Street protests, Asia's most footloose media and grass-root uprisings, such as the Songs-for-Life movement, ultimately failed. The most forceful figures - from Phibun Songkhram in the 1950s, to 1990s coup leader Suchinda Krapayoon and billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra - always seemed to win and then cling to power by corrupting almost every arm of the state.

But after last week's court ruling to ban Mr Thaksin's ruling party, the Thai Rak Thai, from politics for five years, many local commentators have renewed hope for democracy and justice. While some international human rights groups have accused the military junta of guiding the court to evict an elected government from power, many pragmatic Thais interpret western-style democracy as only the means to an end.

For them, justice, equality and good governance remain a higher priority, even if it means royal intervention, coups, temporary military rule and curbs on politicians and their websites and TV broadcasts.

Within this context, many view the court verdict as the culmination of an elaborate Thai way of dancing a leader drunk on power out of the political scene without the brute force and violence of the past.

In effect, the anti-Thaksin camp drew on the country's reverence for the Buddhist Middle Path of avoiding extremes in order to diffuse political passions and tire out the tyrants.

Could these moderate tactics work in Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia? Though sharing Buddhist foundations, they have lacked Thailand's burgeoning middle class and the influence brought in by foreign investors and some 12 million tourists a year. But this could change over the long term, as China and Japan compete with each other for economic domain by pouring money, asphalt and concrete into Southeast Asia. In the short-term, Japan, which is expected to sign investment pacts with Laos and Cambodia soon, appears willing to overlook the suppression of rights in those countries.

Japan, China and other foreign venture capitalists need friendly relations with the nominal communists in Indochina to realise their dreams of massive regional trade by connecting ports from Moulmein in southern Myanmar to Danang in Vietnam and the Mekong River outposts in southern China.

With money to be made, the United States also does not openly support the overthrow of communist regimes. In the early 21st-century, trade, not revolution, is the mantra of the region.

As an older generation of diehard Lao rebels have discovered, it's no longer the 1970s. In pre-dawn raids across California this week, hundreds of US federal agents arrested nine people allegedly plotting to overthrow the Vientiane government.

The mostly ethnic Hmong members 'planned to use AK-47 automatic rifles, Stinger missiles, LAW rockets, anti-tank rockets and other arms and munitions to topple [the] Lao government and reduce government buildings in Vientiane to rubble,' the California public prosecutor said.

The suspects include Vietnam war veteran Harrison Jack, 60, and Hmong general Vang Pao, 77, who led a CIA-funded 'secret army' in a losing battle against communists and then fled to the US in 1975. They could each face life imprisonment.

'Fortunately, we were able to disrupt their activities before their plot evolved into a coup against a country with which the United States is at peace,' Michael Sullivan, a federal police official who headed the probe, was reported as saying.

With the debacle in Iraq weakening arguments for US-led intervention from North Korea to Darfur, an outside invasion of Myanmar also seems highly unlikely.

The Harvard-educated Thant Myint-U, grandson of U Thant, secretary-general of the United Nations from 1961 to 1971, has also argued in favour of trade in his book The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma. A former UN worker in Phnom Penh, who often visits Myanmar, he criticises the west for believing that sanctions would force changes in the junta, because 'much more than any other part of Burmese [Myanmese] society, the army will weather another 40 years of isolation just fine'.

Rather than further isolating the country, he argues that, with an increase in foreign investment and tourism, 'the conditions for political change would emerge over the next decade or two'.

The problem is that these foreigners are sidestepping Myanmar in favour of booming India, China or Vietnam, despite the 'constructive engagement' policies of the trade-hungry Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Some criticise China for propping up the junta with its 'two-legged' policy of economic co-operation without overt political interference. Rather than making China a scapegoat, Europeans should play a more active role in helping the former British colony. From Myanmar to Laos and Cambodia, empowering the middle class, which helped overthrow Mr Thaksin and his government, might help ordinary citizens challenge the strongmen in the future.

Christopher Johnson is a Tokyo-based journalist and author of Siamese Dreams