The World

Trumps and Xis, Sauds, Assads and Kims

THE CALIPHATE AND THE CRIMEA

On 21 August 2013, in the Damascus suburbs, Assad used sarin, a nerve gas, against his own people, some of whom were photographed suffocating and foaming – the first of several such atrocities. Obama had promised he would not tolerate chemical weapons; Cameron demanded action. Yet Obama was focused on a Nixonian grand deal with Iran. American hawks and allies led by Israel demanded bombing to stop Iran developing the Bomb. Obama negotiated a delay in Iranian production in return for lifting sanctions. Yet Iran’s maestro of clandestine operations, General Qasem Solemeini, an elegant protégé of Supreme Leader Khamenei, ramped up his help for the Assads, recruiting militiamen from his Lebanese Hezbollah vassals. Assad also requested Russian assistance. Putin dispatched his air force as Kurdish Peshmerga militias carved out their own independent fiefs and much of the country was occupied by jihadist and secular militias.

Closer to home, Putin feared that Ukraine, keen to join the EU and NATO, was slipping from his grasp. In 2010, his thuggish ally, Yanukovych, had won the presidency and enjoyed a short kleptocratic fiesta, looting $70 billion. When, under Kremlin pressure, he withdrew from EU negotiations, 500,000 Ukrainians protested in Kyiv. Yanukovych’s secret police shot seventy-seven protesters before he was driven out. On 22 February 2014, Putin sent troops to occupy Crimea.^* On 18 March, he annexed the peninsula. He then sent his intelligence officers to incite rebellion and back pro-Russian separatist warlords in Donbas. In Russia his popularity soared, but he had missed the opportunity of his career: had he then launched a full invasion of Ukraine to support the legitimately elected Yanukovych, it is likely he would have succeeded. Instead, he tried to destroy Ukraine from within – actions that fostered the very thing he most feared: a passionate pro-western Ukrainian patriotism, backed by a large, committed and experienced military.

As Assad’s survival began to look dubious, he was rescued by Putin but also something even more ghoulish. In neighbouring Iraq, the bullying by the Shiite rulers sparked a new Sunni insurgency, this time backed by a fundamentalist cabal of al-Qaeda jihadists and secular Baathists, a marriage made in American prisons and then organized into a force that aspired to rule actual territory.

On 10 June 2014, riding SUVs down Mesopotamian roads beneath their death-cult black banners, warriors of Islamic State – known to Arabs as Daesh – suddenly emerged out of nowhere to take Mosul in Iraq and then burst into Syria too. Led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Daesh combined medieval Wahhabi ideology with sophisticated internet communications, pragmatic oil financing and bold military manoeuvrability. It appealed digitally to credulous radicalized teenagers in British and French cities, and used spectacular televised beheadings and burnings of western hostages to advertise its surprising conquests. Baghdadi, commander of 30,000 warriors and soon ruler of an Iraqi–Syrian state of around ten million people, declared a caliphate, as Daesh slaughtered Yazidis and members of other sects regarded as heretics, offering their recruits captured women as sex slaves and blowing up ancient non-Muslim monuments.

The ultimate jeopardy of Daesh focused Putin’s support: the mayhem was the fault of ‘a single centre of domination [that] emerged in the world after the Cold War’, he said in September 2015, meaning America. ‘The export of revolutions, this time of so-called “democratic” ones, continues … Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got … extremists and terrorists.’ While America armed Kurdish Peshmerga, who began to fight Daesh on the ground, Putin bombed Assad’s opponents.

As Obama finished his term, the confidence of the unipower America withered. America’s world crusade, governed by rules and morals developed by the chastening struggle of the Second World War, confirmed by the victory of 1989, was the most ambitious programme in world history, backed by its most potent ever state. Yet even this massive and supreme technarchy could be foiled by bands of mountain warriors in an iPhone and dagger state. And despite it all, its twenty years as the unipower of a globalized world had failed to deliver peace abroad or prosperity at home.

In one of his last trips, Obama flew to London where Cameron was holding a referendum on British membership of the European Union, the trade organization with aspirations to become a federal state. If it left, he warned Britons, ‘The UK is going to be in the back of the queue’ for a US trade deal. But on 23 June 2016, rallied by a haystack-haired maverick, Boris Johnson, the British did just that.

