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.