The Global Fight for Freedom

These pages have long argued that human rights and democracy must be permanent pillars of American foreign policy. They must. But no ally is perfect. Some are even monstrous — yet brutal realities force us to make difficult choices.
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This week, three of them.
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Every stance the United States takes for human rights risks ceding ground to Beijing's model — non-interference with tyrannical regimes, authoritarianism exported abroad, debt-trap infrastructure as the price of admission.
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Where should America draw the line?
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These pages draw it differently in each case. Read on.

Flashpoints

1. The World's Largest Cartel Gets Smaller
2. India Deleted Its Voters. Modi Won.
3. Xi Doesn't Mind Dead Children. Do We?

Country names are followed by their 2026 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.

On April 28, the third-largest producer in the world’s largest cartel announced its exit. Effective May 1, the UAE left OPEC— without consulting Saudi Arabia, the kingdom that has driven OPEC since 1960.
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The strategic logic: Iran has been a founding OPEC member for 66 years, using the cartel as a venue for international legitimacy even under crushing sanctions. Now the table tilts harder against Tehran on every future production decision. The UAE wants to push output toward 5 million barrels per day, putting downward pressure on prices — relief for American drivers paying the cost of the Iran war. This is genuinely good news for American interests.
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It's also the latest move from a regime that has aided the war on Iran more than any U.S. partner outside Israel. Iran has fired more than 2,800 missiles and drones at the UAE — more than at any other country, Israel included. The WSJ reported this week that Abu Dhabi has been secretly firing back. UAE Mirage jets struck Iran's Lavan Island refinery in early April, knocking it offline for months. The UAE has closed Iran-linked schools in Dubai, denied visas to Iranian citizens, and backed a UN resolution authorizing force to break Tehran's chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz.
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This is the kind of partner — illiberal, yet increasingly indispensable — that forces hard questions.
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The UAE sentenced 43 dissidents to life in prison last year in a mass trial under a 2014 counterterrorism law that criminalizes peaceful criticism. Since mid-April, it has expelled up to 15,000 Pakistani Shia workers without charges — bank accounts frozen, families devastated.
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The hard truth: America must sometimes partner with illiberal regimes to defeat worse ones. The UAE's role against Iran is one of those cases.
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What America must never do is sell that partnership.
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​Our Verdict: Engaging illiberal partners against worse enemies is statecraft. Personally profiting from those partnerships is corruption. The first is sometimes necessary. The second is a disgrace to American values.
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​The Trump Administration. Four days before Trump's inauguration, an Emirati firm controlled by the UAE's national security chief bought 49% of World Liberty Financial — the Trump-family crypto venture — for $500 million. The WSJ documented $187 million flowing directly to Trump family entities. Then came the rewards: advanced AI chip sales to the UAE, and a $2 billion investment in Binance — the world's largest crypto exchange, whose founder Trump pardoned last October after his money-laundering conviction — routed through World Liberty.
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A foreign government bought a stake in the president.
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​Sources: Foreign Policy, Human Rights Watch, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post

Two weeks before West Bengal's election, the Election Commission of India struck 9 million names from the voter roll — nearly 12% of the electorate. Of those purged, 3.4 million filed appeals with valid citizenship documents. Tribunals couldn't process them before voting day.
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On May 4, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP won West Bengal for the first time, ending the Trinamool Congress's 14-year hold on India’s fourth most populous state.
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It’s no coincidence West Bengal is home to the second largest population of Indian Muslims — or that roughly 65% of the purge of targeted them. Modi’s record on India’s 200 million Muslims includes the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act explicitly excluding Muslim refugees, the 2020 Delhi riots that killed over 50, and the 2024 inauguration of a Hindu temple atop the ruins of a 16th-century mosque demolished by Hindu nationalists in 1992.
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The democratic backsliding runs deeper still: opposition leaders jailed on disputed charges, independent media raided, Congress party accounts brazenly frozen during the 2024 campaign.
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And yet.
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Since 2011, India has lifted 269 million people out of extreme poverty — one of the largest reductions in human history, according to the World Bank. Give Modi a lion’s share of the credit. Deregulation, a streamlined tax system, and world-class digital infrastructure have transformed daily life for hundreds of millions.
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This is the hardest tradeoff in foreign policy. India's democratic erosion is real. So is the flourishing of a fifth of humanity.
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The voter purge matters, but the alternative to a flawed, ascendant India is worse for Indians, America, and the world.
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​Our Verdict: Engage publicly, pressure privately. India is too consequential as a bulwark against China — strategically and economically — to alienate. Quietly condition the trade deal's most favorable terms on Election Commission reforms, then look the other way.
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​Trump Administration: Silence. A U.S.-India trade deal is being negotiated; the State Department has issued no public statement on the West Bengal purge.
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​Sources: Al Jazeera, The Edge Malaysia, The Federal, World Bank, Pew Research Center

