Time to stop dreaming. Democracy's march has come to a bruising halt. The politicians in Washington may still be arguing about Iraq, but everyone agrees that George W. Bush's democratising experiment is over. The lofty promise of the US president's 2005 inaugural speech - a generational commitment to the advance of global freedom - has turned, well, to sand.

So we are told. You can see why. America's neoconservatives, the shock troops of Mr Bush's mission to remake the Middle East, now languish in political exile. In Europe, Tony Blair's departure from office has robbed liberal interventionism, neoconservatism's gentler cousin, of its most eloquent apostle.