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The United Nations General Assembly Votes to Remove Jews from Jerusalem's Old City

by Elliott Abrams September 19, 2024

The most recent UN General Assembly resolution on Israel and the Palestinians is a radical strike at Israel and would push Jews out of the Old City of Jerusalem. Read More

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The UN's Automatic Majority Against Israel is Fraying

On June 13, the United Nations General Assembly voted once again to condemn Israel, this time for its actions against Hamas in Gaza when tens of thousands of Hamas supporters and terrorists stormed the Israeli border. The condemnation is not news, but the voting patterns are worth a look. The final resolution passed 120 (yes) to 8 (no) with 45 abstentions. Who were the eight countries voting no? The United States and Israel, several Pacific island states (Marshall Islands, Nauru, Micronesia, Solomon Islands), Togo—and Australia. Last year Australia’s government announced that it was through with unfair and unbalanced UN treatment of Israel and would henceforth vote against such resolutions in all parts of the UN system. And so it has. For example, on May 18 of this year, the UN Human Rights Council adopted yet another worthless resolution condemning Israel. The vote was 29 to 2, and the two countries voting no were the United States and Australia. So the first thing to note about the recent General Assembly voting was the Australian vote: a rare show of principle and determination on the international diplomatic scene, and a model for other democracies who all ought to be following Australia’s path. In the General Assembly, the United States introduced an amendment that inserted a condemnation of Hamas in the resolution text. Amazingly enough, the original text did not even mention Hamas once. Algeria moved to quash the American amendment, and remarkably, the United States won that vote 78 to 59 (with 42 abstentions). That is an amazing event in the UN: 78 countries opposed the Arab position and voted on the US/Israeli side, and only 59 supported the Algerian text. There was then a vote on whether to adopt the American amendment, and again we won: the amendment passed 62 (yes) to 58 (no), with 42 abstentions. In the UN, that is an astonishing result. Slim margin to be sure, but a win nevertheless. Because UN rules required a two-thirds majority, the amendment was not in the end adopted --but the voting pattern is far better than many past UN votes. And in this skirmish, all 28 EU countries voted with the United States. That’s the good news. The automatic majority against Israel is indeed fraying at the edges. As U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said, “the common practice of turning a blind eye to the UN’s anti-Israel bias is changing. Today, a plurality of 62 countries voted in favor of the US-led effort to address Hamas’s responsibility for the disastrous conditions in Gaza. We had more countries voting on the right side than the wrong side.” But there was plenty of bad news as well. The final vote on the (un-amended) resolution condemning Israel was as noted 120 to 8 with 45 abstentions. That’s shameful, as are many individual cases. India is the greatest disappointment. Relations between Israel and India have been warming and Prime Minister Modi has visited Israel—the first Indian PM to do so. But India abstained on the American amendment and then joined the jackals in the main vote. In that final vote, the United States and Australia got the support of zero European countries. Many abstained (including Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) while the resolution actually got an inexcusable yes vote from France, Belgium, Greece (whose own relations with Israel are supposed to be improving), Norway (once a friend of Israel but now increasingly hostile), Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Also disappointing was Canada, which abstained on the resolution. Were Stephen Harper still prime minister there is no question that Canada would have voted “no” along with Australia, the United States, and Israel. Once upon a time but in living memory, the United States had clout in Latin America and Israel had many friends there. Last week’s votes show that those days are gone. The American amendment (which, remember, had 62 yes votes) was supported only by the Bahamas, Barbados, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Peru. But Antigua, Argentina, Belize, Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guyana, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, St. Lucia, and Trinidad abstained. Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Haiti, Jamaica, Nicaragua, St. Kitts, St. Vincent, Uruguay, Surinam, and Venezuela voted against the United States. This pattern is bizarre. Hostile governments such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador are easy to explain, but the rest are not. Why do Haiti and Jamaica and several of the small island nations vote against us, while Barbados and the Bahamas vote with us? Why did Chile abstain instead of joining Peru and Colombia on our side? Several African votes are also disappointing. Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu recently visited Kenya and Uganda and relations appeared to be very good, yet both abstained on the American amendment and then voted for the final resolution. The bottom line is positive: Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, commented that “Thanks to the combined efforts with our American friends and our allies from around the world, we proved today that the automatic majority against Israel UN is not destiny and can be changed.” Future progress will require more diplomatic work, by Israel and the United States. Additional votes can be changed, in Latin America, Africa, and perhaps Europe. Hat’s off, for now, to Amb. Haley, Amb. Danon, and once again to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop of Australia.

