With hindsight, the last time Vladimir Putin visited Xi Jinping in China, just three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, was a moment of hubris ¡ª two supremely confident leaders marking their bid to shake up a world organized by and for the U.S. and its allies.
Well, they certainly shook it up, even if not in the way they intended. Putin¡¯s catastrophic error in attempting to invade a neighbor the size of France as though it were a glorified training exercise has, by some estimates, resulted in halving Russia¡¯s military strength.
The supercar that was China¡¯s economy, meanwhile, has sputtered into the slow lane, with forecasts of when it will overtake the U.S. in current dollar terms pushed into the future. So, it¡¯s tempting to imagine Xi and an increasingly dependent Putin humbled at their reunion, the sinews of their ¡°unlimited¡¯¡¯ bond already tearing. But that, to borrow a wonderful phrase from Sarah Paine, a professor of history and grand strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, would be playing ¡°half-court tennis¡± ¡ª the kind where you never see the next ball coming because you aren¡¯t paying attention to the other side¡¯s game.
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