Autocrats: Can they bend without breaking?
It is the strongman leader’s nightmare conundrum: how to change course on a core policy without imperiling the aura of omniscience and political invulnerability on which his power ultimately rests.
And that’s now a problem for three of the world’s most firmly embedded autocrats – Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
They may well find a way out of their current policy predicaments and defuse the popular discontent making itself felt even in their tightly
