In the mid-1980s, although its dissolution was nearly at hand, few were predicting the complete demise of the Soviet Union. But when it came to the politics of leadership succession, a country that had been widely feared or respected for decades had already begun making a mockery of itself.

In the mid-1980s, although its dissolution was nearly at hand, few were predicting the complete demise of the Soviet Union. But when it came to the politics of leadership succession, a country that had been widely feared or respected for decades had already begun making a mockery of itself.

By the late 1970s, Leonid Brezhnev, the once-vigorous man who had shunted aside Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 to lead the country, had been reduced to a shell of his former self by years of heavy smoking, hard drinking, and emphysema. He visibly huffed and puffed as he walked with a shuffling gait, and he occasionally slurred his words or displayed obvious memory lapses.

After Brezhnev, things in Moscow only got worse. He was succeeded by the former intelligence chief, Yuri Andropov, who was regarded in almost equal measure as a reformist thinker and as a corrupt and sternly authoritarian figure. No one knows which of these traits might have prevailed over time, because time was the one thing Andropov did not have. He died at age 69, his power lasting only 15 months, during the last year of which he suffered total kidney failure.

Andropov was followed by the scarcely-remembered Konstantin Chernenko, another heavy smoker afflicted with emphysema and heart problems. His rule only lasted for 13 months. The historian John Lewis Gaddis said of the ephemeral Chernenko that he was “an enfeebled geriatric so zombie-like as to be beyond assessing intelligence reports, alarming or not.” Chernenko’s death in office paved the way in 1985, finally, for the comparatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev.

But by then it was the Soviet system itself that was running out of time.

Existential crises linked to the vagaries of succession politics are typically thought to be the province of authoritarian systems that lack regular and transparent rules for the passing of power from one leader to the next. But for the past three years, it is precisely this specter that has hung over the world’s oldest electoral democracy, the United States.

This has never been clearer than in the past two weeks. First, the mental competence of President Joe Biden, 81, was called into question in a report by Robert Hur, a special counsel appointed to look into the president’s improper handling of classified documents, and then by new flights of disturbing rhetoric by former President Donald Trump, 77, raised renewed profound questions—or should........

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