Exposing Our Enemies’ Weaknesses—and Our Own

The nationwide protests roiling Iran demonstrate the tremendous courage of the Iranian people, who brave hailstorms of bullets to call for a new and better government. They also reveal how the sweeping changes wrought by the information revolution create grave vulnerabilities for America’s adversaries. But the United States can only take advantage if it stops making its own share of mistakes.

The uprisings in Iran are the most dramatic, but far from the only, evidence that America’s enemies have severe domestic problems. There is plenty of discontent in China too: The China Dissent Monitor has found 14,000 protests occurred in China since June 2022.

Some of the people who speak out against their oppressors want their share of the freedoms that Americans enjoy, but they do so for a variety of reasons. For example, most protests in China are smaller-scale outbursts about specific economic problems. The current wave in Iran began that way before it evolved into a full-fledged rejection of Khamenei’s misrule.

The Chinese Communist Party devotes enormous resources to maintaining its grip on the Chinese people and preventing Iran-style flareups from occurring. The “Great Firewall” that restricts access to the outside world is only one of the many measures the CCP uses to restrict speech and thought. Censors banned Winnie-the-Pooh because an online joke comparing Xi to the bear of very little brains became too popular. The Chinese government also relentlessly oppresses ethnic and religious minorities in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia.

The internet and other information technologies fuel these uprisings in complex ways. At the advent of social media, such as during the abortive 2009 Green Movement in Iran and the Arab Spring, discontented tech-savvy young people used platforms like Twitter to coordinate protests against their rulers. This is one of the reasons China censors the internet so aggressively, and Iran’s government effectively cut off the country from the internet for the past few days.