In Syria, America joined the mayhem to bombard Daesh. But the winners were Assad and his backers Russia and Iran.

‘We don’t have victories any more,’ said Trump on 15 June 2015, riding down the golden elevator in his eponymous auric tower that almost matched his hair, skin and style. ‘We used to have victories, but we don’t have them … We’ve got to make America great again!’

THE DYNASTS

Revelling in his outrages, Trump commandeered a populist disdain for the self-righteous, often illiberal orthodoxies of liberals and progressives in big cities, old universities and famous newspapers – and the venal networks in the ‘swamp’ of Washington. He was a coarse but effective communicator, gifted with comic timing, capable of speaking live for hours authentically playing himself and expressing the prejudices and rages of his white, lower-middle-class Christian base, convinced that somehow, someone had given away their American birthright. Many of them believed that Latinos and immigrants were stealing their jobs. Trump promised a Wall to seal the Mexican border and a ban on Muslim immigrants. He announced, ‘The American carnage stops right here, right now. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first.’

No one senses the weakness of others as acutely as the man who fears his own. Trump’s malice was implacably on target, his playground nicknames on the nail, as he brushed aside his Republican rival John Ellis Bush, Florida governor and brother of W, as ‘Low-Energy Jeb’ and forever tainted his Democratic opponent, wife of a former president, Hillary Clinton as ‘Crooked Hillary’. Like Trump himself, she also personified the tiny, elderly circles of America’s elites, wherein power was often passed via family links.

The Obamas were downhearted by Trump. ‘Both of us’, wrote the president, ‘were drained’ by the rise of ‘someone diametrically opposed to everything we stood for’. They asserted the old decencies: ‘When they go low,’ said Michelle Obama, ‘we go high.’ But Trump was oblivious to such distinctions. Personality, wealth and television were all as serious for Trump as statecraft and geopolitics: projections of power.

Inadvertently he was promoted relentlessly and breathlessly by the very TV networks that despised him. Trump’s bombast immediately created its exact opposite: his progressive opponents aped his mendacity and righteousness, printing unsubstantiated calumnies, endorsing untrue scandals and fabulistic conspiracies, redoubling intolerance in witch-hunts and ultimately even banning stories critical of their own candidate. The open world had never been richer or more secure, yet America – emulated by the other comfort democracies – started to consume itself in vicious, self-mutilating schisms about history and nation, virtue and identity, every bit as demented as the christological controversies of medieval Constantinople. Some of it was the result of the comfortable tedium of bourgeois existence. ‘When we look at history,’ Mao had written, ‘we adore times of war; when we get to periods of peace and prosperity, we’re bored.’ Television and internet inevitably brought entertainment closer to politics: Trump channelled something of Nero, Commodus and Wilhelm II.

In November 2019, Trump won the presidency. No one so relished its autocratic regality. America’s war presidency had developed not because it had built an empire abroad but because it had conquered a continent at home. Trump’s White House was a disorganized, corrupt and nepotistic court, starring his entitled daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, an effete property heir. But he was soon infuriated by the restraints of democracy.

The Russians had long had naive views about the power of US presidents, but now, watching Trump and the opposition to him, Putin saw America’s self-laceration as decadence. ‘There’s a gap between the ruling elites and the people,’ he said. ‘The so-called Liberal Idea has come to the end of its natural life.’ Facing sanctions for annexing Crimea and stalemate in Ukraine, Putin flaunted his power in Syria, where brutal Russian bombing had won the war for Assad. To compensate for Russian economic weakness, Putin deployed the potent disinformation of Russian hackers and bots to undermine American confidence in democracy. And the ex-Chekist, still popular at home, deployed calculated menace against opponents and traitors. At home, his Chechen vassal organized the shootings of liberal journalists and opposition politicians. In provincial Salisbury, in spring 2018, a British agent, Sergei Skripal, released from Russian jail in a spy swap, was poisoned with Novichok by the military intelligence agency GRU.^*

Trump, who had grown up in Mafia-dominated Queens, talking about ‘hits’ and ‘rats’, envied the real trigger power of Putin. When challenged, he defended the Russian: ‘There’re a lot of killers. You think our country’s innocent. Our country does a lot of killing.’ In July 2018, when the two met in Helsinki, soon after Skripal’s poisoning, Trump again defended Putin against accusations of interfering with US elections: ‘President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.’

