Why, Indeed?

Another piece that disappointed me was this complaint about President Biden’s bland responses to the demonstrations in Iran and China by Michael Rubin at 1945:

The Biden administration’s response was weak. “We’ve long said everyone has the right to peacefully protest, in the United States and around the world. This includes in the PRC [the People’s Republic of China],” a National Security Council statement read.

Once again, political appointees and professional diplomats responded as if by a computer algorithm rather than with an appreciation of the ideological battle in which the United States finds itself, the outcome of which will shape the fate of the rules-based order over the remainder of the century. The tepidness of the statement undermines any meaning it might have.

The reason for the Biden administration’s weak response is no mystery. After all, many of the president’s top aides also occupied senior national security or diplomatic roles during the Obama administration when, in 2009, Iran also erupted into protest. At that time, protestors chanted “Obama, Obama, ya ba o na ya ba ma” [“Obama, Obama, you’re either with us or against us”] as the White House remained largely silent.

Here’s the meat of his complaint:

The reason for the Biden administration’s weak response is no mystery. After all, many of the president’s top aides also occupied senior national security or diplomatic roles during the Obama administration when, in 2009, Iran also erupted into protest. At that time, protestors chanted “Obama, Obama, ya ba o na ya ba ma” [“Obama, Obama, you’re either with us or against us”] as the White House remained largely silent.

President Barack Obama wanted a restrained reaction for three reasons. First, he argued, there was little the United States could do. Many in his inner circle further believed that to speak out in favor of the protestors might delegitimize them by playing into Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s accusation that they were foreign agents. Finally, Obama had secretly reached out to Khamenei and did not want the Iranian supreme leader to use statements against his regime as an excuse not to negotiate.

In each case, Obama was wrong. Unfortunately, Obama alumni in the Biden administration today repeat the same mistakes.

I think he dismisses the thought that rousing U. S. support for the demonstrations might actually be counter-productive too quickly:

This brings us to the idea that offering moral support to protestors delegitimizes them. This is simply wrong. Protestors around the globe carry signs in English because they want to communicate with and receive the acknowledgment of the outside world. At the same time, dictators try to tar them with the accusation of foreign support regardless about whether they receive it or not. To deny them support is to play into the dictatorships’ hands by helping Beijing and Tehran isolate the protests.

Another possibility is that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible “dialects” of Chinese and English functions as a lingua franca even within China. I use the quotation marks because IMO there is a Chinese language family just as there is an Arabic language family, conventionally referred to as a single language because there is or was a single literary language.

What I found disappointing about the piece is that Mr. Rubin never actually succeeds in providing a credible explanation for why the Biden Administration is maintaining such a low profile with respect to the demonstrations. Clearly, the administration has decided that there is little to gain (or much to lose) by making stronger statements. What?