As strife abates, countries are remembering why ties to Israel are a good bet.

The question of why totalitarian regimes suddenly and unexpectedly collapse has long perplexed researchers, generating no shortage of post-mortems and scholarly analyses after the fact. Accurately predicting the longevity of such regimes is a risky enterprise, and the subject of this report – an examination of how close the regime created by Russian President Vladimir Putin might be to its downfall – is inherently speculative in nature. Yet, as a direct witness to the collapse of the Soviet Union, I have a clear sense of how the sudden collapse of seemingly unshakable power can occur. What follows is my best assessment of the current state of Putin’s regime, drawing on both general observations and extensive personal experience.

Suddenly, Israel has a Syria problem. For years, officials in Jerusalem had banked on a relatively predictable balance of power with the neighboring regime of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. Despite Assad's enduring hostility toward the Jewish state and the inherent weakness of his regime, a tenuous status quo had been struck between the two countries, making it generally possible to anticipate how the Syrian dictator would behave. This has served as a perverse source of comfort over the past 14 months, as Israel has found itself preoccupied with the threat of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and more recently, that of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

When might meaningful change come to Iran, and how? Nearly 50 years after the country's last major political transformation – the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's radical Islamist revolt against the monarchy of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi – that question continues to bedevil policymakers, both in Washington and far beyond the Capital Beltway.