Has the global spread of democracy run out of steam? For long, but especially since the end of the Cold War, democracy and free markets were touted as the twin answers to most ills. But while free-market tenets have come under strain in the present international financial crisis, with the very countries that espoused the self-regulating power of markets taking the lead to embrace principles of financial socialism to bail out their troubled corporate colossals, the spread of democracy is encountering increasingly strong head winds.

The strong-arm tactics Iranian authorities recently employed to quell demonstrations challenging President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election were no different than the use of state power by Burma's junta to suppress monk-led protests nearly two years ago. If there was any expectation of a "green revolution" in Iran or a "saffron revolution" in Burma, that hope lies crushed, at least for the time being. Indeed, the demonstrations that broke out in Iran represented not a democratic uprising but a struggle for ascendancy among those empowered by the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Between 1988 and 1990, as the Cold War was winding down, prodemocracy protests broke out in several parts of the world — from China and Burma to Eastern Europe. The protests helped spread political freedoms in Eastern Europe and inspired popular movements elsewhere that overturned dictatorships in countries as disparate as Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan and Chile. After the Soviet disintegration, even Russia emerged as a credible candidate for democratic reform.