I entered politics with a mandate to focus on domestic Israeli issues, with my personal history propelling me toward Diaspora affairs. As a member of the security cabinet, I had to figure out how to contribute to debates about Israel’s security too. Whenever the generals and intelligence analysts lapsed into military speak, I watched everyone around the cabinet table get nostalgic for their days of service, while I pretended to keep up with the insider’s onslaught of army acronyms.
My military service consisted of three weeks of civil defense training. My age and height qualified me for perpetual stretcher duty, helping others become good soldiers as they dragged my “corpse” around. Despite such inadequate training, from the start of my government service, I got a firsthand look at the Iran threat and the worry it generated. But it happened almost by chance.
In January 1997, I visited Russia for the first time since my liberation. This could have been a normal working trip as Israel’s new minister of industry and trade visiting our new post-Soviet friend. Instead, it became an emotional and symbolic journey, closing many circles for me.
In February 1986, I left the Soviet Union with four KGB escorts as a prisoner stripped of his citizenship for bad behavior. Eleven years later, I returned to Russia as an Israeli minister, with staffers and a large delegation of Israeli entrepreneurs, welcomed with red carpet receptions in half a dozen Russian ministries. In 1980, my father had passed away without seeing me even once after my arrest. Now, I could visit his grave and see the one way I had been able to contribute to his burial from my prison cell: I had proposed the line that was etched on his tombstone, Psalm 25:13, “His soul will lie in peace and his seed will inherit the Land of Israel.”
In December 1989, the Soviets banned me from Andrei Sakharov’s funeral, still considering me a traitor. Now, I visited Sakharov’s grave, met old comrades and cellmates in Sakharov’s now-iconic apartment, and presented an official photograph to the Sakharov Center, an image of the Israeli memorial to him that I helped establish. Sakharov Gardens lies at Jerusalem’s entrance. That makes Israel the only country that mentions my mentor’s name daily, in constant updates about the nearby traffic jams.
In 1976, I snuck two journalists around Moscow with smuggled cameras, dodging the secret police, to film the dissidents’ struggle. The “slanderous fabrications” of the “illegal film” so infuriated the Soviets that they wove the movie into my indictment two years later. The prosecutors showed the film, A Calculated Risk, during my trial to illustrate how I “assisted” Communism’s enemies. In 1997, I took a busload of international journalists covering my trip on the same freedom tour. I traced where we had organized, protested, and been arrested, this time enjoying Russian police protection.
In the late 1970s, I spent a year and a half in Lefortovo prison undergoing interrogations. Twenty years later, I insisted on visiting the prison as a condition of my trip. Avital came with me, and I became the first—and so far the only—public figure to visit my still-functioning alma mater on a sightseeing trip. I also took her to the punishment cell, which the jailers at first said no longer existed.
When Avital and I emerged from the prison and the hellish punishment cell, a crowd of journalists surrounded us. “Why are you returning to this dark place?” one reporter asked. “Isn’t it painful for you?”
I answered, “On the contrary. It’s so inspiring to return. Think about it. At this very place twenty years ago, the leaders of the most powerful secret service of the most powerful empire in the world at the time insisted it was the end of the Zionist movement, the end of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union, that all our friends were arrested. They claimed that everything was finished and that if I didn’t cave in, I would never get out alive.”
I continued, “Now, twenty years later, the KGB doesn’t exist. The Soviet Union doesn’t exist. Communism doesn’t exist. The Warsaw Bloc doesn’t exist. Today, two hundred million people from that big prison called the Soviet Union are enjoying their freedom. The world is freer and more secure today. The Iron Curtain has fallen down and Jews are leaving the Soviet Union by the hundreds of thousands. That shows the real power of the Jewish people and our army of students and housewives.”
On that trip, my childhood dreams came true. Thanks to the attention the visit received, the Russian-language chess magazine I used to read in my teens from cover to cover, 64, published my chess games and puzzles. My satisfaction in closing the circle of my chess career so grandly competed with the joy I had in closing another career. After serving so much time in prison on trumped-up espionage charges, I returned to Russia with a secret mission in addition to my official business: working for Israeli intelligence.
