The World

As the only two African-Americans in their law firm, they dated, finding in his adventurousness and her stability that ‘opposites attract’. She thought him rare as a ‘unicorn … this strange mix-of-everything man’ – ‘refreshing, unconventional and weirdly elegant’. He thought her ‘an original … She was tall, beautiful, funny … and wickedly smart. I was smitten.’ But she believed that ‘the road to the good life was narrow and full of hazards. Family was all.’ He had that characteristic of politicians: ‘He was oddly free from doubt.’

Obama started community work and taught law at Chicago before at thirty-five winning election to the Illinois Senate in November 1996. Michelle laughed at his effect on white people: ‘In my experience you put a suit on any half-intelligent black man and white people tended to go bonkers.’ When Obama, who became a US senator in 2004, ran for the presidency four years later, Michelle ‘avoided talking to me about the horse-race aspect of the campaign’, until, her face ‘pensive’, she asked one night, ‘You’re going to win, aren’t you?’

Obama had studied the darkness and the light within American society. America was the ‘only great power made up of people from every corner of the planet’, but the challenge was ‘to see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to our creed.’ He was an optimist. ‘Maybe I can do some good,’ he told Michelle. America was the ‘place where all things are possible’. When he won the presidency, ‘I felt,’ wrote Michelle, ‘like our family launched out of a cannon and into some strange underwater universe.’

Obama had campaigned for the White House on the slogan ‘Yes we can’, but in power things at home and abroad were less possible than he expected.

Yet ‘The more pressure he was under,’ noticed Michelle, ‘the calmer he seemed to get.’ That was just as well since he arrived in the middle of a world banking crisis caused by reckless investments in American property. Great financial houses crashed. Prompted and aided by Gordon Brown, ascetic and analytical British prime minister, Obama spent $626 billion on saving the economy and those banks too big to fail. Yet his election did not halt the trigger-happy racism of American society: on 26 February 2012, Trayvon Martin, seventeen years old, was shot in Florida by a vigilante; on 17 July 2014, Eric Garner, a gentle forty-two-year-old horticulturalist, was killed in a chokehold by a Staten Island policeman. Its filming by a witness with a mobile phone launched a new movement: Black Lives Matter.

As for ‘my foreign policy?’ he said. ‘Don’t do stupid shit.’ He agonized over how to end the 9/11 wars and tried to reset the US relationship with Putin. America’s Iraqi catastrophe was an opportunity for Putin, who hated Obama, for him the personification of American humbug.

Putin waited for a chance to assert Russian power in his sphere, embracing the myth of the Broken Promise: Bush and Clinton had promised not to extend NATO eastwards and yet now Ukraine was moving towards membership. ‘Not one inch to the east, they told us in the 1990s,’ said Putin in December 2021. ‘They cheated, just brazenly tricked us.’

It was only a matter of time before Belarus, ruled by a porcine tyrant, former director of a collective piggery, would return to the Muscovite fold, but huge, proud Ukraine, divided, ill led and beset by corruption, still had dangerous potential as a democracy that could undermine Putin’s autocracy and his imperial millenarian vision of the Russian World. In 2004, a pro-western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, keen for Ukraine to join NATO and the EU, was set to win presidential elections. Putin ordered FSB agents to poison the candidate, who only just survived, his face scarred. Then an attempt to rig the election for Putin’s candidate, the corrupt, brutish Viktor Yanukovych, was foiled by 200,000 Kyivans who occupied central Kyiv in their Orange Revolution. To Putin, the Russian state was unthinkable without Ukraine. ‘What is Ukraine?’ Putin asked. ‘Does it exist as a country?’ He added, ‘Whatever it has, is a gift from us.’ He regarded Ukraine and Belarus as little Russias with no independent right of existence.^*

Putin watched and waited. His first opportunity came in tiny but defiant Georgia. Putin despised Shevardnadze, who had given away the empire. When in 2003 the Grey Fox, by then seventy-five, faced a revolution led by the young, showy American-educated Mikheil Saakashvili, Putin refused to back the old leader. Shevardnadze retired.

Putin watched Saakashvili’s posturings with contempt. When Saakashvili, encouraged by America, challenged the Russian clients in Ossetia, Putin snarled, ‘Bring me Saakashvili’s head,’ and invaded, routing the Georgian forces.^* America protested but did nothing.