Robert Amsterdam

Below is an excerpt from Michael Barone's opinion column "Two Troublesome Powers."

The Russian political system has come to resemble the political system of Mexico from 1929 to 2000, which was something of an absolute monarchy, with term limits. The candidate of the ruling PRI was always elected president, the legislature was a rubber stamp, and the incumbent president chose his successor. How this worked in practice is the subject of "Perpetuating Power: How Mexican Presidents Were Chosen," a fascinating book by former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda. He interviewed four Mexican presidents, who discussed frankly how they had been selected by their predecessors and how they, in turn, chose their successors. Only someone as well connected as Castaneda, who grew up as part of the PRI elite (his father was also foreign minister) could have elicited the almost Shakespearean accounts.

The continuing theme was that the outgoing president sought to exert power in the reign of his handpicked successor -- and failed. The pattern was set early on. The originator of the PRI system, Plutarco Calles, tried to run things after his choice as successor, Lazaro Cardenas, took office. Cardenas called Calles into his office and told him that he had to stop and he could no longer live in Mexico. Calles moved to California, although he was eventually allowed to return to Mexico.

My guess is that Putin, as he decides whom to choose as the new president, hopes to continue to exert power himself. And that he will probably find himself shut out, as Calles was. Or as Boris Yeltsin, who single-handedly chose Putin to succeed himself in 1999, was.

The problem for the United States is that this kind of regime will tend to behave less predictably than the collective regime of China. In Putinist Russia, as in PRI Mexico, each new leader may lurch from policy to policy. Many such changes will not be predictable, because politicians contending to be selected by one man for a position of paramount power will not show him anything they think he doesn't want to see. As Castaneda's book shows, one-man rule tends to produce a sycophantic court and new leaders who do things no one expected.

Thus, Putin has veered off Yeltsin's course, suppressing the free press, menacing independent leaders in former Soviet republics and opposing efforts to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons. We can only hope that the next Russian president veers off Putin's course, as well.