The Chinese Communist Party recently announced that it will now allow each family to have three children. That’s interesting for a bunch of reasons. The rulers of China have allowed families to have two children for 20 years, yet the fertility rate in China - the average number of children each Chinese woman has given birth to - has been stuck between 1.6 and 1.7 since 1996. In other words, in the wake of the disastrous one child policy, Chinese families aren’t even having the two children they’re allowed to have. For context, the replacement rate - the fertility rate that allows a society to stay at its current population level - is 2.1. Below that, population shrinks; above it, population grows. It was an interesting acknowledgment by the communists in China that the future belongs to those who are there, who exist. People are, apparently, a minimum necessity to be a superpower. Happily, the communists are too late to save their regime. The terrible reality for them is that the Chinese people will grow old before they grow rich. The other terrible reality - and larger lesson for everyone - is that once people stop having children, it is difficult for any government to restart the process. Those of us in the West are familiar with the problem. In the European Union, birth rates are alarmingly low. The overall fertility rate in the EU is 1.5. Some nations - Italy and Spain with fertility rates of 1.3 - are not more than a generation or two from being unable to recover, absent an emphatic and immediate religious resurgence. France is proud that it is leading the pack in Europe with a fertility rate of 1.9. In the United States, the fertility rate is 1.7, the lowest ever.

There was one area of foreign policy in which the United States always seemed to somehow fall short, and as a result, I found myself watching in horror as the threats emanating from the Islamic Republic of Iran grew more serious year after year. I feel hopeful that Western leaders will soon begin paying due attention to crucial missing factors in most prior discussions, namely the role of the Iranian people and opposition activists in the future of their country. Since the early days of the Islamic Republic, far too many Western policymakers have unwittingly fallen victim to Iranian propaganda which suggested there was no viable alternative to the Islamist regime and that the ouster of that regime would only lead to chaos. Previous vice president, Mike Pence said, there exists, “a well organized, fully prepared, perfectly qualified and popularly supported alternative.” When the uprising started in 2018 in over 100 cities people were chanting “death to the dictator.” Those slogans remain in circulation even now, and are often accompanied by clarifying chants of “down with tyranny, be it the Shah or the mullahs.” Western leaders are wrong to assume that the existing Iranian regime is stable, or that they have no choice but to work with it. In fact, the regime has never been more vulnerable. The opportunity now exists for the U.S. and its allies to work together with the Iranian people to exploit that vulnerability. As former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, “to correct the Iran policy, no matter who is in the White House, it is a necessity for the U.S. administration to reach out to the Iranian resistance and take advantage of its tremendous capabilities.”

North Korea has often used provocations and threats to drive a wedge between the United States and its allies. Under President Yoon Suk-yeol, however, South Korea is now willing to respond to North Korean provocations with displays of military strength. Mr. Yoon accepted the Biden administration’s request to resume large-scale combined military exercises and rotational deployments of U.S. strategic assets, both of which had been curtailed since 2018. The Kim regime in the North is expected to escalate tensions still further by conducting its seventh overall nuclear test, which would precipitate even more robust allied military responses. It is expected that the next nuclear test will be of a new generation of smaller tactical nuclear weapons for battlefield use, which would exponentially increase the threat to South Korea and Japan as well as to U.S. forces stationed there. The U.S. and its allies must respond resolutely to future regime provocations as well as restore military exercises to pre-2018 levels to enhance deterrence and defense. Washington also should encourage ongoing South Korean and Japanese efforts to further enhance bilateral security cooperation despite lingering tensions from long-standing historic and sovereignty disputes between those two nations. But South Korea and Japan increasingly question the viability of the U.S. commitment to their defense both because of Pyongyang’s increasing ability to target the United States with nuclear weapons and because of previous U.S. threats to remove forces from the region. Washington should affirm its commitment to its extended deterrence guarantee, while pushing back against growing South Korean advocacy for developing its own nuclear weapons.