Yet Trump did challenge exhausted policies abroad: he tried to confront China, attempted a personal approach to North Korea and revisited the frozen Israel–Palestine negotiations. But first, on 20 May 2017, his first foreign visit, he embraced America’s oldest local ally.

A brash, ambitious young prince, Mohammed bin Salman – MBS – now controlled Saudi Arabia. The moment his aged father, Salman bin Abdulaziz, succeeded as king, MBS energetically commandeered the court and defence power centres. He launched a war against Iranian allies in Yemen and planned a reform of the Arabian economy, Vision 2030, a new city to be called Neom (meaning new in Greek, future in Arabic) and a new touristic industry around the Nabataean ruins of al-Ula. He also introduced the right to drive for Arabian women, the opening of cinemas and the trillion-dollar flotation of Aramco. These reforms delighted the west. Trump placed Kushner in charge of Arab relations, and the two princelings shared a dynastic view of the world. As Kushner worked on a peace plan for Israel and Palestine, MBS, infuriated by the Palestinians, hinted at recognizing Israel.

Yet there was another side of MBS. He was from Prince Salman’s junior brood of sons, the fifth boy and not by his senior wife, a Saudi princess, but a second Bedouin wife. The eldest had been the first Arab into space; MBS, nicknamed Little Saddam in the family, had much to prove, both the common thing – a will to power – and that rare quality – a vision of what to do with it. As an ambitious young prince, he was nicknamed Stray Bear by his friends, always genial and playful with westerners, a modern millennial joking about his love of Game of Thrones, discussing the digital future at meetings with the tech plutocrats. But his visionary impatience dovetailed with brutal intolerance. Inheriting his father’s aggressive intelligence, he was resentful that other princes were much richer, that dynasties like the bin Ladens received vast commissions and that the kingdom itself was too cautious in confronting its enemies. Long before reaching power, he had sent a bullet to a business rival, earning the nicknamed Abu Rasasa – Father of the Bullet.

If he needed any lessons in policing a royal family, a young Kim provided them. When Kim Jong-Il, seventy, died of a heart attack in December 2011, he was declared immortal and his untried son, Kim Jong-Un, twenty-seven, had succeeded him. Now, In February 2017, two women, recruited by a TV station to take part in a reality-show prank, an irresistible temptation to many, approached a plump, scruffy eastern man at Kuala Lumpur airport and sprayed him in the face. Minutes later, poisoned with the nerve agent VX and with his organs closing down, Kim Jong-nam, exiled eldest son of Kim Jong-il and once crown prince of North Korea, was dead, his assassination ordered by his younger half-brother, Kim Jong-un. Rapidly promoting himself to marshal, Kim Jong-un, the image of his grandfather and father, orchestrated the killings of his powerful uncle and family, messily shredded by firing squads of anti-aircraft guns. He had targeted his brother, who, after losing his rank for trying to escape to Japan, had been allowed to live quietly in China, because he talked to journalists. ‘Without reforms,’ Kim Jong-nam had said, ‘North Korea will collapse.’ Now that problem was solved.

Closely advised by his younger sister Kim Yo-jong, the Marshal tested a hydrogen bomb, defying America. After trading insults – Trump was ‘the insane dotard’, Kim ‘little Rocket Man’ (a reference to the song by the president’s favourite singer, Elton John) – the two met as equals in Singapore, confirming the kudos of nuclear weapons. ‘I don’t think I have to prepare very much,’ boasted Trump, but Kim gave up no Bombs, indulging instead in a correspondence that the president compared to ‘love letters’.

‘Even now I can’t forget the moment I held your excellency’s hand,’ wrote Kim to Trump on 25 December 2018, remembering their meeting as being ‘like the scene in a fantasy film’. It was a fantasy. While Rocket Man returned home triumphant, Father of the Bullet was targeting his own difficult insider.

In October 2018, members of MBS’s secret retinue, known as the Saudi Rapid Intervention Group, arrived on a private jet in Istanbul. The Group was the vanguard of MBS’s Centre for Studies and Media Affairs that dealt with special tasks. A first unit swept the consulate for bugs, finding none – even though it was riddled with Turkish listening devices. The staff were given a day off. Then fifteen retainers arrived, led by an intelligence officer who travelled with MBS in America and an Interior Ministry forensic surgeon, Colonel-Doctor Salah al-Tubaigy, with a bone saw in his luggage. While they waited tensely, the doctor told his colleagues that when dissecting bodies ‘I listen to music – you should do that too.’ Finally the chief myrmidon looked at his watch.

