Despite my strong personal interest in such topics, I think Harvey has a point.
I find it interesting that jimk started this thread, which we all know would be prohibited on the forum where he is titled "Travel Correspondent." I understand sbooker's curiosity about a foreign political system about which many of us here can provide insight.
The 2024 election was a single topic of broad general interest. When it went off on a tangent, I separated and then closed the tangent thread.
I think it would be a bad idea for multiple political threads to be active at the same time.
My 2 cents. I think it's very difficult to predict when authoritarian and/or fragile regimes may fall. Exhibit A was Saddam Hussein. After getting his @$$ kicked in 1991, I suspect the Saudis assured the Bush administration that Saddam wouldn't last. Of course the Saudis wanted an internal Sunni coup, not an uprising by the Kurds and Shiites. Conventional wisdom was wrong; Saddam successfully maintained his repressive regime until the American invasion of 2003. It is amply evident that most Iranians hate the theocracy, yet it has persisted for 45 years, longer than Stalin or Mao. Closer to home, Maduro persists in Venezuela. The U.S. should think about doing something there, because it exacerbates our immigration issue, as the Syrian situation did for Europe over the last decade.
In retrospect it's now clear that Assad was propped up by Iran, Hezbollah and Russia. Analogies to that include:
1) South Vietnam fell 2 years after the U.S. left.
2) The Soviet client regime in Afghanistan fell 3 years after Gorbachev pulled out. Recall that pundits predicted it would only be a few months.
3) Then there was the U.S. exit from Afghanistan in 2021.
Is a collapse of Putin's regime next?
The above examples should make us very modest about predictions. The fall of the Soviet Empire in 1989 and 1991 was not well forecast either.
However, losing wars was not good for Czarist Russia. There was
mass unrest in 1905 after the humiliating loss to Japan. And surely the bleeding of WWI was the precipitating cause of 1917. But if I were to hazard a guess, Putin will more likely survive as Saddam did.
