Doubts are stoked by the Great Recession that slammed prosperous democracies while barely scraping communist China; the crisis of the euro; anxieties about the Arab Spring; and the inability of Japan, Europe and the United States to make tough fiscal choices as their populations age.

The question here is no different than in Europe or the United States: Can democracies still rouse themselves to do hard things? Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, the sixth Japanese leader in as many years and by many accounts the most sensible, is trying to provide a novel answer.

It’s also possible to venture a theory as to why that’s so.

We’re unlikely to be hear about a young man named Shin Dong-hyuk, who was bred, like a farm animal, inside a North Korean prison camp after guards ordered his prisoner-parents to mate. But Shin arguably has as much to teach about Korea’s past and future as about the cycle of negotiation, bluster and broken promises over the nuclear issue.

You could call it nostalgia liberals versus accountability liberals.

Newt Gingrich is promising big things, like a colony on the moon and a private-account Social Security plan, with the federal government insuring us against any losses.

Six months ago, that might have seemed an unfair question, or at least premature. The roster of candidates often starts out looking like the “seven dwarfs,” only to have some rise in stature while others fall away.

If, as seems likely, enough Republicans manage to overcome their sometime scruples and join President Obama before last call, Washington will prove once more that bipartisanship is alive and well — as long as it is in the service of digging the deficit hole deeper.

Fifteen political prisoners who embarked on a hunger strike to protest their confinement have been denied water as punishment. Eight of them, according to Amnesty International, have been sent to cells built for dogs, which have no light, no mats or bedding, and insufficient space for humans to stand.

Americans who deem South Korea’s education system a model (President Obama, among others) might be surprised at one message leaders here are delivering to their youth: Drop out, please.

Well, that may be a slight exaggeration. But South Korea’s government has decided that too many people are going to college. It is working to restore the luster of a high school diploma as a stopping point for some and to establish a vocational track for others.

Here are some things South Korean President Lee Myung-bak probably will not dwell on when he addresses a joint session of Congress on Thursday afternoon:

●How U.S. fighter jets inadvertently killed two of his siblings as the jets hunted communist infiltrators in his village during the Korean War;

In the better part of a decade that the United States has needed to negotiate, ponder, renegotiate, fight over, ponder some more and finally ratify a free-trade agreement with South Korea, a lot has changed in this neighborhood.

The words of caution might have come from a Communist Party leader, once again lecturing the West not to push too hard on human rights. But, no; this was the party’s nemesis, the Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet, explaining in an interview Thursday why he favors “gradual change.”

In the decades after World War II, as Japan, Germany, France and Britain recovered and America’s share of the global economy declined, we could have accepted the inevitability of a multipolar world.

On the most vexing challenge facing the country — how not to go bankrupt — he hasn’t lived up to the promise.

In 1988, the regime in Burma, a once-promising nation of 50 million, slaughtered unarmed university students to derail democracy. In 2007 the junta gunned down pacifist Buddhist monks in their robes and sandals.

And if so, will the United States be nimble enough to take advantage?

There’s nothing blessed in the suffering of civilians forced to flee the fighting or subjected, in the besieged city of Misurata, to shelling by forces loyal to dictator Moammar Gaddafi. If Gaddafi isn’t forced from power soon, stalemate could evolve into disaster.

But what if what we all know is wrong? What if history is proving George W. Bush to have been the more adaptable, and Barack Obama the more rigid — or, to put it in positive terms, consistent?

But there are Republican doctrinal fantasies that may be more dangerous: the conviction that taxes can always go down, but never up, for example, and the gathering consensus among Republican leaders that human-caused climate change does not exist.

A member of Congress for almost two decades, the Florida Republican spearheaded the move to allow airline pilots to carry guns and wants to privatize a good chunk of airport security operations.

Since what he was looking for was “coherence” or “consistency” in U.S. policy, it’s no wonder he was momentarily stumped. An hour-long conversation with the president, as polite as he was, brought home how badly that quality is missing from U.S. policy on drugs, guns, trade and democracy promotion, when viewed from south of the border.

If the Obama administration had been following all along what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton described as its policy here Saturday, U.S. officials might know more about the leaders of the extraordinary demonstrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square.