It is remarkable how quickly the world has given up on the popular uprising in Burma, abandoning the country once more to the oppressive rule of the generals who have run it with singular incompetence and brutality since 1962.

The reasoning is simple: with the failure of US President George W. Bush’s democratisation drive in the Middle East, democracy itself is in worldwide decline; in Burma, where troops gunned down and jailed the marching Buddhist monks, the army is too strong and the protesters too weak for democracy to have a chance; let us therefore return to the uncomfortable but familiar status quo ante.

This analysis is too hasty and the conclusion flawed. Such arguments recall the pessimism about the Soviet bloc. Even after the wave of east European revolutions had begun in 1989, I remember watching an academic explain on British television how Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania would survive because he had forged a nation and ruled it with a rod of iron. The next day he was dead.

Burma’s armed forces are strong – they number 400,000 in a nation of 50m – but they lack legitimacy and the reclusive generals are deeply unpopular. This is not an Asian authoritarian government, like those of China or Vietnam, that has delivered growth and prosperity. A third of Burmese children under five are malnourished. As Lee Kuan Yew, founding father of Singapore, put it in a recent interview, the generals are “rather dumb” when it comes to the economy.

But the army – it is argued by apologists for the junta – is the only institution capable of unifying the ethnically diverse peoples of Burma. Not true. The army has steadily increased its numbers but has struggled for decades to unite Burma by force; it has finally engineered an uneasy peace across most of the country only by resorting to extreme violence, by driving its enemies into exile and by co-opting tribal warlords and giving them control of smuggling and the opium trade. This is not a recipe for long-term stability.

Although it is the army, not the opposition, that has a dismal record, it has become fashionable to dismiss Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader, as a naive, foreign-educated liberal with scant understanding of her own country.

Not true either. Her father, Aung San, was the founder of the modern Burmese army and she has always taken care to show respect for the military and to pursue national unity. Her National League for Democracy and its allies won an overwhelming victory across Burma in the 1990 election (the result of which was never honoured by the junta), winning even in constituencies inhabited predominantly by soldiers and their families.

It is also absurd for foreign governments that have connived with Burma’s military dictators to blame Ms Suu Kyi and the NLD for lacking experience in government. She has spent 12 of the past 17 years under house arrest or in prison. Most of the NLD’s 392 elected members of parliament have either been jailed, exiled or silenced, and 73 have died.

Authoritarian critics of Ms Suu Kyi have nevertheless seized on remarks by Thant Myint-U, grandson of a former UN secretary-general, who rather unconvincingly criticises her politics and argues strongly against economic sanctions (which she supports) in the closing pages of The River of Lost Footsteps (Faber 2007), his history of Burma. The critics should keep reading. Mr Thant Myint-U also insists that only a free and liberal society can provide stability and prosperity in such a diverse country. “That a democratic government for Burma should be the aim is not in doubt,” he writes.

The junta’s only real asset, other than fear, is the support of Burma’s powerful and unprincipled neighbours, trading partners and arms suppliers: China, India, Thailand and Singapore.

Full economic sanctions would fail not because they are wrong but because they would not be fully implemented. It was always a stretch in any case to imagine Chinese leaders who oversaw the shooting of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing in 1989 wagging their fingers at Burmese military commanders for doing the same. When he ran Tibet in the 1980s, Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, declared martial law and cracked down hard on protesting Buddhist monks.

The futility of sanctions, however, does not mean the Burmese should be left to their fate. Burma’s military rulers have been caught off-guard by the protests and have reluctantly agreed to negotiate with the detained Ms Suu Kyi. An embarrassed Singapore government has shown uncharacteristic leniency in allowing Burmese to hold unauthorised demonstrations outside their embassy in Singapore.

It is time for Asians to show that freedom and human rights are more than “western” concepts. A good start would be for the Singaporean, Malaysian and other leaders of the Association of South East Asian Nations, which welcomed Burma into its ranks in 1997, to shun men who order the killing of unarmed monks.

The world should maintain the diplomatic pressure on the junta and its allies and reject the notion that Burma is a hopeless case because “democratisation is dead and popular revolutions do not work”. Try telling that to the Iranians (1979), the Filipinos (1986), the Poles (1989), the South Africans (1994) or the Indonesians (1998), to mention just a few. Revolutions happen. It is just hard to predict when.

victor.mallet@ft.com