So, to succeed in the trough of graft, a politician must have a profusion of scandals, so many of them all at once such that they would eventually overwhelm the system’s capacity to cope.
The Beijing summit did not produce a major agreement between the great powers on the region, but it firmly established that Middle Eastern crises are now deeply tied to the great-power dialogue.
During the Cold War, the United States occupied the apex of this triangular dynamic, pitting China and the USSR against each other. Today, it is Beijing that occupies that apex.