Blog Post by Elliott Abrams June 16, 2018 Pressure Points

Palestinian Territories

Prince William (and the Foreign Office) in Jerusalem

I’ve written many times about the British royal family’s remarkable record of refusing to make an official visit to Israel while making scores of visits to Arab capitals. That will change in a matter of days when Prince William visits Jordan, Israel, and the “Occupied Palestinian Territories.” It has long been assumed that the royals themselves were not refusing to visit, but were (as is constitutionally required in the U.K.) following the advice of Her Majesty’s Government—in this case the Foreign Office. While we do not know what led to the current change of policy that permits a royal visit, it may well be the warming relations between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors. It simply cannot be argued these days that a royal visit to Israel will harm Britain in any way. But leave it to the Foreign Office to try to stir ill will over the visit. Here is what the Jewish Chronicle in London reports: The Duke of Cambridge will arrive in the evening on June 25, after visiting Jordan. His first engagement, on the morning of June 26, will see him visit Yad Vashem – Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Accompanied by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, the prince will receive a short tour of the museum and meet with a survivor of the Holocaust and the Kindertransport. He will also lay a wreath in Yad Vashem’s Hall of Remembrance. After that, the prince will meet Mr Netanyahu and Mr Rivlin at their respective residences....planned stops include the Mount of Olives, where the prince’s great grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, is buried. The itinerary says this will take place as part of the prince’s trip to the “Occupied Palestinian territories.” It gets worse. The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth reported that When asked to comment by Yedioth Ahronoth on the decision to place the prince’s visit to the Old City of Jerusalem under the rubric of his visit to the Palestinian Authority, a British Foreign Office spokesperson said: “East Jerusalem is not Israeli territory.” As former holders of the Palestinian Mandate, the British above all others should know that the Old City of Jerusalem was never “Palestinian territory.” It was Jordanian territory until 1967, and has never been under Palestinian sovereignty for one single day. The British might have said the Prince was visiting “Jerusalem” without saying more. To call a visit to the Old City instead a visit to “Occupied Palestinian territory” is deeply and probably intentionally offensive—and plain wrong. It is in fact one thing to say that the UK does not regard East Jerusalem as settled Israeli territory and that its fate will be decided in peace negotiations, and quite another to call it “Occupied Palestinian territory.” This episode has made me agree entirely with David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, that the United States should stop using the term “occupied territory” to describe any part of Jerusalem or the West Bank. Call it “disputed territory,” which it certainly is, or just say “East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which Palestinians claim as part of an eventual Palestinian state.” Legally, it is hard to see how land that was once Ottoman, then governed by Britain under a League of Nations mandate, then Jordanian, can be “Occupied Palestinian territory” anyway. The visit by Prince William has been damaged by the Foreign Office, but it is still a step forward after 70 years of refusals to make an official visit at all. One hopes that during the Prince’s visit to Israel, someone—perhaps the Chief Rabbi—will tell him what was the fate of East Jerusalem before Israel conquered it in 1967: no access at all for Jews, no protection for Jewish holy sites, vast destruction of Jewish holy and historical locations. The Prince will visit the Mount of Olives. Perhaps he might be told what occurred during the Jordanian period, as described by the Jewish Virtual Library: All but one of the thirty five synagogues within the Old City were destroyed; those not completely devastated had been used as hen houses and stables filled with dung-heaps, garbage and carcasses. The revered Jewish graveyard on the Mount of Olives was in complete disarray with tens of thousands of tombstones broken into pieces to be used as building materials and large areas of the cemetery leveled to provide a short-cut to a new hotel. Hundreds of Torah scrolls and thousands of holy books had been plundered and burned to ashes. Somehow I doubt the Foreign Office will apprise the Prince of that bit of background about “Occupied Palestinian territory.”

