Why is it that Beijing, Russia and others are so determined to oppose the Western position on Iran’s nuclear program, even at their own expense? For Germany’s Die Welt, columnist Clemens Wergin writes that thwarting democracy is far more important to Beijing than what appears in the West to be common sense. He also warns that Beijing’s thwarting of the United Nations ‘threatens President Obama with failure.’
For Die Welt, Clemens Wergin writes in part:
The Chinese constantly repeat that it continues to rely on negotiations. And this, eight years after the discovery of Iran’s secret nuclear program and after six years of intense negotiations that consisted of a series of Iranian lies, deceptive maneuvers, broken agreements and withdrawn pledges.
China is acting out of solidarity with a fellow authoritarian regime. This is often overlooked in the foreign policy debate, because the West sees China as a country whose political evolution has been delayed, but nonetheless, one that will eventually arrive at the port of democracy. In fact, the conflict between liberal democracy and authoritarian government has been going on since the French and American Revolutions. It entered a new phase in the 1990s and no longer has the ideological focus it had during the Cold War, since neither Russia nor China offer the world a real political alternative. However, they and many others see themselves in a defensive struggle against democracy. And in that struggle, every state that remains in the authoritarian camp becomes an important ally.
When Woodrow Wilson entered World War I against Germany, he hoped to “make the world safe for democracy.” Today, authoritarian regimes hope to make the world safe for undemocratic states. … In the end, it’s irrelevant whether Iran is a theocracy and that North Korea preaches stone-age era communism. Of importance to Beijing is that both are part of an anti-democratic bulwark, with which the wave of democratization can be stopped.
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