A Washington Post column points out how north Korea’s dispatch of troops to Russia highlights “the four aggressive Eurasian dictatorships — Russia, China, Iran and North Korea – cooperating strategically, and … with an increasing coherence.” It points toward to a single effort against us, so that “the war in Gaza and Lebanon against Israel by Iranian proxies is the war by Russia against Ukraine, as would be the war in Taiwan that China may unleash … All one.
This view casts the dictators’ motives through the lens of our wants and fears. Certainly the four share an interest in weakening the U.S., and are collaborating. But are their interests all the same? Doesn’t the logic of each one’s interest rest on its own unique base? China has an ideological project, to show its Marxism-Leninism superior to the liberal world order. North Korea nominally shares that interest, directed against South Korea. Iran has a Shia Islamist ideology to promote. China is also in contest of systems with the United States, which may or may not be served by collaboration, long term or short, with Russia, or India, or Brazil, or Saudi Arabia. Putin has no such ruling doctrine, no such project except his personal rule.
Looking through another lens, Putin also has the most immediate interest in circumventing US sanctions. He needs arms, soldiers and money for his Ukraine War. His hosting of the BRICS summit featured proposals for payment systems to circumvent US sanctions. Iran also needs to get around the western monetary system. China does not, in any urgent sense. Their larger purpose, to promote a Chinese system, may incline them, less or more, to collaborate with a range of countries, conceivably including even the US, at least in the short term.
While all these nations are dictatorships, we need not accept that they are united in sustained, undifferentiated opposition to us. To be sure, we ourselves oppose Iran’s “axis of resistance” to the US and Israel, the PRC in our systemic contest, Russia in its aim of conquest in Ukraine, and north Korea in its threat to democratic south Korea. But each of those positions is justified in itself, and we must not let anyone paint any of them as mere tools to keep challengers down.
In this clarity, we highlight the core motive behind our policies and actions: to support freedom. Through all the complexities that can lead us into messy inconsistencies, the “Liberal World Order” arose to enable societies to nurture people’s capacity to live beyond fear, want, and oppression. If our core ethos leads us to disarm an aggressor, sanction an abuser, or condemn a belligerent, it ultimately serves that aim. To the extent our policies have been inconsistent, we need to explain why – we condoned Latin American dictatorships because they condemned Communism – and / or curb the inconsistencies.
We need to guide our conduct by this standard. We support Taiwan not for its output of chips, or its geographical blocking of Chinese access to the sea, but for its rule of law democracy and open society. We oppose Iran for its regime’s espousal of terror and violence and its aim to destroy an internally-democratic Israel, and we cannot be friendly to it in its suppression of rule by the people. Putin’s Russia, particularly in the invasion of Ukraine, shows itself as a bad actor as well as another oppressive dictatorship. And China, while some of its motivation may be defensive, cannot be a friend in its system that formally declares its ruling party to be the dictatorship of a particular class and acts in practice as an autocracy. If we cast our opposition to each of the dictators in terms of their specific oppressions, we uncover that their only real common interest is their dictatorship. They have no cause to unite in “resisting” us, except in that we give people hope for freedom.
We should treat each of these dictatorships in different ways, partly out of pragmatic need in some cases, but always following our own commitment to personal rights and government by consent of the governed. We should oppose each for the ways in which it particularly contravenes our principles of liberty, not just as rivals to out-compete. We must make those principles our purpose.
We do not live for some ideological project or to garner wealth or power; we do not even have some national project to spread some doctrine. We just need our nation and our government to show that a nation based on rights can both take care of its needs – and, crucially, keep faith to its tenets. People deserve freedom and we exist to validate that idea. If we want to be loved, as Burke said, we must make ourselves lovely. Our example will show the falsity of autocrats’ claims, which will erode the harshest dictator’s power. Our conduct in our freedom is the most important thing.
Common Conviction 