It is the latest in an escalating dispute between neighboring India and China, which share a 3,500 kilometer border.

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ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Frederick Douglass called freedom of speech “the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they, first of all, strike down. They know its power.”

Back in the day, tyrants could gag those they ruled, but in free nations people were free, their rights protected. Once Alexander Solzhenitsyn arrived in America, once Natan Sharansky was in Israel, the Kremlin could silence them no more.

Today, tyrants are increasing their reach, attempting, not without successes, to restrict speech everywhere.

What brings this to mind: As a congressional staffer, a scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction at the U.S. National Security Council, Richard Goldberg has for years been making the case for a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign on the rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran in response to their illicit nuclear weapons program, sponsorship of terrorism and domestic oppression.

So last week Iran’s rulers announced they were “sanctioning” Mr. Goldberg, who is now back at FDD. A year ago, they “sanctioned” FDD in general and, by name, FDD’s Mark Dubowitz, a recognized expert on the Tehran regime, and international economic statecraft, calling them “the designing and executing arm of the U.S. administration” on Iran policy.

Since FDD isn’t contemplating opening an office in Tehran, and no FDD employees plan on vacationing in Shiraz anytime soon, such sanctions may appear symbolic. But they carry a threat. This was made explicit in the statement accompanying the 2019 designations: “[T]his measure will be without prejudice to any further legal measures that the other administrative, judicial or security institutions and organizations may take in order to counter, prosecute or punish” FDD.

How serious is this threat to “punish” (which led to bipartisan condemnation, including from Trump, Obama, Bush, and Clinton administration officials)?

According to the U.S. State Department, the theocratic regime’s overseas “campaign of terror has included as many as 360 targeted assassinations” in more than 40 countries. “Iran leverages its well-earned reputation for extrajudicial killings to try to silence civil society through death threats against activists, dissidents, and journalists.”

One definition of war: the use of violence to impose one’s will on others. It is within that context that such murders should be viewed. Iran’s rulers won a pivotal battle back in 1989 when Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the killing of Salman Rushdie, British author of “The Satanic Verses.”

One can only imagine how differently history might have unfolded had the response of free nations been robust; had they, for example, recalled their ambassadors from Tehran and sent the regime’s envoys packing. Instead, only the U.K. broke diplomatic relations, and only for about a year.

The tyrants of the world learned a lesson. A report by the British Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, about which I wrote last month, estimates that 14 Russian dissidents have been murdered on British soil over recent years.

The rulers of North Korea and China have found nefarious ways to limit speech critical of them, intimidating and manipulating what we might otherwise consider powerful and independent individuals in Hollywood, professional sports, and the news media.

The crime for which Tehran has found Mr. Goldberg, Mr. Dubowitz, and FDD guilty is “economic terrorism against the interests” of the Iranian government and citizens of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In part, this is an attempt to strike a blow for false moral equivalence. Tehran has long been designated by the United States — Republican and Democratic administrations alike — as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.

One example: According to the French government, the Iranian intelligence ministry was behind a 2018 plot to bomb a large gathering of Iranian opposition supporters in Paris. “This extremely serious act envisaged on our territory could not go without a response,” read a rare joint statement from France’s interior, foreign and economy ministers. In truth, their response — e.g. freezing the assets of two suspected Iranian intelligence operatives — barely amounted to a slap on the wrist.

More to the point: Equating the murder of dissidents with the imposition of economic sanctions on murderers is risible. The United States has a right — as does any nation — to decide with whom it will and will not maintain commercial relations. As for other countries and the corporations based in those countries, they are free to choose to do business with America or with those who vow “Death to America!” Establishing that they may not do both hardly qualifies as terrorism.

This raises an interesting policy question. For decades, it was widely believed that treating tyrants as respected “stakeholders” in the “international community,” trading with them, providing them aid, welcoming their participation into international organizations, and getting them to sign multilateral treaties would put them on a path to liberalization. That belief, we now know — or should now know — was misplaced.

Perhaps the free nations of the world might consider an alternative: building their own international communities based on comprehensive free trade agreements, while leaving the rogue regimes to manage on their own.

