The Terrible TwosCan Washington prevent the turbulent Arab Spring countries from going the way of the post-Soviet states?BY JAMES TRAUB | FEBRUARY 15, 2013We have reached the second anniversary of the Arab Spring, but no one is celebrating; the divisions inside the "post-revolutionary" countries of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya have become so pronounced, and have provoked so much turbulence and violence, that a sense of grim foreboding has almost entirely eclipsed the giddy atmosphere of 2011. Optimism says that we are witnessing the inevitable birth pangs of democracy; pessimism says that the joyous scenes of two years ago will degenerate into yet deeper political and sectarian strife.I have been trying to think about analogies that could offer some guidance for what the future holds. The obvious one is Eastern Europe after 1989 -- there, too, millions of people flooded the streets to demand freedom, overwhelming the benumbed autocracies which had ruled over them. But the two situations resemble one another only in their birth: Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and the like had long traditions of liberal and even democratic rule, and shucked off communism as an alien and despised ideology. Moreover, Eastern Europe was pretty rich by global standards. A slightly closer analogy is Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s; but nations like Brazil and Argentina left behind military rule through "pacted" transitions in which political elites agreed to surrender their power, easing social tensions and creating consensus around democratic rule.Larry Diamond, the democracy theorist at Stanford University, suggested to me that the most useful analogy is the post-Soviet space, where a dozen new nations with no prior experience of democratic rule left behind a hated system and struggled to create something new. This is not a particularly encouraging comparison. As Diamond points out in his 2008 book, The Spirit of Democracy, nine of those states are authoritarian while the other three -- Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova -- are "illiberal, even questionably democratic, and unstable."Guarded optimism on the Arab Spring -- if one can still use that inspirational term --consists of the recognition that societies deeply damaged by autocratic rule and economic failure take a generation to heal. It is still very early days. This is still my view. But the Soviet Union passed into history in 1991, and there's precious little democratic light at the end of the Russian tunnel. Steven Sestanovich, a Russia scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, points out that the crowds that filled the streets of Moscow in 1991 were every bit as large, passionate, and as filled with a sense of destiny as those in Tahrir Square. The old system felt just as discredited. But the democratic order created under Boris Yeltsin was simply too weak to curb the energies unleashed by the colossal scramble for wealth as Russia privatized its state-owned resources. Into the ensuing vacuum stepped a strongman, Vladimir Putin.Egypt's revolutionaries have begun to think of President Mohammed Morsy as their Putin, consolidating power and crushing dissent. But it's much more likely, as Sestanovich observes, that Morsy will prove to be Egypt's