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.
CONCLUSION
There is such a thing as too much history. This may be a strange reflection for a historian who is just finishing a world history in a time of pandemic and European war. But the fetishistic obsession with curated versions of nations and empires in the past can blind one to the present and what really matters: people living today, and how they and their families wish to live. That is one of the reasons I chose to write this book through families – the measure of happiness for what one wants for one’s family defines what one wants for the world. Yet it is a balance. History matters: we long to know how we came to be who we are. ‘Life can only be understood backwards,’ writes Søren Kierkegaard, ‘but it must be lived forwards.’ History never dies; history is never history; it is kinetic, mutating and dynamic, a deathless arsenal of stories and facts to teach us how humans lived, but also to be deployed in the causes of today, good and evil, a mission complicated by the internet – that cesspit, treasure-trove and reliquary of hatreds and hobbies, truths, randomness and revels, calumnies and conspiracies. Yet it is our reverence for the legitimacy granted by history that gives it such lethal, propulsive power.
The Ukrainian war marks the end of an exceptional period: the Seventy-Year Peace, divided into two phases – forty-five years of Cold War, then twenty-five of American unipotency. If the first era was like a chess tournament and the second like a game of solitaire, today is a multi-player computer game.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is not a new way of exerting and expanding power. Its flint-hearted ferocity is a return to normality in a way that the dynasts in this book – warlords, kings and dictators – would find routine: normal disorder has been resumed. Many of today’s empire nations seem keen to expand spheres of influence that mimic old empires. The wanton killing of Ukrainian civilians, the bodies in the streets and the escape of families from the war, reminds us what much of history was like in times when there were no mobile phones to record atrocities and refugees, and court historians praised murderous conquerors as heroes. We have met plenty of those in this book, and this is not the only sign that human momentum is not just a march of progress but also a stuttering spasm of contingencies. It is a struggle not just between clashing states and ideologies but between contradictory facets of human nature. If nothing else, the Ukrainian invasion demonstrates the real difference between the open world of the liberal democracies and the closed world where the combination of traditional menace and digital surveillance increasingly allows control states to police their people in a way scarcely imaginable even by a Stalin.