‘Has the sacrificial animal arrived yet?’ he asked.

Moments later, a sturdy man wearing a blazer and grey trousers entered the Saudi consulate, with an appointment to get papers so that he could marry his fiancée. Jamal Khashoggi was a journalist but also a court insider who believed he would be safe, unaware that all his digital communications were watched by MBS’s team. He had hesitated to enter Saudi territory, arranging for his fiancée to wait outside, but he was not as suspicious as he should have been. This was because Khashoggi was a member of the Saudi elite, grandson of King Abdulaziz’s doctor, nephew of the billionaire fixer Adnan Khashoggi and a journalist, writing Janus-like in the Washington Post embracing western pluralism and in the Arabic press criticizing the Saudi–American alliance. By bugging his telephones, MBS learned that Khashoggi was rallying dissidents. For MBS too was Janus-like, embracing western reforms yet tolerating no opposition.

In June 2017, he had seized his cousin Muhammad bin Nayef, fifty-seven, forcing him to cede his title, crown prince. He had kidnapped the Lebanese premier for getting too close to Iran-backed Hezbollah, hard to avoid in a Lebanon dominated by the Shia militia. He had blockaded Qatar. He had ordered the kidnap of the female activist and filmmaker Loujain al-Hathloul, who was tortured. He paid particular attention to criticism on Twitter, where Khashoggi had millions of followers, infiltrating Twitter itself to find out the details of critical accounts while investigating corruption in the royal family. ‘You have a body that has cancer everywhere, the cancer of corruption,’ he explained. ‘You need the shock of chemo or the cancer will eat the body.’

In November 2017, MBS arrested a constellation of princes and billionaires including five bin Ladens, who were imprisoned in the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh and forced to pay billions in fines. Soon afterwards MBS himself spent $300 million on a new yacht, $50 million on a holiday in the Maldives and then $400 million on a Leonardo da Vinci painting, Salvator Mundi.

As soon as he entered the consulate, Khashoggi was taken upstairs and must have seen the team waiting for him.

He was sedated, then suffocated with a plastic bag. After that the doctor, putting on earphones, dismembered him with his bone saw. The CIA reported MBS ordered the killing but this compulsive visionary and despotic reformer, dedicated to Saudi dynasty, personal autocracy, cultural liberalization and – a player of the Call of Duty videogame – millennial technology, weathered the storm.

Trump’s unconventional approach could have solved problems, but every initiative was spoiled by his own unique mix of narcissistic braggadocio, racist undercurrent and clumsy autocracy. He delivered few of the promised victories.^* In 2017, American and British air power obliterated Daesh from above as Kurdish Peshmerga and Iranian-backed Shiite militias rolled them back on the ground. Yet the Daesh threat had saved Assad, who was backed by the Iranians, Hezbollah and Russian air power. The death of the family matriarch Anisa, Bashar’s mother, left her family exposed – her billionaire nephew Rami Makhlouf owned half the economy – and allowed Asma to emerge. Now Bashar, faced with rebuilding a ruined state, demanded that Rami hand back some of his riches; when he refused he was arrested. Asma herself was diagnosed with cancer. When she recovered, she started to approve government appointments and build her own smartphone and smartcard businesses, run by her brother and other henchmen, while her portraits – often inscribed ‘The Lady of Jasmine’ – appeared beside those of Bashar. Lady Jasmine had become a potentate of war.

Trump accelerated the withdrawal from the 9/11 wars, which had cost eyewatering quantities of treasure and blood. Yet Iraq was controlled by Shiite factions allied to Iran which enjoyed tormenting America. On 8 May 2018, Trump withdrew from Obama’s Iran agreement, calling it ‘the worst deal ever’.

On 3 January 2020, after Iranian militias had fired on American forces in Iraq, Trump ordered the assassination of Iran’s ‘shadow commander’, Soleimani, liquidated by a drone at Baghdad airport. In August 2020, Trump delivered his ‘Abraham Accords’ between Israel and the Gulf monarchies, backed by MBS, aimed at the chief enemy, Iran. This dramatic alignment placed Israel, chief military power despite its chaotic democracy, at the centre of an Arab–Islamic affinity led by MBS, whose oil made him indispensable.

