahlavi Shah, the father of the Shah, Reza Shah, took power. In 1925 and created a new monarchy and a new dynasty. In World War II, so very recently really, in 1941, Reza Shah made a massive miscalculation trying to maintain neutrality between the allies and Hitler. And Churchill and Stalin just agreed that this was out of the question. They couldn't take the risk of losing Iran. So they literally partitioned Iran and occupied it, which is why in 1943, the first big free conference took place in Tehran. You know, people sometimes go, why was it in Tehran? Well, it was. They controlled Tehran at that point. And after the war in 1945, 46, Stalin tried to keep the Azeri, the sort of Iranian Azerbaijan. And he created a Kurdish state and an Azerbaijan state. Which he hoped would allow him to keep control of Iran itself and Iran's oil. Well, that didn't happen because the Cold War started and the Shah rebuilt it. But it's just worth remembering that, you know, yes, Iran is. There's always going to be an Iran. Iran is always going to have interests, broad regional ambitions and interests because of history, because of its scale, because of its mass, because of its. Because of its geography. But a bad option is that the country just disintegrates. And that creates refugees. It creates civil war. And that would be a disastrous sequel to all this. That the regime fell and then there was total disintegration of the state. That would be a disaster for everybody. Though. Though I guess for Israel, it would be unable to threaten Israel. But ultimately, it would destabilize the region in all sorts of ways that I think would work for nobody. So I think those are the possibilities.
Speaker 1Okay, Simon. So going to a closing question here. So you've written about Shahs and Ayatollahs, revolutions, coups, empires that have vanished and regimes that everybody assumed would endure. When you look at Iran and the Middle East today, are we witnessing another violent turn inside the cauldron? Or is something historically larger taking place? Is it really the end of this revolutionary cycle that began with Khamenei in 1979? And what would have to happen for you as an historian to really to know the difference?
Speaker 2Well, that's a very good question. One's always tempted to quote Joe and lie at points like this. It's too early to tell. But, you know, the regime could endure for a long time. As, you know, as a damaged, demiserated regime. I mean, the fact is, in history, it's very unusual for people power to bring down dictatorships unless support disintegrates in their huge security organs. And, you know, the whole point in January is that that didn't happen. And, you know, though there were all these. These young people on the streets saying down with the dictatorship, you know, long live the Shah. Some of them were shouting. The fact is, when it came down to it, the regime had the loyal had the loyal my madons of the of the Basij and the Revolutionary Guards and all sorts of militias to call on. And it looks like they they didn't really hesitate to to do what was necessary to to massacre these people. And when you've got. That sort of devotion, it's actually pretty hard to bring down a regime. You've you've got a contrast with the Soviet Union. Well, first of all, the Soviet Union lasted 70 years. But secondly, by the end of it, no one believed in this. No one believed in in communism, even the leaders, really. And that is very different from Iran, where, you know, depending how you calculate it, no one knows. But it's 10 to 20 percent of the population is still is. Still devoted to the to the to the mission, as far as we know. And that includes all the security forces. So on one hand, this could go on for a long time. On the other hand, for reasons that we've discussed in this hour, you know, you could you could see the whole thing collapse. But but I wouldn't count on it. You know, I think the ability to the ability for regimes to last longer than you think is is, you know, is surprising. And. You know, and I think I think that's the challenge now is just to see is just to see how damaged the regime really is internally after the war, after the big shooting, after the big gun stop.
Speaker 1Simon Sabag Montefiore, your new book is The Cauldron, The Making of the Modern Middle East. Thank you so much for being on the Iran breakdown. We're grateful for your time and we'd love to have you back on as as the cauldron turns and Iran centrality to. To the Middle East and its development remains. I'd love to come back. And thank you so much for having me. Nice to meet you finally. Such a pleasure. Thank you, Simon. So that's it for today's episode of the Iran breakdown. If you want to better understand what's really happening with the Islamic Republic, please subscribe. Rate us five stars and share this with people who need to hear it. If it's your first time here, go back to episode one. That's where we began laying the groundwork in an episode with Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. You can find me on X. And Instagram at M Dubowitz or M-D-U-B-O-W-I-T-Z. I'm Mark Dubois. Thanks for listening and look forward to breaking it down again with you next time.
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