Mediterranean Basin

of Spanish.

The Spanish look like Mediterranean region.

People maybe don't know this, but it's very mixed.

Yeah.

So there's a lot of like, you know, in the Spanish south of Spain, south of Italy, south of Greece.

Yeah.

North of Africa, Lebanon and all that Mediterranean region.

Yeah.

As I am told by my colleague, Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, we're looking at the remaking of the Middle Eastern map, remade in 1945 when FDR, on his way back from Yalta, leaving Yalta early to Churchill's surprise, stopped to greet Ibn Saud, the father, grandfather, great-grandfather of the Saudi princes.

And that meeting began the relationship between the U.S. and Riyadh that we see today as determinative of the strength of the Middle East, of Europe, the Mediterranean Basin, etc.

And the question is, what is to be done right now if that map that FDR and Ibn Saud made is to be recast entirely, with or without, and I'm chiefly entertaining without, the United States of America.

I welcome my colleague Thaddeus McCotter, American Greatness, from the great city of Detroit, to comment on my general observation that what we have is a brave new world, not the 20th century map that we grew up with, with Saudi Arabia producing oil that was critical to the development of the world after the catastrophe of the Second War.

Instead, multiple sources of energy were all very expensive, and multiple threats to the Middle East, to the Mediterranean Basin, to Europe, and to the United States and continental North America.

A new world, maybe.

That is a very good day to you.

Is I can sit and have a coffee at, like, 11:00 or 11:00 at night.

So many of the Mediterranean countries actually.

Yeah, I love it.

And I'm...

But by the third century, they were having trouble controlling things.

They had a whole succession of assassinated emperors, military rebellions, barbarians of course this happens all the time but they had economic instability and they had some epidemics too that we record in history sort of the plague stuff that came along and decimated some cities all around the Mediterranean regions and the legions that had once secured Roman civilization increasingly made and unmade emperors according to their own interests and then they sort of abandoned their main responsibility to protect and expand the empire and when we come back going to try and see how this fits into how we look at civilization as a whole all right let's talk a little bit about what was going on in rome and those some of you were listening on the radio at kansas 1100 and 92.7 kgln 980 and 101.3 i'd like to mention that we love our local audience and our podcast has been popular for reasons I'm not quite sure since I feel amateurish here but I really appreciate people that do that and we get a fair amount of people listening on the internet during the show too so I thank all of you very much for your attention.

Anyway let's get back to the crisis of the third century and how what we can understand about that and how that applies to the way we live now because all this kind of history applies to the way we live now.

Now We're talking about the area of about 270 AD with all of these things.

It was just called Gaul at that point.

And They controlled a lot of territory there in the West.

Now, there was a Queen Zenobia in Palmyra, which is the east part of the Mediterranean there.

And she dominated much of the east and pretended to go along with Rome sometimes, but was really a breakaway.

Right.

But on the other hand, it is connected enough to have been influenced by almost every major civilization in the Mediterranean Basin.

And that specific friction, that extreme physical isolation paired with intense unavoidable global intersection, that is the engine driving the mysteries we're looking at today.

Which is why whether you're a hardcore history buff who reads peer-reviewed archeological journals for fun or just someone who's insanely curious about the fringes of human history, you're gonna wanna hear this.