Does the 'free world' show care for others?
This is a pivotal time not just for those yearning and fighting for freedom, but also for those who have the freedom others long for.
There is, on the one hand, the worldwide rise of authoritarianism and the routinization of human rights abuses, leading to an epidemic of oppression and suffering. On the other hand, Ukraine's courageous resistance to Russia's genocidal war, and brave protests in Iran, China, Cuba and other hotspots show that brutality does not destroy the human spirit.
The Free World should see the urgency and the opportunity in this moment. With both impassioned pleas for liberty and crackdowns on civil society intensifying, free people should show they care about the freedom of others.
Current geopolitical trends do not favor freedom. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance reports that the number of countries moving toward authoritarianism is more than double those moving toward democracy and that authoritarian countries have deepened their repression.
Freedom House finds that in recent years countries in every region of the world have experienced worsening abuses. Humanity reels from dictators doubling down in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Myanmar and elsewhere. Although they have their differences, China, Russia and Iran comprise an anti-American front that includes military cooperation and disinformation.
In backing the Syrian butcher Bashar Assad, and supporting antidemocratic forces across the Middle East, Russia and Iran pushed the region backward. In the meantime, the United States precipitously withdrew from Iraq, ignored atrocities in Syria, abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban and failed to build on the Abraham Accords.
A dismal indicator of freedom's trajectory came this month when China's President Xi Jinping met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The two countries strengthened partnerships on energy and defense, and signed massive investment agreements in infrastructure and technology. Especially bad for human
Although multilateralists justify generous economic deals and enabling strategic compromises with brutal regimes as only befitting an enlightened world that accepts cultural differences, they have to ignore human nature and human longing to do so.
For, regardless of the culture one lives in - regardless of race, nationality, or religion - no one wants their family and friends subjected to the cruel dictates and methods of authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
Those who overlook human rights for the sake of "international relations" flout the idea inherent in the American founding that rights are God-given and universal, that governments cannot grant them nor take them away.
As freedom movements reveal that the emperor of multilateralism has no clothes, will those who assumed other peoples and regions weren't "ready" for freedom rise to the challenge - or will they cling to a worldview that allows them to ignore the suffering of others?
Given the post-Cold War mindset and post-Cold War policies, it is by no means certain that democracies in America, Europe and Asia will meet this moment: The moral relativism, economic globalism, isolationist tendencies and identity politics of our time provide excuses for inertia. They allow us to view indifference and silence as "tolerance" and selfishness as empowerment. They place a premium on domestic comfort and global harmony, and suggest we can have them if only we stop insulting other countries with our "values." That dismissal of values makes the reason for standing up for universal rights elusive. The idea that there is no better or worse beyond each person's or group's definition of these things runs counter to the idea that we must, in order to be good as well as free, consider the plight of our fellow human beings.
As repose regarding our own security and our own prosperity reinforced our amorality, threats to the way of life we took for granted grew. It turns out that neither a philosophy of "co-existence" nor a narrow focus on our own comfort are enough to ward off the problems of good and evil we thought we'd left behind.
Anne R. Pierce "The idea that there is no better or worse beyond each person's or group's definition of these things runs counter to the idea that we must, in order to be good as well as free, consider the plight of our fellow human beings.” rights, Saudi-led Arab league states agreed to a statement endorsing China's "efforts" and "position" in Hong Kong and "rejecting Taiwan's independence in all its forms."