At 9.39am on 18 February, Steve Bannon walked into his basement studio in Washington DC, placed three iPhones on the table, hoisted the blinds and started ripping newspapers out of plastic packets: the Washington Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal. His television show, WarRoom, which appears on the cable channel Real America’s Voice, was due to go live in 21 minutes. “Have [you] got a map yet?” he demanded of his young producer like a Napoleonic marshal. “I want the Western Hemisphere and eastern Europe.”
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was in Saudi Arabia, meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, drawing lines on a map of Ukraine as they discussed a possible deal to end the war. Rubio told the press there were “incredible opportunities to partner with the Russians, geopolitically, on issues of common interest”. Bannon wanted his team to prepare a map for the upcoming episode of WarRoom to illustrate what he called “hemispheric defence”: the Trump administration’s plan to end the war in order to pivot to the coming war with China. “It’s all part of a piece,” he told me. The nationalist broadcaster and former senior adviser to Donald Trump believed his years-long ambition was within reach: a partnership between the United States and Russia.
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