North Korea has ratcheted up its military activity to unprecedented levels this year. In addition to a record number of missile launches, it has conducted highly provocative ground, air and naval actions near its border with South Korea. Pyongyang was seeking to intimidate the United States and its allies, but it triggered bolder allied actions, including the resumption of large-scale military exercises after a hiatus of roughly five years. North Korea has steadily improved both the quality and quantity of its nuclear and missile arsenals in recent years, unveiling nuclear-capable missile systems that pose an ever-greater risk to the United States and its allies. The increasing rate and diversity of missile launches show that Pyongyang is making significant progress toward implementing a more capable and flexible nuclear strategy, including preemptive strikes with strategic, tactical and battlefield nuclear weapons. North Korean air, ground and naval operations near the border were also on a scale never seen before. These provocations, as well as Kim Jong Un’s willingness to resume missile flights over Japan, exacerbated regional tensions and risked triggering a military crisis. North Korea’s escalating military provocations are the result of its decades long campaign to develop a nuclear war-fighting capability and its exploitation of recent circumstances, including the diversion of international attention by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and deteriorating U.S. relations with China and Russia. Pyongyang knows it can rely on Chinese and Russian obstructionism at the U.N. Security Council to prevent additional punitive measures.

The Black Berets, special repressive forces trained by Chinese advisors, spread out at night to arrest thousands of youths. Shaken by the July 11 uprising and the continued citizen defiance, the communist regime in Cuba is grasping power through whatever means necessary. The thousands of protesters on July 11 were very clear in their demands: Their goal is liberation and an end to communist rule, to enjoy the same kind of freedoms people around the world, such as those Taiwan now enjoys. At this crossroads, a clear-minded and principled U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba and Taiwan is imperative. No concessions should be made on either one. Taiwan must be protected from aggression. The Cuban people deserve decisive support to regain the freedom they have struggled so long and so hard for. Democratic change in Cuba would bring about profound changes in Latin America and the world. If the aggressive Cuban totalitarian state were to be replaced with a thriving democracy, the global resurgence of authoritarianism would receive its first powerful push back. Two of the decisive steps that the United States can take to support Cuba’s fight for liberty are, in the first place, to implement a wide array of communication initiatives to break the regime’s censorship of the information that reaches ordinary Cubans, as well as to actively engage with the Cuban resistance in the island to bolster a national and international civic campaign for democratic change. Preservation and attainment of freedom for Taiwan and Cuba would usher in a better 21st century for all the planet.

Starting from a war-ruined economy, Cuba’s social and economic gains placed it at the forefront of Latin American countries. In 1949-50, the same year the Republic of China reestablished itself in Taiwan, Cuban GDP ranked seventh of the 47 Latin American nations, nearly three times that of Taiwan’s. Today, Taiwan is the world’s 21st largest economy, a technological powerhouse with top living standards, and Cuba’s economy is ranked 64th in the world, with a calculated 70% of its population mired in poverty. Whereas Taiwan turned toward the private sector’s leadership in the economy, Cuba had a revolution that had promised to reestablish constitutional order, and free elections turned dramatically toward communism. Both the freely elected government of Taiwan and the dictatorship in Cuba have adversarial relationships with the huge powers they are close to. The communist regime in Cuba is closely allied with the People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan has a close alliance with the United States. As the world faces both the COVID-19 pandemic and a dangerous resurgence of the totalitarian virus, driven by China’s accrued economic power, Cuba may offer a ray of hope for the cause of democracy. On July 11, an unprecedented number of Cubans throughout the island participated in mass protests for freedom. The regime’s secret police services could not stop the national civic uprising. U.S. financial sanctions and citizen non-cooperation have severely weakened the regime’s network of neighborhood informants and thugs. With support from the PRC, the Cuban dictatorship brought down the internet to cut off protesters from the world.

The mettle of U.S. foreign policy in the new phase of the worldwide struggle between democracy and totalitarianism is being tested in two islands: Taiwan and Cuba. There are great cultural differences between the two, but the modern history of both is shaped by the struggle for freedom and against communism. The prosperous democracy of the Republic of China (Taiwan) is today’s equivalent of pre-World War II Czechoslovakia. A republic whose very existence signifies defiance of a great power’s ambition to establish a totalitarian regional and world order. In pre-war Europe, that power was Nazi Germany. In 21st century Asia, that power is the People’s Republic of China. Our resolve in supporting Taiwan’s existence as a self-ruled, democratic polity is essential. Any weakness or faltering in U.S. commitment to its defense will send all the wrong signals to an expanding dictatorship whose world vision is as totalitarian as that of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union once was. A world that accepts PRC’s conquest of Taiwan will inevitably be a world shaped by the dominance of China. In such an international atmosphere, those very domestic freedoms we treasure will be diminished by the reality of the United States becoming a second-tier power. In some ways, pre-1959, Cuba was to Latin America what Taiwan now represents for Asia and the developing world. Cuba gained independence in 1902 after a hard-fought struggle and a devastating war. A sugar-producing island, as Taiwan once was, Cuba struggled through periods of military dictatorship to build an inclusive democracy, also just as Taiwan.