Disabusing ourselves of the comforting notion that commerce and engagement are transformative also should make clear why it is essential that free nations maintain defensive capabilities and mutual defense alliances sufficient to deter adversaries. Bellicose regimes we cannot deter; we will need to defeat. (How do the isolationists and “restrainers” not get this?)

Finally, we should always support, as much as we can, those fighting for freedom and human rights in foreign lands, in the hope that sooner or later they emancipate themselves. “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” Frederick Douglass said that, too.

• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for The Washington Times.

Source: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/aug/11/tyrants-including-rulers-of-iran-china-and-north-k/

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Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (left), the director-general of the World Health Organization, shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping before a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Jan. 28. NAOHIKO HATTA – POOL/GETTY IMAGES

hile the novel coronavirus is changing the world, China is trying to do the same. Already a serious strategic rival of the United States with considerable international clout, it’s now moving into a new field—health.

After initial denials and cover-ups, China successfully contained the COVID-19 outbreak—but not before it had exported many cases to the rest of the world. Today, despite the falsehoods it initially passed on, which played a critical role in delaying global response, it’s trying to leverage its reputed success story into a stronger position on international health bodies.

Most critically, Beijing succeeded from the start in steering the World Health Organization (WHO), which both receives funding from China and is dependent on the regime of the Communist Party on many levels. Its international experts didn’t get access to the country until Director-General Tedros Adhanom visited President Xi Jinping at the end of January. Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international concern,” denying after a meeting Jan. 22 that there was any need to do so.

After the Beijing visit, though, WHO said in a statement that it appreciated “especially the commitment from top leadership, and the transparency they have demonstrated.” Only after the meeting did it declared, on Jan. 30, a public health emergency of international concern. And after China reported only a few new cases each day, WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic March 11—even though it had spread globally weeks before.

[Mapping the Coronavirus Outbreak: Get daily updates on the pandemic and learn how it’s affecting countries around the world.]

WHO was keen to broadcast Beijing’s message. “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history,” WHO experts said in their February report on the mission to China. The country had gained “invaluable time for the response” in an “all-of-government and all-of society approach” that has averted or delayed hundreds of thousands of cases, protecting the global community and “creating a stronger first line of defense against international spread.”

China’s “uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures” provides vital lessons for the global response, the WHO report said. Beijing’s strategy “demonstrated that containment can be adapted and successfully operationalized in a wide range of settings.” However, while recommending China’s epidemic control policy to the world, WHO neglected the negative externalities—from economic damage to the failure to treat many non-coronavirus patients, psychological woes, and human rights costs.

It’s not surprising that China’s containment strategy was effective, said Richard Neher, virologist at the University of Basel. “The big lockdown, centralized quarantine, and contact tracing for sure accelerated the decline,” Neher said. Lawrence O. Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, points to “major human rights” concerns with the lockdown techniques pioneered in China and now—to a different degree—adopted in many nations. Gostin recommends standard public health measures like testing, treatment, contact tracing, and isolation or quarantine “as scientifically justified.”

While the rising number of cases elsewhere shows that China isn’t alone in failing in the initial stages of an outbreak, the full story of the Chinese loss will probably never be known—and certainly not recognized by WHO or other bodies.

One reason is that official data from China is often highly dubious—which can lead to ill-advised health policies in other countries, since studies based on information from China are the first used to understand COVID-19. Countless cases of people dying at home in Wuhan—some being described in social media posts—will probably never go into the statistics. And while a report by Caixin on the Chinese province of Heilongjiang said that a considerable percentage of asymptomatic cases has not been reported—which amounts to about 50 percent more known infections in China, according to a South China Morning Post report on classified government data—WHO takes numbers reported by Beijing at face value.

“I thought the greatest success of the Chinese party-state was in getting the WHO to focus on the positive sides of China’s responses and ignore the negative sides of the responses,” said Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the SOAS University of London. “With the WHO presenting China’s responses in a positive light, the Chinese government is able to make its propaganda campaign to ignore its earlier mistakes appear credible and to ignore the human, societal, and economic costs of its responses.”

