[liftbigweights]

The british relationship with the kingdom of saud predates ww2 by decades going back to the ottoman empire. The british were instrumental in supporting saudi and arab nationalism to destroy the ottoman empire. Hence the tense relationship between "britain and turkey" and "saudi arabia and turkey" today.

Actually british have a long history of using nationalism to destroy the ottoman empire. Some of the foremost british romantic poets supported greek nationalism to free greece from the ottoman empire.

Interestingly enough, 40 years after nationalism destroyed the ottoman empire, nationalism would destroy the british empire.

[krastanov]

Is it fair to call it "nationalism" though. That word has a bit too many meanings, but universally it includes the idea of doing something on your own in a selfish fashion. The desire to be independent from an oppressive regime is orthogonal to nationalism.

I am saying this as a Bulgarian citizen, one of the beneficiaries of the fall of the Ottoman empire (the Ottoman government was very oppressive to my people for centuries up until 150 years ago). It is not selfish nationalism that liberated us, it was the desire to stop being abused by a conqueror.

[danans]

> The british were instrumental in supporting saudi and arab nationalism

The Saud family didn't overthrow the Ottomans with the British. That was done the Hashemites, under King Faisal, and of course T.E. Lawrence (whose story was told in his own memoir, and later in David Lean's epic film Lawrence of Arabia).

In the subsequent post-WWI, post-Ottoman chaos, the Sauds conquered Mecca from the Hashemites, and established modern "Saudi" Arabia.

The Hashemites fled and established what is now the modern country of Jordan, which they rule today.

[igravious]

I just got John J. Mearsheimer's new book (hot off the presses!) called “The Great Delusion”. He argues that from a strictly Western political perspective there are only three forces which control the interplay of great powers: Liberalism, Nationalism, and Realism.

He says that Nationalism and Realism always trump Liberalism. (From his perspective both neo-liberals and neo-cons are Liberal in that to the public at least they espouse bringing freedom and democracy to the peoples of the world even if it is at the business end of a gun.)

He drives home his point that nationalism has "won" by pointing out that most states are now nation-states whereas 200 years ago that most certainly was not the case. (Not all nations have their own state.) National identity is complicated but it explains all sorts of conflicts in the last 100 years.

It is political irony, as you say, that the forces the Brits used to topple their enemies also toppled them. But I think we must realise that the nationalism was there before the Brits decided to use it for their Machiavellian purposes. It is Afghan nationalism that has made Afghanistan the graveyard of empires. It was Irish nationalism (dressed up as Republicanism) that finally broke the Union of Great Britain and Ireland, and as a consequence has made Brexit orders of magnitude more intractable.

You could go further and point out that by nationalism is meant National Identity. So it is social identity in one of its many powerful guises that has shaped the last 200 years. The other being religious identity of course: (internecine – Roman Catholicism versus Protestantism and Shia versus Sunni; interfaith – Christianity versus Islam).

This suggests that the rules-based international order is not going to contain China because China has a national identity going back millennia. The key geopolitical question of this generation (the years to 2049) is whether the US and China come into direct conflict because of China's rise. I'm a rational optimist so I say "no" but I wouldn't put money on it. :/