Twenty-one children shot. Two under five. Grieving families who never got bodies back. They buried clothing instead.
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When Samia Suluhu Hassan took office in 2021, the West embraced her as a reformer. She lifted bans on opposition rallies, freed political prisoners, and welcomed back exiled journalists. Western donors opened the spigots.
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Then the bodies started falling.
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By 2025, Chadema, the main opposition party, was disqualified. Its leader Tundu Lissu — profiled below as Freedom Fighter of the Week — sits in prison on treason charges. Hassan's Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), in continuous power since 1977, claimed 98% of the October vote.
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Tens of thousands of Tanzanians flooded the streets in Dar es Salaam, Arusha, Mwanza, Mbeya — even villages that had never seen unrest. Security forces answered with live ammunition. Hassan cut the internet for five days to bury the evidence.
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Opposition party Chadema documented 2,000 deaths and accused police of dumping over 400 unidentified bodies at undisclosed locations. Multiple Western outlets confirmed.
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Hassan's response was to create a commission she selected — including the Defense Minister who oversaw the killings. The result, which arrived April 23, is an autocrat's whitewash. The final death toll: 518. Hassan launched another probe too — into the protesters.
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But Xi Jinping doesn't care about dead children. Tanzania was the world's fourth-largest Belt and Road construction recipient in the first half of 2025 —up 1,930% year-over-year.
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This is the defining tradeoff of American foreign policy in our era.
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Every stance the United States takes for human rights risks ceding ground to Beijing's model — non-interference abroad, tyranny at home, debt-trap infrastructure as the price of admission. Every dollar of conditional aid the West withholds from Hassan pushes her closer to Beijing. Yet every dollar it supplies is moral abdication.
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Where do you draw the line?
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​Our Verdict: These pages draw it at twenty-one dead children. Full withdrawal of aid.
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​The Trump Administration: Credit for condemning the violence in December, saying it was "comprehensively reviewing" ties. But five months later — no statements, no aid cuts, no action.​
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Sources: Human Rights Watch, The Citizen (Tanzania), Green Finance & Development Center, CNN

Freedom Fighter of the Week: Tindu Lissu

In 2017, gunmen ambushed Tundu Lissu's car outside of his apartment in Dodoma, firing 36 rounds. Sixteen bullets tore through his legs, arms, and stomach. The Tanzanian government's chief political opponent — a constitutional lawyer who had filed over 200 cases against the state — should have died on the asphalt that morning.
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Twenty-three surgeries and three years of recovery in Belgium later, Lissu returned home and ran for president against autocrat John Magufuli. He won between 13% and an unknown true percentage; the regime claimed Magufuli took 84%.
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Lissu fled again, hunted.
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When Samia Suluhu Hassan took power in 2021 and signaled reform, Lissu returned a second time. The reform proved theater. By 2025 he was leading Chadema, Tanzania's largest opposition party — and demanding electoral reforms before the October vote. On April 9, security forces seized him from a rally in Ruvuma and charged him with treason. Under Tanzanian law, the punishment upon conviction is mandatory death.
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He has now spent over a year in a maximum-security prison in Dar es Salaam though never sentenced and barred from talking to lawyers. So, he is representing himself. And he is winning — exposing inconsistencies in witness statements until the courtroom erupts in laughter and getting the prosecution's secret-witness scheme ruled unconstitutional.
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From his cell, as Hassan’s security forces shot down protesters in the streets, Lissu issued a statement: "I am prepared to endure any hardship for the sake of my belief in justice and the freedom of our people."
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Tanzania's dictators have spent eight years trying to bury this man. They have only made him stronger.

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