Having avoided it for as long as possible, Aimen & Thomas finally turn their attention to the state of Israel: its backstory, its modern re-emergence, and its impact on the civilizational fault lines crisscrossing the Middle East. In the present day, Arab statesmen have never been closer to their Israeli counterparts, both sides united around a shared enemy: Iran. This marks a dramatic sea change from the past, and to help explain it, as so often this season, this episode reaches back into the Bronze Age, establishing the mishmash of peoples who have long called the Holy Land home, before returning to the pivotal late-Ottoman period, as Jewish migration to that corner of the Ottoman Empire, under the banner of Zionism, inspired the local Arabs to respond with nationalist ambitions of their own—culminating in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948

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Following on from our last episode, another CIA adventure in the Middle East kicks off this episode on Egypt. King Farouk’s removal from power is the starting pistol for the Egyptian Revolution—a landmark event in modern middle eastern history. The figure of Nasser reigns supreme, whose dogged attempts to resist incorporation into the new U.S.-led Western order precipitated a crisis that might have led to World War 3: the Suez Crisis. All eyes remain fixed on Egypt today, as the war in Ukraine threatens fatal food shortages there, and regional rivalries over the River Nile could turn ugly.

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In this episode, we shift our focus to Iran. Nobody could have known this at the time, but with hindsight we can see that at the beginning of the Cold War, Iran had somehow become a whirlpool swirling with all of the 20th century’s clashing ideological and political forces. All the players are there: an autocratic monarch in the old style; a newly formed Communist party conspiring revolution; aristocratic Liberals demanding economic and constitutional reform; Islamist terrorists; Big Oil; a declining European empire; the Soviet Union reviving Tsarist geopolitics; and America, the new superpower. These clashing interests and ideologies would result in Operation Ajax, one of the most notorious episodes from the Cold War.

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In the last episode we talked about how the American half of the Cold War was established in Saudi Arabia. Today, we’re shifting our focus to the other half of that epic conflict: the Soviet Union. What were the Soviet Union’s designs on the Middle East? Or were their forays into Middle Eastern geopolitics simply countermoves in a Cold War chess game, attempts to wrongfoot their American opponent? And now, as the spectre of war between Russia and Ukraine hangs over Europe, to what extent can Soviet history, and indeed the earlier history of imperial Russia, help us to understand what’s going on?

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In this week’s episode, we focus attention on Aimen’s homeland: Saudi Arabia. Arabia is as old as time, and we explore how the depth and profundity of its history inform the present day. Saudi Arabia is also, as we’ll show, where the Cold War began, and to understand how, we’ll explain the way in which long-standing British power in the region gave way, fitfully and almost without anyone noticing, to those upstart imperialists from Thomas’s homeland: the United States. And we’ll see how the Cold War world of spycraft, ideological conflict, and state paranoia continues into the present, through Aimen’s take on the notorious murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

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Introduced in the first episode, we raise the all-important question: what is the “Clash of Civilizations?” We lay the groundwork by explaining the concept and how it relates to the “New World Order” covered in Series 2. Listen as Thomas and Aimen travel back to the end of the Cold War, this time zooming in on a little-known regional conflict, the explosive dispute still raging between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Their struggle over Nagorno-Karabakh offers a topical example of how the Clash of Civilizations manifests on the ground, and how small conflicts cast widespread reverberations, across both space—and time. Find out on all platforms.

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We pick up where we left off, narrating the failure of America’s Afghanistan policy, its chaotic pull-out, and how the future of Afghanistan rests on a game of geopolitical poker—and the dealer is the Taliban! In our first episode of the season, Thomas and Aimen fully unpack Afghanistan’s modern history and its potential future all while introducing us to the idea of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’… Buckle up.

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Join us on January 19 for Season 3 as we dive even deeper into the history of the Middle East by looking at the Cold War and travelling as far back as the Bronze Age. We also reflect on today’s state of affairs and digest its complexities to answer the question: is a clash of civilizations really to blame for the Middle East’s history of conflict? Or is the real problem our blindness to the region’s reality?

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This year marks twenty years since 9/11 and the start of the war in Afghanistan. A war which is now reaching a tragic and extraordinary finale. In this special episode, Thomas and Aimen are back for a deep dive into the ancient and modern history of Afghanistan, Aimen's first hand experiences with the Taliban and an exploration of why the country has been in disarray for decades now.

And we can also confirm that we are coming back for Season 3!

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In November, Iran’s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated, and so Thomas and Aimen return to discuss the regional context of Iran’s nuclear program, what’s next for the region once Joe Biden takes office, and Aimen reveals how the assassination unfolded step-by-step. Plus, you will hear an update on Season 3 and a very special guest.

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