For petro-autocrats, is that all there is?

When you are the wealthy and powerful leader of a petro-state, what gets you up in the morning? Saving your job — which has occupied Saudi King Abdullah on and off — can be motivational. But when you have $130 billion to throw around for such purposes, it still goes only so far. The same with fun missile strikes at a neighbor, the one-time preoccupation of Saddam Hussain — you can aim at only so many targets before it gets old.

Which brings us to the time-honored geopolitics of the court entertainer. In 1801, Alessandro Volta regaled French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte about his exciting invention of the battery, and Bonaparte named Volta a knight and a count. Three centuries previous, Leonardo da Vinci worked under the tutelage of Milanese duke Ludovico Sforza, for whom he designed the airplane and the tank long before the internal combustion engine made them feasible.

The capacity to command such fealty from the stars of the creative world has always been a marker of a leader’s arrival. It is street cred, an integral factor of geopolitical power.

But autocrats must be cautious because creative souls can also be mercurial. In the version of our age, last weekend Sting backed out of a long-advertised singing gig for the birthday of Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the softest of Central Asia’s autocrats (pictured above). Why did Sting stand him up? He was shocked to discover from folks with Amnesty International that there is a labor strike going on in the republic. "Hunger strikes, imprisoned workers and tens of thousands on strike represents a virtual picket line which I have no intention of crossing," Sting said.

Joanna Lillis accuses Sting of sanctimony. Josh Foust says it’s part of Kazakhstan going "bizarro." What about plain bad manners? (In the interest of fairness, we note that Sting may be just suffering a lapse since in 2009 he sang for Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov, despite the latter’s "appalling reputation in the field of human rights, as well as the environment," as he responded to later criticism.)

Elton John did not back out of his appearance before Nazarbayev. Mariah Carey and Beyonce showed up to entertain the family of Muammar Qaddafi. Sharon Stone (in preparation for her pro-democracy venture to Georgia), Goldie Hawn and Gerard Depardieu provided fawning attention to Russia’s shy petro-leader Vladimir Putin. We ask Sting — are you not a professional?

Nazarbayev will recover by and large from the slight. But he may also wonder whether in the recesses of the minds of Kazakhstan’s clan leaders and populace, and those of neighboring Central Asian leaders and fellow dictators further afield, there is a shred of doubt regarding his rightful place in the pantheon of petro-leaders. He will ponder the innocent snicker. Such is the lot of kings who choose to arise from bed.