The lesson is that even in a post-American world, democracy has legs. The Middle East has vast populations of young, often educated, people with no prospect of a productive, dignified life. After the 9/11 attacks, many American commentators assumed they would turn to jihadist Islam, and a few have. But while al Qaeda gives young Arabs a chance to lash out at brutal, corrupt regimes and their American sponsors, its vision of society holds little appeal to populations that mostly yearn for East Asian-style economic opportunity, not Taliban-style primitivism. That kind of economic opportunity is possible under authoritarian rule, as China shows. But the claim that authoritarianism can bring economic dynamism isn’t likely to impress young Tunisians, Egyptians, or Syrians, given that their rulers have been trying dictatorship for decades now, and it has brought economic rot.

The U.S. is not suddenly irrelevant in the Middle East. American power still undergirds the ruling clans in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and some smaller Gulf states. U.S. power bolsters Mahmoud Abbas against Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Saad Hariri against Hezbollah in Lebanon. But the divide between America’s allies and its adversaries in the Middle East is not mostly about democracy, and as much as neoconservatives bash Obama, it wasn’t under George W. Bush either. The reason democracy may yet break out in the Arab world has less to do with the trajectory of American power than with the reality that even if American power declines, democracy still has no compelling ideological competitor. Jihadist Islam can’t answer people’s desire for economic progress. Chinese-style authoritarian capitalism isn’t something most authoritarian regimes can import, certainly not in the Middle East. In other words, it’s too early to count Fukuyama and the optimists out. It’s a good thing for the U.S. government to want democracy in the Middle East. But the important thing is that young Arabs want it even more.