The World

Now Obama flew in to see Putin. At his mansion at Novo-Ogarevo, Obama observed Putin: ‘short and compact – a wrestler’s build – with thin, sandy hair, a prominent nose, and pale, watchful eyes’, exuding ‘a practiced disinterest … that indicated someone who’d grown used to power’. He reminded Obama of a Chicago ‘ward boss, except with nukes’.

Ironically Putin’s view of American presidents was almost identical: he advised his henchmen to watch his favourite Netflix drama House of Cards to explain US politics. ‘Don’t harbour any illusions,’ he later lectured Obama’s vice-president Joe Biden. ‘We’re not like you, we may look like you but … inside we have different values.’ Obama listened to Putin accuse America of being ‘arrogant, dismissive, unwilling to treat Russia as an equal partner’. Putin worked to redress the balance: in 2010, his vassal Yanukovych won the Ukrainian elections, then, in the Arab world, he found a further opportunity.

BASHAR, THE BAYONET AND THE MONA LISA OF INDIA

On 6 March 2011, in the southern Syrian town of Deraa, fifteen schoolchildren mocked the young dictator Bashar al-Assad in graffiti on the walls of their school, inspired by demonstrations against the dictators of Tunisia, and then of Egypt, Libya and Yemen, communicating by the exciting encoded medium of WhatsApp. In Deraa, the hated governor, a cousin of Assad, arrested the schoolchildren and tortured them. When their families protested, the army fired on them. The town rose in rebellion, which spread across Syria.

In 2000, when Hafez al-Assad died, the thirty-four-year-old ophthalmologist Bashar succeeded to the throne, marrying a British-Syrian surgeon’s daughter, Asma, who was an unlikely recruit to the Mafia-style family – a private schoolgirl (then known as Emma) and French literature graduate. Anisa, Bashar’s mother, had disapproved of the marriage: she wanted Bashar to marry a cousin. But the couple were in love. Asma gave Bashar the pet name Batta – Duck. When she arrived, the Assads isolated her.

She and Bashar promised reform and courted the west. Vogue magazine hailed Bashar as ‘wildly democratic’ and Asma as the ‘rose of the desert … glamorous, young, and very chic – the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies … a thin, long-limbed beauty … breezy, conspiratorial, and fun’. Vogue was right about the conspiracy: in 2006 when the Lebanese billionaire Rafic Hariri, former and future premier, challenged Syrian power, Bashar ordered his killing in a car bombing, which so outraged the Lebanese that he was forced to withdraw his troops. Sensing ‘a great conspiracy’, Dr Assad sent tanks and troops against his own students, teenagers and Islamicists. ‘My father was right,’ he said. ‘Thousands of deaths in Hama bought us three decades of stability …’

On 17 February 2011, Libyan cities rebelled against the Neronian dictator Qaddafi, who, assisted by his son Saif al-Islam, threatened that the rebels, these ‘cockroaches’, would be ‘hunted down street by street, house by house until the country is cleansed of dirt and scum’. Obama was determined to avoid any interventions. In Egypt, Mubarak, who had been in power since Sadat’s assassination, faced a popular revolution and looked to Obama for support. Obama refused: Mubarak resigned. In Libya, Qaddafi had lost half of the country, but he promised, ‘Everything will burn.’ David Cameron, fresh-faced young British prime minister, regarded Qaddafi as ‘Mad Dog, a horrific figure who sold Semtex to the IRA’ and ‘ordered the downing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie’. He called Nicolas Sarkozy, the diminutive, manic French president, to discuss an intervention. Obama was, recalled Cameron, ‘unenthusiastic’. But now Qaddafi’s forces were advancing on rebel Benghazi.

On 28 February, Cameron suggested a no-fly zone; NATO agreed to intervene to save lives, and Obama delivered air cover. Qaddafi threatened to kill Cameron and his family. Beginning on 20 March, NATO air forces, led by Britain and France, attacked Qaddafi’s forces for months until the regime cracked. On 15 September, Cameron and Sarkozy visited Tripoli: ‘we’d promised we’d go together … We wove through jubilant hordes to a stage in Freedom Square and gave speeches as 10,000 people chanted Cam-er-on and Sar-koz-y! Still we had no idea where Qaddafi was …’