Blake Hounshell' s excellent item on why analysis of despotic regimes is like celebrity gossip journalism can be found here. Says Hounshell:
A lot of cultural expertise and background knowledge goes into analysis of what a man like Vladimir Putin is thinking. But at the end of the day, as Dmitri Trenin put it, "Putin will probably beat any analyst at that game" because only he knows what he will do. But at least Putin appears to have a cold rationality to him, and the Chinese system generally follows fairly well-established rules of behavior, and decision making is a little less concentrated in the hands of one man. Try figuring out what Hugo Chavez is going to do next. That guy is crazy. I mean, skipping the U.N. to meet with Kevin Spacey? Who could have predicted that?
Read the whole thing.