Blog Post by Elliott Abrams June 12, 2018 Pressure Points

North Korea

The North Korea Nuclear Agreement and Human Rights

The agreement between President Trump and Kim Jong Un may be the start of denuclearization, or another failed effort brought down by North Korean cheating. But if the United States and North Korea are to have a new relationship, it must include the human rights dimension. There’s no reason to rehearse here in detail the astonishing nature of the regime’s tyranny. The size and vicious nature of its prison camp system, the punishment of family members for what the regime appears to believe is a blood taint, the number of deaths, the murder of Otto Warmbier—all are well known. It is the most brutal regime on Earth. The first point to make is that raising human rights issues will not destroy the effort to change North Korea’s nuclear conduct. President George W. Bush raised freedom of religion repeatedly with Chinese leaders and that did not prevent a working relationship. President Reagan put human rights issues at the center of his relations with the Soviets, and that did not prevent remarkable progress in the relationship. As George Shultz wrote in his memoir Turmoil and Triumph, Ronald Reagan and I both gave pride of place to human rights. He took up the subject at each of his meetings with Gorbachev and with most visitors from the Soviet Union to the Oval Office. I pounded on the subject at every opportunity....” Indeed he did, making it the first subject at meetings rather than a throwaway in the final minutes. Yet relations with the Soviets prospered. The second point to make is that the only possible guarantee that a nuclear deal with North Korea will last over the years is some change in that society. As long as there is brutal one-man rule, the only thing needed to destroy any progress that has been made is a whim by that man. If and when there are others with influence—some day, one can dream, a journalist or legislator or mayor or clergyman—there can be something called “public opinion.” It exists even in dictatorships. Shultz described Reagan’s approach to the Soviets this way: “I’m not playing games. I’m not trying to push you into a corner publicly. I understand politicians even in your circumstances have to worry about how they look and don’t want to be pushed around in public.” So pressing for change in North Korea is not utopian and foolish idealism. Shultz noted that he and Reagan “increasingly emphasi[zed] to the Soviets the advantages to them, in the emerging knowledge and information age, of changing the way they dealt with their own people.” That is the kind of argument worth making, and to some extent the Trump administration has been making it to North Korea. The third point is that how we act toward North Korea must reflect who we are as Americans, even if the impact over there is slight. That regime killed an American named Otto Warmbier, and not in the distant and murky past: next week is the first anniversary of his death. The Trump administration must recognize that among our nation’s greatest assets is our association with the cause of liberty. Working for the peaceful expansion of the frontiers of liberty is not a sucker’s game, or a disadvantage or liability, or a waste of resources. It is in very concrete ways one of the greatest advantages of the United States in world politics. It is ultimately what ties allies like Australia, South Korea, and Japan to us: the knowledge that what we seek for them is what we seek for ourselves—peace, security, and liberty. The alternative is to leave those allies, and others, with the sense that our relations with North Korea exclude them and their interests, which we have forgotten. That is what happened in the Obama administration's nuclear agreement with Iran: close allies situated near Iran, such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel, came to believe their own interests were simply being forgotten. We saw in 2009 that the Obama administration viewed protests in Iran askance, not as the people's call for freedom but as an inconvenience to negotiations with the regime. Japan and other allies in Asia have critical security interests at stake in our relations with North Korea, and we should always give maintaining close and longstanding alliances pride of place as we undertake to open new relationships with hostile powers. This is not to say that the President should return to Washington and suddenly blast human rights abuses in North Korea. That should be a steady, constant theme in American diplomacy, never abandoned and never diminished. When we did the nuclear deal with Libya in 2003, we did not take Qadhafi’s weapons and then turn around and commence a human rights onslaught meant to weaken or to bring down his regime. I believe we bit our tongues and actually said less than we should, but one can understand why: we were starting a relationship with Libya that we thought would lead in the medium run to a political opening there as the economy and society changed and pariah status was replaced by international engagement. But the goals and the American standards of conduct must be clear and our disgust at the Kim regime’s treatment of its people should always be equally clear. As in the Soviet case, that will not destroy our bilateral relationship; instead it will push the regime toward change and in any event will remind the regime who we are and what we believe. To put it another way, a nuclear agreement with North Korea is not a single transaction--or if it is, it will fail. It must be the start of an effort to change relations between our two countries, and to change the relationship between the regime in North Korea and both the international system and its own people. In that effort, a constant assertion of our belief in human rights is essential to success and to our own self-respect.