It then spread to Syria, Egypt and beyond, causing the marginalization of the intellectual and economic classes, leading to a decline in Muslim scientific productivity and economic dynamism. For example, Europeans invented the printing press around 1440, but it took nearly three centuries for Muslims to print a book in Arabic script. This extreme delay followed on the absence of an intellectual class to appreciate the scholarly significance of the printing press [and] a merchant class to understand the financial opportunities of print-capitalism. The military commanders in Muslim empires did not see the value of the printing press and the ulema regarded it as a threat to their monopoly over education. As a result, in the 18th century, European presses printed 20,000 books to each solitary one printed in the Ottoman Empire. Nineteenth-century reforms did not address the ulema-state alliance and so failed. Subsequent efforts fared even worse due to a combination of military-led expanded state power, proliferating radical ideologies, insecure secularist leaders and disproportionate hydrocarbon revenues, which “hindered democratization and created rentier states,” leading to today’s predicament. Looking ahead, Mr. Kuru offers Muslims four excellent recommendations: acknowledge the problems of authoritarianism and underdevelopment; blame neither imperialism nor Islam for them; focus on the damage done to intellectuals and economic entrepreneurs by the ulema-state alliance; and focus on “economic restructuring based on productive systems that encourage entrepreneurship.” Now, will Muslims heed this wise advice? I am prepared to bet my house mortgage that they will not.

Personally, I advocate a third explanation: that various factors ― closure of original thought and Mongolian invasion especially ― caused medieval Islamic civilization to decline even as Europe took off. Then, a searing mutual disdain and hostility blocked Muslims from learning from Christians. Had modernity been invented in China, Muslims would far more advanced today. These contending interpretations come to mind on reading a paper with a forbidding title, “The Ulema-State Alliance: A Barrier to Democracy and Development in the Muslim World” (ulema are Islamic scholars), that offers an exciting fourth explanation. Ahmet T. Kuru, a professor of political science at San Diego State University, argues that too-close relations between religious and political authorities have stifled Muslim creativity for the past millennium, and that this coalition needs to be broken for Muslims to surge ahead. His thesis bears serious consideration. Mr. Kuru starts by recalling that “a certain degree of separation between the ulema (who represented Islamic knowledge, education and law) and political rulers” characterized the Muslim Golden Age of the eighth to 11th centuries, when Muslims enjoyed a wealth and power that put them at the forefront of civilization. In particular, “the overwhelming majority of the ulema and their families were working in non-governmental jobs, particularly in commerce.” As a result, a religious and philosophical diversity made early Muslim societies dynamic. Starting in the mid-11th century, and for many reasons, “the ulema-state alliance began to emerge in today’s Central Asia, Iran and Iraq.”

A flood of statistics on human rights, health, corruption, longevity, literacy, security, income and power makes clear that Muslims have fallen behind other peoples during at least the past two centuries. The causes of this problem, however, are far less clear. The global left and Islamists blame Western imperialism. For them, today’s tribulations follow inevitably on the two centuries after 1760 when nearly all Muslims fell under the control of 16 majority-Christian states (the United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, Russia, Ethiopia, the Philippines and the United States). But this accusation ignores two key facts. First, Muslims lagged much of the rest of the world long before 1760 ― which helps explain why they fell under Western control in the first place. Second, Western control ended many decades ago, affording plenty of time to blossom and succeed, as so many non-Muslim peoples have done; compare Singapore and Malaysia or Israel and Palestinians. In contrast, analysts hostile to Islam tend to blame that religion for Muslim tribulations. Ascribing Muslims’ medieval success to the contributions of cultures subjugated by force, such as the Roman, Greek and Iranian, they portray Islam as a stultifying influence that encourages rote learning, inculcates fatalism and breeds fanaticism. But this too is illogical: If Islam permitted Muslims successfully to borrow from other civilizations a millennium ago, how can it prohibit a similar borrowing today?