The World

Bo had a flaw – his wife, Gu Kailai, herself the daughter of a general. Together they had recruited Heywood as their fixer, in return for commissions. But Heywood, fluent in Chinese and married to a Chinese woman, got too close. When Gu demanded he divorce his wife and devote himself to her interests, he complained she was ‘behaving like an old-fashioned Chinese aristocrat or empress’. Whether he had an affair with Gu or demanded a vast commission or both, Gu recruited the Chongqing police chief who entertained Heywood then poisoned him with cyanide, declaring later that his death was from alcohol poisoning. They cremated the body. When the police chief feared he was about to be killed himself and sought asylum in the US embassy, the murder was exposed.

In 2012, Bo and Gu were arrested and condemned, their patrons on the Standing Committee were purged and their rival Xi emerged as the leader. As Obama led the US in holding pattern, Xi directed what he called the ‘resurrection’ of China. But it was a more singular moment than that: America was starting a process of self-laceration that altered its world mission. As the bipolar system was a memory and American paramountcy was wavering, China, which many times had dominated its own region, would, for the first time, join the World Game.

 

 

* In Latin America, the end of the struggle against Communism accelerated the fall of juntas in Argentina and Brazil, which then became democracies; in Paraguay, the vicious Hispano-Bavarian tyrant Stroessner, who had protected Josef Mengele, was deposed; in Haiti, ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, who at nineteen had inherited the throne from his father Papa Doc, claimed he was ‘firm as a monkey tail’ but, rocked by protests and pressured by Washington, flew into exile. In Colombia and Mexico, America feared a new export, not Communism but cocaine. In 1989 in Colombia, the rise of a minor Colombian cigarette smuggler from Medellín in the late 1970s had transformed the cocaine business: Pablo Escobar, paunchy and moustachioed, had created a business – offering his victims ‘money or lead’ – that manufactured cocaine and delivered it to its American markets. Now at his height, he exported eighty tons a month, bringing in $70 million a day, so much that he subverted and corrupted the fragile Colombian state. When threatened, he launched a murderous terror in which his assassins killed 25,000 people with bullet and bomb, even blowing up a civilian airliner while, worth $30 billion and commanding his own army, he lived in splendour at his spacious ranches. When Escobar was arrested, he was so powerful he was able to build his own prison, and escape when he wished. America intervened to help Colombia: on 2 December 1993, Escobar, at the age of forty-four, was finally hunted down and killed by American and Colombian commandos, his business commandeered by a more discreet cartel from Cali. After they too were arrested, the business was taken over by Mexican narcotraficantes who lethally undermined the Mexican state.

* Nazarbayev was an astute player of the system, orchestrating the overthrow of his boss to become the youngest premier in the Union. ‘I was an ambitious young man and Party membership was the route to all advancement,’ he explained. ‘If I had thought that it would have helped my ambition in those days to be a Buddhist I would have become a Buddhist.’

* Except in Albania, still a Communist dictatorship. Hoxha had died in 1985 but his chosen heir Ramiz Alia was still hoping to hang on – which he did until December 1990.

* In 2020, the Supreme Leader orchestrated the election of his former pupil, the Butcher of Teheran, Raisi, as president.

* In November 1990, Thatcher, having won an unprecedented three elections, but showing signs of deluded grandeur, promising to ‘go on and on’, was overthrown by her own cabinet – she was the longest serving twentieth-century PM and the ablest since Churchill.

* The US and UK were in denial. This author was travelling through the Caucasus and central Asia at this time; on his return to Moscow he was debriefed by both British and US intelligence officers who enquired if he had seen any nuclear weaponry while assuring him that ‘The USSR is here to stay.’

* Sometimes Bush’s entourage was more realistic than Gorbachev’s. When Jim Baker, secretary of state, discussed Ukraine with Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev, he wondered if there would be war. There were twelve million Russians in Ukraine, replied Yakovlev, ‘many in mixed marriages, so what kind of war would that be?’ Baker replied: ‘A normal war.’