Dan Senor
speaker
4,588 appearances
37 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard today
Dan Senor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 37 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 14.
Appearances
In between are the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the creation of modern Turkey and the Arab states, the birth of Israel, the Cold War.
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Nasser and Pan Arabism, the Shah and the Iranian Revolution, the rise of Islamism, the American era in the region, the emergence of Erdogan and Mohammed bin Salman, the long reign of Benjamin Netanyahu, october seventh, the Gaza War, and the wars with Iran.
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And one of its central ideas is that we give outsiders far too much credit for making the region, and the people who actually live there far too little agency.
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The Middle East was not simply acted upon, it was shaped by Ottoman sultans and Saudi kings, Arab nationalists and Iranian revolutionaries, Zionists and Islamists, generals and monarchs, tribes and religious movements all competing for power, territory, survival, and legitimacy.
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And many of the forces we tend to think of as modern may actually be much older.
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Empires never really disappeared.
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Great powers often discovered that their supposed clients had agendas of their own.
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and the European style nation states may have been an awkward fit for a region whose societies were historically far more mixed, ethnically, religiously, and politically than the borders suggested.
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Today, Simon argues, the story may be turning again.
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Iran, Turkey, and Israel have become the region's leading military powers.
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Saudi Arabia has replaced Egypt as the dominant Sunni Arab state.
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Similar, smaller Gulf monarchies project power thousands of miles beyond their borders.
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In conflicts once neatly separated into the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Europe.
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Are beginning to collide.
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So perhaps the question isn't simply who made the modern Middle East.
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Perhaps it is whether the Middle East we have known for the last hundred years is now coming to an end.
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I can think of few books more important to read since October 7th, 2023, than Simon's new book, The Cauldron.
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He is a prolific writer.
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His biography of Joseph Stalin and his history of Jerusalem are among my favorite history books.
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And now so is his latest book, The Cauldron.
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Showing 1281–1300 of 4,588 · page 65 of 230
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