‘We must become more unpredictable as a nation,’ said Trump at one of his campaign rallies. ‘We must immediately become more unpredictable.’ In this, he had delivered.

THE EMPEROR, THE TSAR AND THE COMEDIAN

Several unpredictable – but frequently predicted – things were happening in the People’s Republic. Trump confronted a rising China and a gaping trade deficit that he said was ‘ripping off’ America. Ever since Nixon, China had been a protected sector in foreign policy that was targeted against Russia. In the process, western leaders had been awed by the prosperity and wealth of China, appeasing its Party and letting its trade soar. Now Trump insisted, ‘We can’t let that continue.’ His trade war hurt both economies, but when the two met Xi Jinping was as confident and vigilant as Trump was inconsistent and erratic. A man who had experienced a vertiginous downfall, who had been in prison himself, who had seen his sister commit suicide, was unmoved by Trump.

When he became leader in 2012, his view of power was unromantic and realistic. ‘People with little contact with power always see these things as mysterious and novel,’ he said in a rare moment of public reflection. ‘But what I see aren’t just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the bullpens and how people can blow hot and cold.’ His family came with him: his nonagenarian mother called a family meeting to warn them against exploiting his rise.^* His wife Peng became the first leader’s wife to be publicly prominent since Madame Mao, but she claimed, ‘When he comes home, I’ve never felt as if there’s some leader in the house …’ His political ‘lineage’ rose with him too; he purged rivals and their ‘lineages’.

Now his mission was simple. ‘East, west, south, north and centre,’ he said, ‘the Party leads everything.’ Deng ruled that the Chinese must ‘bide their time and hide their strength’. But now Party rule was consolidated, the former British and Portuguese colonies Hong Kong and Macau restored; only Taiwan remained unredeemed. As he was promoted to Core Leader without the usual term limit and with his own ‘Xi Jinping Thought’, Xi promised a ‘Chinese dream’ for his people, with ‘common prosperity’ for all. China boasted the second largest GDP after America, becoming the world’s largest exporter. Now, Xi looked abroad.

‘The Chinese nation has stood,’ declared Xi, ‘grown rich and become strong – and now it embraces the new brilliant prospect of rejuvenation.’ This meant an expansion of Chinese power, military and economic, as he offered loans, roads, ports and technology to extend his ‘Belt and Road’ network of power, without having to conquer an empire. It was an autocratic version of the Marshall Plan. The trajectory of the Xi era was upwards: ‘The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has entered an irreversible process.’ But it could be delivered only by the Party founded by Mao. ‘Don’t forget the original intent,’ warned Xi. That meant that any resistance to the Party must be crushed. Xi, a harsh authoritarian, cracked down on dissent, tightening police supervision of citizens and internet using the new technologies of surveillance and face recognition, while in Xiangjing he conducted an ethnic purge of the Muslim Uighurs, a million of whom were confined to education camps. But the unification of China, meaning the conquest of Taiwan, was the spark wheel of Xi’s world mission, not just as Chinese nationalist and Maoist heir but also given his father Xi Zhongxun’s ‘United Front’ work. It was, writes Jospeh Torigian, ‘always both a national and a family affair’. As Chinese growth faltered under his rigid autocracy, Xi surely pondered a ‘short, victorious war’ – the risks of ‘rolling the iron dice’ to retake Taiwan that could win him immortality or destroy his rule altogether. Simultaneously, his natural ally, Putin, promoting his resurgent Russia, was weighing up a similar gamble.

Putin had faced minor sanctions for annexing Crimea, but his war in Ukraine was stalemated. His view of Ukrainian illegitimacy was only confirmed when Ukraine elected a clown as president: Volodymyr Zelensky, forty-year-old son of a mathematics professor, was a Russian-speaking Jewish comedian from east Ukraine who had become the most popular man in the country when he starred in a TV series, Servant of the People, in which he played an everyman history teacher who becomes president of Ukraine. When he decided to run for president, he called his party Servant of the People. In March 2019, he won a landslide victory: in the era of Trump, the preposterous Neronian fusion of politics and showbusiness seemed to confirm the decadence of democracy. Indeed, Trump’s corruption – his refusal to recognize the difference between his interests and those of the state – soon tainted Ukraine. He tried to withhold Ukrainian military aid unless Zelensky smeared his Democratic rival Joe Biden, a gambit that led to his impeachment. Trump survived his congressional trial. Zelensky emerged unscathed.

