Face It, Putin: China Is Just Not That Into Your Gas Pipeline
The benefits to Xi Jinping of playing hard to get are obvious. That sound you hear is a dictator’s heart breaking.
A dictator’s heart breaking.
Photographer: Sergei Bobylyov/AFP/Getty Images
Underneath all the bombast and saber rattling that plays out whenever President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin meet up, there’s always an undertone that sounds more like a plot line from a high school film comedy.
You know the script: Mean-spirited cheerleader dumps her boring-but-dependable boyfriend in the hope of snaring the dreamy quarterback and being elected Prom King and Queen. The dreamy quarterback has a pathological fear of commitment, though, and gives her the runaround until she ends up being jilted on Prom Night. This painful experience gives an early glimpse of how lonely the world can be when you treat relationships as power transactions.