Among many of the systemic flaws of autocracy, degeneration at the top, epitomized by ever weaker leaders, is progressive and incurable. The exclusive and closed nature of autocracy bars many talented individuals from rising to senior government positions, owing to a pattern of succession that rewards political loyalty over capabilities.

Poverty can be made history only if the bad habits of autocracy and corruption are replaced with democracy, good governance and accountability.

Through some basic change, change like improving transparency, change like promoting self direction and collaboration, encouraging collaboration, not autocracy, the things like having a results focus.

Traditionally Asian Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have resumed the tribal forms of autocracy they practiced throughout the centuries. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have in essence become their presidents wholly owned family fiefs.

But a knowledge economy cannot operate with muzzled minds. Even the smartest authoritarian rulers are unable to manage complexity on this scale not to mention the corruption that inevitably breeds in the protected shadows of autocracy.

America s interests are now so closely intertwined with China that a policy to isolate or confront it is not feasible. Even on the issue of democracy, the US prefers to lecture other dictatorships rather than the world s largest autocracy.

The region s entire value system a political culture forged by autocracy is being transformed. Arab men and women have shed the sense of humiliation and inferiority that despotism imposed on them and that fostered desperation, anger, violence, and insularity.

It wasn t long ago that Turkey appeared to be a bright beacon of democracy and moderation in a region accustomed to autocracy and radicalism. Now it looks more like a country heading towards authoritarianism at home and embracing adventurism abroad.

Burma failed miserably, and, despite belated efforts to make the best of terrible circumstances, so has ASEAN. In the end, of course, it doesn t matter much whether or not we ascribe the failures of autocracy and non intervention to anything specifically Asian.

Europe s technocrats worked in the service of security ahead of the EU s enlargement in 2004 to the former communist states of Central Europe. The EU s bureaucracy played a key part in helping those countries to navigate the complex transition from socialist autocracy to capitalist democracy.

Even a disorderly regime transition, however traumatic and chaotic in the short term, could yield a system that, on balance, is an improvement over a stagnant, repressive, and corrupt autocracy. Indonesia s new democracy may be imperfect, but has thrived despite its initial poor prospects.

After decades of autocracy, this vast archipelago of a country just concluded a presidential election that has solidified its transition to democracy. India, proud of its long standing democracy and fresh from its own elections, shares a border with Myanmar and can also assist efforts there.

Yet the Kremlin understands that something is needed to replace them as Russia adapts to its new oil fueled autocracy. Solzhenitsyn, one of the most famous and heroic dissidents of the Soviet era, now seems certain to become a towering figure in the iconography of Putinism.

The larger strategic rivalry between the world s largest autocracy and its biggest democracy has also sharpened, despite their fast rising trade. In the past decade, bilateral trade has risen more than 20 fold, to 73.9 billion, making it the only area in which bilateral relations have thrived.

Recent history has witnessed a series of triumphs that humanity can justly take pride in. These have involved the ending of colonialism, the limiting of autocracy, the strengthening of democratic values and institutions, the rise of liberalism and enhanced partnership between Governments and civil society in development.

If the 2011 uprisings had not occurred, we would now be witnessing another year of autocracy, with more talk of dynastic successions. That would mean further humiliation for ordinary people, who bear the brunt of corruption, as government officials and their crony capitalists continued to siphon off public funds.

But this correlation goes missing when one looks at the dimension of time rather than space. Countries that become democracies do not, on average, achieve faster economic growth after their political transition and, vice versa, democracies that fail and relapse into autocracy do not, on average, do worse than before.

A fortnight before Obama s Cairo speech, a delegation of the United Nations Security Council visited four African countries to express concern about the resurgence of unconstitutional change on the continent. Africa does indeed present a gloomy picture, with countries virtually crumbling to dust as a result of autocracy and stagnation.

In essence, the Chinese government must transform a predatory state into a nurturing one, and treat private entrepreneurs as creators of wealth rather than targets of extraction. In nearly all other countries, such a transformation was accomplished by establishing the rule of law and or moving from autocracy to democracy.

Indeed, despite their geopolitical dissonance, the world s most powerful democracy and its most powerful autocracy have much in common when it comes to how they approach international law. For example, the precedent that the US set in a 1984 International Court of Justice (ICJ) case filed by Nicaragua still resonates in China, underscoring that might remains right in international relations.

Despite Erdoğan s personal authoritarian tendencies, which are obvious, it would be misleading to regard the current protests purely as a conflict between democracy and autocracy. After all, the success of Erdoğan s populist Justice and Development Party, as well as the increasing presence of religious symbols and customs in public life, is a result of more democracy in Turkey, not less.

But the lack of transparency in this type of autocracy has also led to massive corruption and huge blunders, not to mention the growing signs of ecological ruin. Chinese critics of the government, or even those who simply wish to report mistakes or wrongdoing, are silenced with a heavy hand beatings in police stations, draconian jail sentences, or even murder.

A second lesson of recent events in Iran and Turkey is that the spectrum of government in the Middle East and North Africa runs from autocracy and theocracy to varieties of managed democracy. No country qualifies as a full liberal democracy that is, as a political system that combines free and fair elections with constitutional protections of individual rights for all its citizens.

Unfortunately, this double standard sends a message that democratic empowerment in any society is possible only if it is in the interest of the great powers. No one has a greater interest in broad acceptance of this noxious idea that promotion of human freedom is nothing more than a geopolitical tool than the world s largest, oldest, and most powerful autocracy, China.

Plato held that moral progress is essentially an intellectual process, driven by reasoned arguments a stance that many of the most influential moral philosophers, from Baruch Spinoza and Immanuel Kant to John Rawls and Peter Singer, have supported. Yet many other philosophers have rejected the autocracy of reason in humans moral lives, agreeing with David Hume s assertion that reason, in itself, is perfectly inert.

Indeed, predictions that Cuba might now shift toward a Chinese style model of political autocracy and economic opening might be accurate only in the short term. In the longer term, the end of the Castro era, together with improved relations with the US, is likely to bring about a repeat of Spain s transition toward full fledged liberal democracy after the fall of Francisco Franco.

Russia has most of the usual features of rentier states autocracy, weak political and judicial institutions, arbitrary governance, lack of the rule of law, little transparency, restraints on freedom of expression, widespread corruption, cronyism, and nepotism. Also common to rentier states are short investment horizons, vulnerability to commodity price volatility euphoria when they surge, crisis when they collapse and an underdeveloped and uncompetitive manufacturing sector.

For the Unites States, the European Union, Japan, and other members of the Old West, the good news is that most of the emerging powers that are positioning themselves for a more active global role are also democracies. Within the G 20, only two states China and Saudi Arabia explicitly do not want to be liberal democracies, while a third, Russia, has developed into an autocracy with a democratic façade.