Diminutive, emotional and playful, Zelensky seemed too soft to handle his dictatorial antithesis, the lethal Putin, who believed that the actor personified Ukraine’s failure. Zelensky had shown courage in entering this brutal arena, but he struggled to govern Ukraine and halt its rampant corruption. It looked as if his presidency might fail. In one of his movies, Rzhevsky versus Napoleon, Zelensky had played Napoleon invading Russia. But in real life the threat was from the east.

Yet, if ever a crisis came, the essential relationship in the tripolar World Game was between Xi and Putin, who had met thirty times. ‘I’ve had closer interactions with President Putin than with any other foreign colleagues,’ said Xi in June 2019 as Putin showed him the Romanov palaces of his home town, Petersburg. ‘He’s my best and bosom friend.’ Xi boasted of their personal affinity: ‘We’ve taken a high-speed train ride together, watched an ice-hockey friendly, celebrated his birthday and bantered about light-hearted matters, literature, art, and sport …’ But while Russia’s rigid dictatorship was still dependent on its oil income, its bigger brother China was at a historic zenith, a moment unique in its history. Then Xi faced that challenge: a pandemic.

The Party knew such a disease would one day come, but no one knew when and no one was prepared. On 17 November 2019, a man in China’s Hubei Province was diagnosed with a new virus. On 31 December, Wuhan Municipal Health Commission announced a cluster of cases of pneumonia caused by an unknown germ. A thirty-three-year-old doctor at Wuhan Central Hospital, Li Wenliang, shared a report of a respiratory virus with his colleagues and was arrested for ‘making false comments on the internet’. On 31 January 2020, two Chinese tourists in Italy fell ill. On 6 February, in the United States, the first patient died; on 7 February, Dr Li died of this new respiratory virus, Coronavirus 2019. The fast-moving twenty-first-century world, in which millions of people flew from city to city on cheap flights, spread the disease with unprecedented speed. For two years, fear and panic followed waves of the virus that, like every pandemic, inspired civil schisms, distrust of foreigners, wild conspiracy theories and strained governments, which by March 2020 were confining people to their homes. The lockdown started to reverse a century and a half in which the office – the working space – had occupied as much time and attention as family life. Thanks to smart computers, many people could work at home, as they had before the industrial revolution; ironically, the pandemic returned people to their families.^* Fifteen million people – mainly older and poorer, and those with respiratory vulnerabilities – died.

Xi declared a ‘dynamic zero-Covid’ policy that treated the pandemic like ‘a people’s war against an invisible enemy’, but such a disease was impossible to control and it exposed the vulnerability of China’s prosperity and the rigidity both of its system and of its leader. In the open world, smaller war democracies – Taiwan, Israel – proved more efficient than larger comfort democracies, but its mitigation was most catastrophic in India where around five million (a third of the global Covid deaths) died, thanks in part to its government’s incompetence.

Trump’s bombast wilted amid the hysteria, his incompetence and insouciance exposed, and in November he decisively lost the election to Biden, who at seventy-eight became the oldest president with Kamala Harris as the first female, first African-American and first Asian-American vice-president. Even though Biden had won six million more votes, Trump, refusing to concede, espoused a conspiracy claiming that he had been robbed of the presidency. On 6 January 2021, encouraged and abetted by Trump, a mob of freakishly garbed Trumpians stormed the weakly defended Capitol to stop Congress’s electoral vote count. It was fortunate that Trump lacked the backing and the acumen to organize a coup, but he now dominated the Republican party, hinting at a second presidency; America had not seemed so fragile since the civil war.

Every president had dreamed of extracting America from the 9/11 wars, above all from Afghanistan, where the corrupt pro-American rulers were maintained by a small NATO presence while the Taliban controlled much of the countryside. In the classic iPhone and dagger state, men in Toyota trucks with Kalashnikovs could still take towns and defy America’s expensive technologies. Biden unwisely accelerated an exit, insisting that the Afghan army was ‘better trained, better equipped, more competent’ than the Taliban, whose victory was ‘highly unlikely’. Instead, on 15 August, the Taliban, commanded by the terror lord Sirajuddin Haqqani, advanced, the regime collapsed and thousands fled to the airport where the Americans desperately evacuated their friends. Not even the fall of Saigon was such a self-inflicted blow.