Indeed, WHO closes its eyes to such problems. “China reported and isolated ALL individuals with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19,” Christian Lindmeier, a WHO spokesperson, said in mid-March. However, Chinese authorities only in the beginning of April started to make current numbers of asymptomatic cases with lab-confirmed infections public—which also are included in the WHO case definition for COVID-19. “Every country has its own self-reporting processes”, Lindmeier said. WHO epidemiologist Bruce Aylward, who headed the visit, said in an interview that China was not hiding anything. When asked how many people have been put in quarantine, isolation, or residential restriction, Lindmeier referred to numbers from China’s National Health Commission—which are much smaller than the numbers calculated by the New York Times. “WHO works with these data,” he said.

Yet it is unclear whether the WHO experts who traveled to China sufficiently understood the situation on the ground. For example, based on numbers from the South China province of Guangdong, WHO argued that undetected cases are rare. However, a screening program for COVID-19 only included patients seen at fever clinics; most of them probably showed at least a fever. In Germany, most of the people who tested positive did not show a fever. It is easily possible that there has been a substantial number of undetected cases, Neher said, which is the “big unknown” in calculations of the death rate.

WHO also left many questions open about how exactly public engagement was managed in its report. Chinese people have reacted “with courage and conviction,” it says; they have “accepted and adhered to the starkest of containment measures.” While this is probably true for many, others were likely motivated by a statement of the Supreme People’s Court: People carrying the virus who don’t follow quarantine restrictions “face jail terms ranging from three to 10 years if the consequence is not serious,” it says. Otherwise, they could face a life sentence or death.

“The community has largely accepted the prevention and control measures and is fully participating in the management of self-isolation and enhancement of public compliance,” the WHO report says. In China, no measures have been implemented that could not also be used elsewhere, Aylward claimed in an interview. Apparently, the WHO mission didn’t have the chance to speak with people with opposing views. Many Chinese people told him that they all have been attacked together and need to react in a united fashion, Aylward said.

The very uniformity of this narrative should have been a wake-up call, said Mareike Ohlberg from the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies. Indeed, the whole trip of both foreign and national experts seems to have been organized along Potemkin-esque lines for a team where most of its international members lacked linguistic skills and familiarity with China. “We really didn’t have much interaction until after all the site visits,” said Clifford Lane, a deputy director at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the delegation. It was his first trip to China, he told Science. “I was really surprised with how modern the cities were.”

Ohlberg said the statements of the WHO have clearly been heavily influenced by the Chinese Communist Party. She says she was surprised that, from the start, many experts uncritically repeated information from Beijing and “preached confidence in the WHO and the Chinese government.” The WHO report rightly emphasized the heroic commitment of the population of Wuhan. “But it’s important that the WHO does not degrade itself to an instrument of the Chinese government—which does not want to make transparent how the population suffered,” she said.

Osman Dar, global health expert at Public Health England and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said that China is no different from other countries that seek to exert influence. WHO had evolved out of colonial-era international sanitary conferences convened by the European powers and expansionist U.S. policy, he said. Since WHO was controlled and largely influenced by the national interests of Western powers before, in the past 20 years, countries like China “have started to have more influence in the global health space.”

Beijing’s say is growing not only at WHO, but also in the health policies of more and more countries. This also is an important area in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its activities in African countries. It may be doubted whether Beijing always acts in the best interests of its partners. “Chinese health aid allocation is poorly related to direct health needs of African countries,” French researchers last year concluded.

The same is true for the current outbreak, which is politically important, said Tankred Stöbe, former president of MSF (Doctors Without Borders) Germany and a former member of the International Board of MSF International. In February, he traveled to Southeast Asia (SEA) as a COVID-19 emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders. Countries like Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand “cannot escape the influence of China,” he said. “I know about meetings where representatives of China have said: Dear friends in Southeast Asia, we’re interested in continuing good cooperation. It is clear for us that you must let your borders open—otherwise we would have to rethink our friendship.” The countries “cannot refuse,” Stöbe said. Countries like Cambodia and Pakistan  kept accepting flights from China during the outbreak.

For political reasons, “Vietnam can’t close its border with China,” physician Rafi Kot told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. He founded several medical centers in the country. “The Chinese have put immense pressure on everyone: the Koreans, Vietnam, everyone,” he told the newspaper. “Asian countries cannot act as they want vis-a-vis China because it’s the big power in the neighborhood.” While Cambodia closed its borders to several Western countries in mid-March, it started military drills together with hundreds of Chinese soldiers, which concluded this Monday.

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