Blog Post by Elliott Abrams June 12, 2018 Pressure Points

North Korea

On North Korea, Iran, and Trump

The cancellation of the US/North Korea meeting begins, in my view, with the JCPOA. Logic suggests that what Kim really wanted from the new administration was a JCPOA of his own. That is, he wanted a nuclear deal that was time-limited by sunset provisions, that permitted him to keep on developing better and better missiles, and that required only that he suspend his nuclear work for a short period of years. Such a deal would legitimize the North Korean nuclear program and Kim would see sanctions lifted and his economy greatly benefitted. No wonder he wanted such a deal. And from the regime stability angle, he might well have been persuaded that the Chinese and Vietnamese models are better long-run bets than his own. Those models allow for great economic growth and growing prosperity while maintaining single-party despotic rule. President Trump’s decision to exit the JCPOA was a critical prelude to the summit from the American point of view. Kim had to be fully disabused of the notion that such a deal was even remotely available. The best he could hope for was a step-by-step agreement, in which he was not required to end his nuclear program entirely on Day One, and instead was rewarded for each serious step he took. When the Libya example was mentioned, I do not think Kim really believed that was because American officials hoped to see him dragged through the streets and killed while his country underwent terrible violence and divisions. Rather, the Libya model calls for complete denuclearization at the inception; it was not a long, step by step process. For Kim, that was bad enough. The tone of North Korean insults in the last few days made it clear that opinion in Pyongyang was changing. It has been suggested that the tone changed after Kim met Xi Jinping. That makes sense: Xi might want to be the middleman between the US and North Korea, and might want to use that position as leverage in ongoing US/PRS trade talks. So he might well have told Kim things were going too fast. But the basic ideas behind a US/North Korea agreement remain reasonable. For China, a North Korea that is not starving, that does not need aid, that does not have nuclear weapons, and that is run on the Vietnamese or Chinese model politically and economically makes sense. For the United States, denuclearization of North Korea is a valuable goal and as with Libya worth opening diplomatic relations and ending sanctions. The question is whether Kim wants to slow this all down or kill it. It’s easy for me to say the Vietnamese model is better for the long-term stability of his regime than starvation, but he has to believe that. He has to believe that prosperity and openness will not lead North Koreans to demand more and more, or at least that he will be able to resist those demands through a combination of prosperity and repression. Kim also faces a difficult ideological shift if he ever makes a deal, because even by Asian communist standards the Kim family regime is uniquely repressive and bizarre. He will need to rewrite every textbook and make ten thousand speeches that his grandfather, his father, and he himself have given disappear down the memory hole. Kim may have simply gotten cold feet and decided that in the end, what we call progress and prosperity would lead to uncontrollable instability. I’m think there is still a chance that the insults were a form of bargaining, and that the on/off summit might some day be on again. Perhaps Secretary Pompeo needs to meet with Kim again at some point down the road, or new talks might take place secretly at a lower level. The dream of a quick resolution to this terrible problem is over. But the American position is clear and is far more sensible than it has been for decades: there will be no freebies for Kim, no deals that do not require serious steps on his part to denuclearize. The American willingness to engage with him at the highest levels to achieve these goals is clear; that door is open. There will probably be efforts to cast blame around Washington now, but it’s entirely uncalled for. A serious effort was made, and was well-handled by serious officials. The President’s letter was well done, making it clear that North Korea had made the next step impossible for now—and regretting that fact. No one who has ever worked on North Korea negotiations could be surprised by what North Korea did in the last few days. The surprise might be that U.S. policy is tougher and more realistic than it has been under the last several administrations.