One man was watching this from the isolation of his mansion outside Moscow. Now sixty-nine, Putin asked historians whom he met, ‘How will history judge me?’ Putin, spoiled by easy if blood-drenched successes in Chechnya, Syria and Crimea, limited in debate by his dominance and misinformed by his sycophantic secret police, came to believe that a coup de main at the opportune moment would restore the Russian imperium and destroy Ukraine as a nation. Russia’s massive oil and natural gas production could fund a war and force dependent Europe to acquiesce. Putin sensed a felicitous conjunction offered a unique opportunity: the democracies were paralysed with culture wars; NATO, said President Macron, was ‘brain-dead’; Britain, now led by the erratic Johnson, had undermined the EU; Biden, unlike the unpredictable Trump, personified western bewilderment; and Xi backed him. In February 2022, Putin flew to Beijing where Xi explained, ‘We’re working together to promote a truly multilateral world order,’ pooling their ‘efforts to uphold the real democratic spirit’, code for a world of power spheres ruled by the autocrats of empire nations.

Putin massed 180,000 troops around Ukraine and demanded Ukrainian subjugation along with western withdrawal from eastern Europe. Biden warned against an invasion. Putin rolled ‘the iron dice’: on 24 February 2022, he announced a ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine: ‘To anyone who’d consider interfering from the outside … you’ll face consequences greater than any you have faced in history.’

Zelensky was asleep at home in the Ukrainian presidential compound when Russian rockets hit Kyiv. He and his wife Olena rushed to their two children. ‘We woke them up. It was loud. There were explosions.’ Zelensky decided to stay at any cost – and it was too dangerous to move his family as Russian commandos, landed by parachute, attacked the Triangle government district in a bid to assassinate him.

Moscow’s tanks raced towards Kyiv. Western experts and Putin’s epigones agreed on one thing: an era had closed, a new one had opened – and, within a few weeks, Ukraine would collapse …

* Crimea, home of Byzantine and Slavic, Genoese, Venetian and Ottoman entrepôts, was long the heartland of a Mongol khanate, ruled by the Giray dynasty, until 1783 when it was annexed to Russia by Potemkin. In 1853, Palmerston and Napoleon III invaded Crimea to challenge Nicholas I’s aggressive Russian empire. Its fall in July 1942 was one of the successes of Hitler’s summer offensive which almost won the war; but Stalin, suspecting that Crimean Tatars had welcomed the German invaders, ordered their deportation and replacement by Russian settlers. In 1954, Khrushchev transferred Crimea to Ukraine.

* In 2015, Boris Nemtsov, opposition leader and Yeltsin’s deputy premier, was shot and killed near the Kremlin by Chechen assassins. In 2019, in provincial Tomsk, FSB agents poisoned opposition leader Andrei Navalny, again with Novichok; like Skripal, he barely survived.

* Yet American ingenuity was still rich: in 2020, Elon Musk sent a crewed SpaceX rocket into space, the first such private mission. He was already a galactic entrepreneur, launching satellites for internet communications. He was the creative maverick of the digital titans, a modern combination of Edison and Rockefeller, spiced with a touch of Cagliostro – born in South Africa, son of an Afrikaner entrepreneur and a former model – who started writing programs while living on a sofa and showering at the local YMCA. His Tesla electric cars made him the world’s richest man. Now he promised a ‘space-bearing civilization’, dreaming of ‘a self-sustaining city on Mars. That’s, I think, the critical thing for maximizing the life of humanity.’ This new galactic home for human families is far off – but no longer just science fiction.

* Not only had Xi visited America but his daughter Mingze was reading English and psychology at Harvard where she used a pseudonym but shared digs, cooked her own meals and attended lectures on Chinese history with a famed British professor.

* Lockdown did not stop conflicts outside Europe. In November 2020, in the latest skirmish in the disintegration of the Ethiopian empire, the high-handedness of the Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed alienated the Tigrayans, who had led the liberation from Mengistu in the 1990s. Abiy had fought Mengistu under the Tigrayans, rising to deputy intelligence chief. But now the Tigrayans returned to war. Abiy made an alliance with the Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki and attacked the Tigrayans, who counter-attacked and almost broke through to Addis before they were again pushed back.