Whether you are a despot or merely an oligarch, you are likely to be looking longingly at Aleppo at the moment. This is what every leader of an authoritarian regime could ever dream of: a superpower that will support you, that will help you to keep your ruling class in power, that will help you destroy your enemies, but without one-hand tied behind its back; without making you spout pious formulas about peace and democracy.
Of course, the deal is that you become a satellite state. But that hardly matters. From Belarus to Chechnya, Russian satellite regimes allow local elites to live high on the hog, without pretense, without shame.
If military support isn’t what you need, and you have raw materials to exploit, then China is also a tempting superpower for many regimes in Africa. You can merrily sell off your assets, collect the payoffs, distribute them to your cronies and to your house in the South of France. So long as China gets what it needs to build gadgets for export to the west, what does it care?
