PRESIDENT BIDEN has promised to put democracy on the front burner of U.S. foreign policy after four years of neglect. It is none too soon. From Myanmar to Belarus, democratic forces are under siege. Despots have learned how to corral civil society and imprison journalists, lawyers, clergy, bloggers, opposition candidates and just about anyone who objects to their rule. Mr. Biden has an opportunity to develop fresh thinking about how freedom can be better defended.
Sanctions against nations and individuals have their place. Many of those targeted by the Global Magnitsky Act — gross human rights violators — deserve to be punished and would not be without it. On Thursday, the Biden administration slapped new visa restrictions on 43 officials in Belarus who are complicit in undermining democracy, on top of 66 sanctioned earlier. But sanctions are blunt instruments, and slow. Many tyrants and their henchmen can live without Disney World. What the United States and other democracies need are more potent ways to push back.
These methods must effectively help legions of courageous people taking to the streets to oppose authoritarian regimes. In Belarus, they have been demonstrating against President Alexander Lukashenko, who stole the August election and has launched a wave of arrests this week against journalists and human rights activists. On Thursday, a court in Belarus sentenced two journalists, both women, to two years in prison for doing their job, filming protests against Mr. Lukashenko. In Myanmar, also known as Burma, a mass civil disobedience campaign is underway against the military coup. In Russia, gutsy young people have protested the capricious arrest of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Speaking out strongly and openly, as Mr. Biden did on Myanmar, is essential, and gives the street demonstrators a boost. But a new strategy is needed for defending democracy. The underside of many authoritarian regimes is the theft of resources by a favored few, brilliantly exposed in Russia by Mr. Navalny and the open-source journalism outfit Bellingcat. The democracies ought to borrow from their pioneering work on YouTube to use technology — satellite imagery, cellphone records, mobility data and social media — to reveal thieving and duplicity.
Democracies can further empower besieged citizens with resilient and robust communications channels that dictators deny them. The important role that Telegram has played in Belarus offers a glimpse of the possible. So does the use of satellite imagery to reveal the concentration camps for Uighurs in China, or the use of drones, deployed to take video footage of President Vladimir Putin’s monster mansion near the Black Sea. Yet another innovation are the nongovernmental human rights groups in Myanmar, Belarus and Russia that tallied arrests and detentions online, exposing the raw and arbitrary use of police power.
Laws should be toughened to prevent the ill-gotten gains of these dictators from being hidden and laundered abroad.
Standing up for democracy is a long-term project. Now is the time for the United States and other democracies to develop novel ideas and implement a broad strategy to start confronting tyrants head-on, where they live.
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