The World

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.