OPINION:
Sparked by the death in police custody of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini in September, a wave of popular protest, strikes and civil unrest against Iran’s dictatorship has spread throughout the country that shows no signs of slowing down. Students, middle- and working-class city dwellers and rural communities are courageously asserting their right to freedom of speech and assembly.
In China, brave demonstrators staged mass protests against China’s unrelenting COVID-19 lockdowns in November after an apartment fire killed 10 people in the provincial city of Urumqi. Beijing’s rigid and widely disliked “zero-COVID” policy reportedly impeded firefighters from reaching the victims in time.
Protests, which began against Iran’s brutal enforcement of its law requiring women to wear the hijab head covering, transformed into outrage and demands for regime change over the corrupt, failing command economy. Similarly, in China, demonstrators’ grievances over the Communist Party’s authoritarian COVID policies expanded to include human rights abuses against ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang province and China’s economic policy failures, with some even demanding President Xi Jinping step down just weeks after he secured an unprecedented third term as party general secretary.
Both Iran and China are now scrambling to defuse tension and intimidate their populations into submission. Mr. Xi’s government eased lockdown and quarantine policies, no longer forcing those who test positive for COVID-19 into government detention centers. Iran’s attorney general announced plans to disband Iran’s hated “morality police,” though it’s not clear how or when that will happen.
And both China and Iran brutally cracked down on demonstrations, even as they were adjusting the most oppressive policies that sparked the protests in the first place.
Iran’s security forces have targeted innocent women with shotgun fire to their faces and intimated doctors trying to treat wounded protesters. Last week, Iran publicly executed Majidreza Rahnavard after he was found guilty of stabbing to death two members of Iran’s Basij paramilitary militia, which serves under Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. In China, security forces have clashed brutally with protesters and suppressed dissent by arresting would-be protesters in their homes.
Both countries have tried unsuccessfully to use the domination of their domestic cyberspace to control the social media narrative and squelch critical voices and independent sources of news.
Democracies derive their legitimacy from representative governments, the consent of the governed and the right of every citizen to participate in real policy debates and free and fair elections. Corrupt dictatorships such as Iran and China are brittle because they depend entirely on performance to stay in power. As the collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrated, when economic, social and national security policies fail, there are no other options for citizens to change their rulers short of revolt and revolution.
President Kennedy proclaimed in his famous 1961 inaugural address that the U.S. was “unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.” He would have contrasted the brittle and brutal Iranian and Chinese dictatorships with the power of vibrant and free democracies.
And it was President Reagan who emphasized in a 1982 speech to the British Parliament that “regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.” The Great Communicator would have likewise recognized the opportunity today to “assist the campaign for democracy.”
The Biden administration has responded to Iran’s repression with new economic sanctions and National Security spokesman John Kirby has called out China’s brutal tactics. But Mr. Biden would do well to seize the moment as Kennedy or Reagan would have, with more aggressive public diplomacy to counter Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and Xi Jinping, who are falsely accusing foreign states of fomenting the unrest in their countries for which they alone are responsible.
I witnessed firsthand in my career how our closest allies appreciated presidents who publicly defended democracy. As for our adversaries, it’s not just their victimized populations but also a regime’s military, intelligence officers and diplomats who are often more ideologically inclined towards freedom and liberty than their corrupt and barbaric leadership would want the world to know.
The U.S. should never hesitate to use our immense “soft power” advantage against our adversaries. The battlefield in the conflict between dictators and democrats is in the realm of ideas. Principles of liberty, pluralism and freedom are antithetical to Iran and China, especially given their autocratic leaders’ cult of personality.
Social justice is universal. We should be as publicly supportive of those striving for liberty and freedom in China and Iran as we are vigilant about protecting human rights at home.
The bully pulpit used by Kennedy and Reagan is waiting for President Biden. He should seize the opportunity.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. Follow him on Twitter @DanielHoffmanDC.
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