Blog Post by Elliott Abrams May 24, 2018 Pressure Points

Israel

Gaza and Hamas

This is a painful week to be a leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas--and a much worse week to be living under its rule. Israel left Gaza in 2005, and in 2007 Hamas seized control by overwhelming the (much larger) Fatah forces. Eleven years of Hamas rule have brought nothing but violence and repression to the Palestinians who live there. Hamas might have decided to improve the economy and offer Palestinians tired of Fatah’s corruption and inefficiency an decent alternative. Instead it has focused only on attacking Israel and maintaining its fantasy of “return” and the destruction of the Jewish state. Constant rocket fire from Gaza—thousands of attacks—into Israel led to “Operation Protective Edge” in 2014. In that nearly two-month conflict over two thousand Palestinians died, ten thousand were wounded, and thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed. From this Hamas may have learned that escalation of its attacks on Israel will lead only to misery. But it had several tricks to try. The first was unpredictable, occasional, and damaging rocket fire. Hamas could make life miserable and even unlivable for Israelis anywhere near the Gaza border or in larger areas of southern Israel. This the Israelis defeated with the high-tech layered defenses against rockets and missiles that they developed. Then Hamas tried tunnels. Tunnels to Egypt brought consumer goods and fuel (which Hamas taxed) and of course weaponry; tunnels into Israel brought opportunities to kidnap or kill Israelis and lay waste to Israeli communities. But the Egyptians started closing the tunnels and moving citizens back away from the border. And Israel is again employing high-tech means of discovering the tunnels, which it then bombs, and blocking new construction. Now Hamas has tried pushing masses of Gazans to the border fences, mixing its own armed men among them carrying grenades, guns, and other weapons. The goal was obviously to overrun the border, get into Israel, and (we know from testimony in the past few days) kill and destroy as much as possible. And now this tactic has failed as well. Israel defended its border: no one got through and all the loss was on the Palestinian side. Injuries to those trying to break through the border overwhelmed Gaza’s medical facilities, there were perhaps 60 deaths, and Hamas pulled back. On “Nakba Day” itself, Tuesday May 15, there was relative quiet. In the West Bank, there was little solidarity shown to Hamas: a couple of hundred demonstrators here and there, totaling under two thousand. There were no major demonstrations in Arab capitals. So every one of Hamas’s tactics has failed, and has produced only more misery in Gaza. Now what? The answer is at one level obvious: Hamas should stop throwing the people of Gaza into combat and stop attacking Israel. It should concentrate on economic recovery for Gaza, negotiating for more open borders that permit imports of needed goods and export of people and products. Israel and Egypt should agree to such arrangements, so long as Hamas stops trying to import more weapons to prepare for future rounds of combat with Israel. Hamas should break its ties with Iran. It should permit the Palestinian Authority to resume its presence in Gaza. Both Israel and Egypt would in fact accept such a deal. Misery in Gaza is not in Israel’s interest. The problem is that Hamas has thus far shown no interest in such a transformation from Islamist terrorist group into responsible government of Gaza. This should be no surprise. Yasser Arafat could never make that transformation either, from terrorist into head of government. His rejection of Israel’s offer at Camp David was in part a rejection of changing himself from a “resistance” leader in military uniform into an administrator responsible for schools, hospitals, roads. And Arafat was secular; Hamas is Islamist. Its Covenant is a bizarre anti-Semitic document filled not only with Koranic references and calls to expel the Jews from the Middle East, but also explanations that the French Revolution, First World War, and the League of Nations, as well as the Freemasons and Rotary and Lions clubs, were the product of the Jews. No one rises to leadership in Hamas because he thinks the unemployment rate in Gaza must be reduced or the water supply improved. Asking the Hamas leadership to abandon the battle against the Jews is asking them to abandon their raison d’etre and their life’s work. I suppose it is possible that a tactical retreat can be negotiated by the Egyptians, and they appear to have done something of that sort this week—agreeing to open the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt and getting Israel to open the Kerem Shalom crossing where trucks go through into Gaza) in exchange for an end to the mass border assaults. But how long can that last? Hamas is an Islamist terrorist group dedicated to the eliminating Israel, and will never agree to transform itself into a “normal” government. This leaves Israel and Egypt, and anyone else who is serious about avoiding more violence, with few good options. How can Israel and Egypt pursue a policy of improving economic conditions in Gaza—more electricity, water, sewage treatment, jobs, opportunities to leave the Gaza Strip to study or get medical treatment—without strengthening Hamas’s ability to move terrorists in and out and acquire more weapons or their components? We are familiar with the story of cement: permitted to be imported to build houses, but instead diverted by Hamas into construction of those tunnels. It is worth trying again to reduce misery in Gaza, even if success will be partial or minimal. Efforts at humanitarian relief at least show Gazans and moralists in Europe (so quick to jump to facile criticism of Israel, as we saw this week) that the true author of Gaza’s plight is Hamas, which sees Gazans as cannon fodder rather than citizens for whom it is responsible. There is no visible “solution” to the problem of Gaza, because it is today a small Islamist emirate governed by a terrorist organization. For Israel, violence can at best be reduced or delayed, but not avoided entirely, when the goal of the group ruling Gaza is precisely violence designed to destroy you. Is that really true? Here are a few choice lines from the Hamas Covenant: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory). Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah's victory is realised. Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised. Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. "May the cowards never sleep." These beliefs are the background to this week’s violence. While Hamas rules Gaza, full solutions to Gaza’s problems must be sought but it seems very unlikely that they will be found.

