The World

In March 2011, to the Obamas’ incredulity, Trump floated a racist conspiracy theory that Obama had not been born in the USA. ‘Growing up, no one knew him,’ he said. ‘I want him to show his birth certificate …’ Obama, rattled and astonished, mocked him but realized that Trump ‘was a spectacle and in the USA of 2011 that was a sort of power … Far from being ostracized for the conspiracies he’d peddled, he had never been bigger.’ Michelle felt that ‘The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited … But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks.’ Yet Trump still seemed to be a reality-show maven who posed no threat.

Now in the Situation Room in May 2011, as Obama watched the grainy image of the chopper making an emergency landing in Pakistan, he feared the worst, but the pilot managed to land: ‘I saw … grainy figures on the ground … entering the main house’ as the commandos worked their way up the three-storey house, passing groups of children, shooting three armed men who challenged them, a woman who was caught in crossfire, until they reached the top floor: they heard shots. But where was Geronimo?

THE KILLING OF GERONIMO

On the top floor of the mansion, the Seals encountered Osama bin Laden, ‘the man who had directed the murder of thousands and set in motion a tumultuous period of world history’. They shot him in the forehead and chest. In the Situation Room, ‘audible gasps’. Obama was ‘glued to the video feed’. Then suddenly ‘we heard … words we’d been waiting to hear’.

‘Geronimo ID’d … Geronimo EKIA.’ Enemy killed in action.

‘We got him,’ said Obama softly. A photo arrived of the dead terrorist: ‘I glanced briefly … it was him.’

Bin Laden’s body was carried off by the Seals, and was later buried in the Arabian Sea. When Obama announced the hit, he linked it to his own mission. ‘Americans can do whatever we set our mind to – that’s the story of our history,’ he said. ‘We can do these things because of who we are.’

Geronimo had been a risk. The new technologies offered easier ways to wage surgical warfare. On 30 September 2011, Obama approved the killing by drone of a terrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen. It was far from being the first of these killings by US ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’, devices that heralded a new era of warfare.^*

Trump did not run for the presidency in 2012. As Obama won his second term, an intrigue in Chongqing was settling the struggle of two princelings for the Chinese leadership. In November 2011, the body of an English financier, Neil Heywood, entangled in high Chinese politics via a powerful woman he called an ‘empress’, was discovered in a Chongqing hotel, destroying one candidate for the leadership – and opening the way for the other to be the all-powerful autocrat. The two rivals were both crown princes, sons of Mao’s grandees, leaders and heirs of what the Party called ‘lineages’ of family power. Bo Xilai, flamboyant son of one of Deng’s Eight Immortals, was an ambitious Politburo member, boss of what was later called the ‘independent kingdom’ of Chongqing, and candidate for the leadership.

His rival was Xi Jinping, son of Deng’s ally Xi Zhongxun, who had fallen from power and then returned to the top. Xi junior, like many of those who had been rusticated, combined the entitlement of the princelings with the plain, harsh habits of the peasants. The trauma had made the family closer; it had toughened Xi but it had not put him off the Party. On the contrary, it was the Party that had restored order and safety after the Cultural Revolution. But it was only after Mao’s death that Deng brought them back. When Xi senior retired, he arranged for his son to work at the Central Military Commission, the most important office after the Politburo’s Standing Committee. In 1986, when he was promoted to deputy secretary of Hebei province, he met someone who changed his destiny. Peng Liyuan was the most famous singer in China, a beautiful soprano who, sporting Red Army uniform, sang Party ballads. Xi, just emerged from an unhappy marriage to an ambassador’s daughter, ‘fell in love at first sight’ – according to his official biography – and they had a daughter. His stolid climb up the Party was far from meteoric. In 1997, he joined the Central Committee as an alternate, becoming a full member in 2002, but he was on his way. He was appointed first secretary of Zhejiang province and in 2007 joined the Standing Committee as a future leader. But just behind him came the flashier Bo, who caught up fast.