Simon Sebag Montefiore
speaker
146 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thank you so much. It's... It's great to be here and great to see you.
We last saw each other on election day.
And we called it right.
I think that the significance of it was a crisis of confidence in the Western liberal democracies in themselves, and a crisis partly caused by an incredibly complex world crisis, many new powers rising, but also a crisis within the societies of the Western liberal democracies, which had been models of confidence in themselves since 1945.
In 1945, the victory of liberal democracies, the defeat of a totalitarian challenge sold the idea of Western capitalist democracy around the world And even new countries that were in fact dictatorships felt they had to look like democracies. They all had presidencies and legislatures and everything. They were just copying America because America was the model of victory. And for systems to win...
in the world, they have to win wars. They have to be willing to win. And that's the crisis we've really seen in the last 25 years in the United States most significantly, but also in Britain, where I come from, and in Europe.
And that is the orthodoxy that was really personified by the disasters of the Obama-Biden administration, often with the best intentions, often with the best values, but a constant self-doubting about America's place in the world, America's mission. So that is, I think, the deeper significance of the election of Trump.
Well, I think what we're coming out of is an extraordinary period. You know, we're coming out of what I would call, depending on how you calculate it, the 70-year peace or the 75-year peace. But in 1945, there was such a shock that all sorts of things became clear. All sorts of taboos were established. For example, you know, we're talking in a synagogue here, the taboo of anti-Semitism itself.
but also it became self-evident that Western liberal democracy was the right, the freest, the most open society in which to live. And the values that that engendered brought us Great advances in world affairs, the rules-based world order, supranational organization, United Nations, the idea of world human rights.
And then in the 60s, what I call the great liberal reformation of gay rights, abortion, the pill, all this sort of thing. none of that was challenged by anyone for a very long time. So America could go about its mission of selling those ideas to the world. And then, of course, the Soviet Union fell. But it's interesting to realise that there'd never been a period like this in world history.
This wasn't normal. Normally, everybody's against everybody. Most world history is about a multiplayer game. But that was a game of chess between two great players, Soviet Union and United States. When that ended, America lost its way, and America was the unipower.
And for whatever reasons, some of them understandable, some of them preposterous, America squandered that moment, partly with the disaster of the Iraq War. And out of that has come a reordering, a return to normalcy, in which it's ever more important that our society, especially liberal democracies, keep their solidarity, their coherence.
And it's at this very moment that we're actually eating ourselves in an act of self-mutilation. I mean, there's become a challenge from within society itself.
the entitlements and the entitlements that people believe are owed to them by their societies, some of them financial in the comfort democracies of Europe, like Britain, Canada, and some of them the result of law itself, out of human rights law. But all of these things have created loyalties that are greater than to the state.
And as Rousseau said, you know, if someone says, like, what does the state mean to me? The state is lost. And JFK quoted that as well because it's a quote that makes you realize the stakes at the moment are very high. So many things became unsayable and so many things lack sense that it's very easy for populists from right and left to claim that they can solve these problems.
But the point is that one of my great heroes, the historian Ibn Khaldun, the Arab historian from the 14th century, he said many fascinating things. But one of the things he said, like, he said, states don't fall from military defeats. They usually fall because of psychology. And that's worth thinking about.
a crisis of self-confidence, a crisis in which people have forgotten that the freedoms and values that they hold were fought for. And the wars are pretty unpleasant things, but those fights were worth joining. And that is the crisis today. I mean, if you look at our nation, we kind of generally agree that nation states are the best way to organize countries and empires aren't a good thing.
But of course, nation states are very flawed things. They exclude people.
They have borders. And if you're not in the nation, however that nation is defined, that can be an uncomfortable situation. So there are flaws from nation states. But I just wonder, you know, the young people that went off to fight for democracies in World War II, for example, how many of the present young generation would fight for their nation now?
And yet those nations can represent the highest ideas and values. I'm kind of old-fashioned, but I believe that America represents the highest values of freedom. I believe in that stuff.
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