Blog Post by Elliott Abrams May 16, 2018 Pressure Points

Democracy

Why We Must Never Give Up on Democracy

In Nicaragua and Armenia today, people are rising up against tyranny and demanding human rights and democratic rights. Nicaragua has been suffering under a decade of misrule and deepening tyranny by the Sandinista Party--and by Daniel Ortega as president and his wife as vice president. And all of a sudden there are national protests. From the New York Times today: “Nicaragua changed,” said José Adán Aguerri, president of Cosep, the country’s influential business organization, which is pushing for dialogue with the government. “The Nicaragua of a week ago no longer exists.” The protests started with a relatively narrow issue — a change to the social security system — but they quickly rose to a national boil when students began to die. Human rights organizations say that dozens have been killed, including at the hands of the police.” In Armenia, protests began two weeks ago against the man who had served two five-year terms as president, Serzh Sargsyan—and was then appointed prime minister a week after his term as president ended. As CNN reported, “The move prompted thousands to take to the streets of the capital Yerevan to protest what was seen as an unconstitutional power grab.” In both cases, “people power” suddenly appeared. The streets were filled with demonstrators. We are reminded of the “Arab Spring,” which erupted when a police officer slapped Mohamed Bouazizi and knocked over his wheelbarrow full of produce to sell. His self-immolation led to protests that quickly spread and brought down the dictator Zine el Abedine Ben Ali after 24 years in power. The protests soon spread to Egypt, where they quickly brought down Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in power. There were protests in Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain as well. Who predicted these outbursts? No one; experts assumed the real story was “authoritarian longevity” and the stability of the regimes. And no one predicted the protests in Armenia and Nicaragua. But all these uprisings are a reminder that the taste for liberty is present even in many cases where it is nearly invisible. It would have been reasonable to believe, one month before each of these protests began, that the populace in each case was resigned to its fate and uninterested in democracy. Instead, we can see that many citizens were ready to struggle for more freedom. That is important information for the United States as it considers whether to continue, strengthen, or abandon its policy of supporting the expansion of democracy. Realpolitik is often said to counsel dealing with regimes as they are, but these uprisings remind us that regimes are temporary; populations are permanent. Why side with a regime that the people despise, and will eventually remove? Why assume that a dictator speaks for his people, or will speak for them tomorrow? Why treat the dictators in Tehran, for example, as “Iran” when they are not at all the repository of the hopes—nor will they be the permanent rulers—of the people of Iran? All those despotic regimes lack public support and lack legitimacy, which is why they never hold free elections. Experts have rarely in fact predicted the sorts of uprisings noted here, but the point is not to criticize them for lack of omniscience. It is rather to emphasize that as President George W. Bush put it, “No people on Earth yearn to be oppressed, or aspire to servitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police.” Of course protests movements can fail to bring freedom; the regime may survive or a new regime may be as bad as or worse than the one it replaces. But Armenia and Nicaragua remind us that the desire for freedom, and the resistance to tyranny, are never crushed. They remind us whose side we should be on.

Blog Post by Elliott Abrams April 26, 2018 Pressure Points