Shortly before my Moscow journey, Amos Gilad, the head of military intelligence research at Aman, Israel’s military intelligence agency, approached me. He and his associate asked me to arrange a short, confidential session with the highest official I would meet, Russia’s foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov. They wanted me to inform him that Israel knew Russian technology was being peddled to the Iranians. “The foreign minister will deny the charge,” my briefers said. “But we want them to know that we know, and we want to see their reaction.”
They started explaining to me what to say and what not to say. After rounds of drilling me in their nuanced dos and don’ts, I stopped them. “To avoid any mistakes, dictate to me exactly what you want me to say and I will deliver the message word for word.”
My official meeting with Foreign Minister Primakov went well. This cultured academic with deep intelligence ties welcomed our trade delegation warmly. We enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation about improving our cultural, economic, and diplomatic relations. The weakened, post-Soviet Russian Federation wanted to celebrate historic new beginnings with Israel.
When our short private meeting began, I changed the tone abruptly. I told Primakov that all these good intentions would go nowhere if Russia continued helping Iran develop lethal ballistic missiles that could reach Tel Aviv. “We will have no choice. We will have to fight Iran and we will win. But nothing will be left of this friendship both our countries clearly desire.”
Primakov seemed to sigh in relief. He probably feared I was going to challenge him about some unpleasant Soviet-era episode that was beyond him. This question was easy. As expected, he dismissed it. “I’m sorry, Natan Borisovich,” he said. “Someone is misleading you. We are not interested in supporting Iran’s aggressiveness. We are definitely not interested in hurting Israel. And we are not exporting military technology to Iran.”
Pulling out my cheat sheet from my pocket, I spelled out how X firm in the north delivered Y materials in the autumn of 199Z and facilitated Iran’s ballistic missile production. I watched carefully as he took notes on the specifics.
I had run through the information my briefers pumped into me, but I was enjoying myself. “Look, I can’t tell you any more than what I already said,” I added, improvising. “But, as you know, I am a graduate of MFTI, your top scientific institute in this field. I can understand that without this particular equipment, Iran could only launch scrap metal wildly in our direction. It’s your technology that makes them dangerous to us.”
Still sputtering denials, Primakov repeated, “I’m sure you are wrong but I promise to look into this.”
Two days later, just hours before our flight home, Avital and I were making a farewell tour of the souvenir shops on the Arbat, Moscow’s historic shopping center. Someone from the Israeli embassy tracked me down with a message that had been relayed to our ambassador. Primakov wanted to see me immediately.
The Russians knew I was only a few hundred meters from the Foreign Ministry’s headquarters, which made it easy for me to peel off discreetly from the shopping for twenty minutes. Minutes later, I was back in Russia’s majestic Foreign Ministry building, one of Stalin’s famous “seven skyscrapers,” which sits on Arbat Street. “We want to be open with you because your friendship is important to us,” Primakov said. “We looked into this. You were right. But we want you to know our government was not involved. A private firm violated our security protocols,” he claimed. “We will punish the sinners and make sure it never happens again.”
When I returned to Israel, my new friends from military intelligence were waiting impatiently for the Russian response. I told them word for word what happened during the two meetings. Like good spooks, they showed no emotion and vanished.
The next day, the chief of staff, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, called. “Thank you, Natan. You rendered a great and unique service to our country,” he said.
I was glad to have helped, and I didn’t expect any more such calls. But somebody in our intelligence bureaucracy probably decided I was an expert on the Russian mentality and an asset in dealing with such issues. I was invited to top-secret briefings about Russia and Iran. My security clearance was upgraded to the level of the defense minister. Eventually, I became unofficially the minister with a special responsibility for Russian relations.
Altogether, I learned far more than I expected about the danger of the Iranian threat. Most of our neighbors used Israel as a whipping boy, the external enemy every dictator needs. The Islamic Republic of Iran, however, is a totalitarian Islamist regime obsessed with fighting America and destroying Israel. The traditional basis of the Cold War standoff—the fear of mutual assured destruction—for Iran is not a minus but a bonus. The apocalyptic dimension in Iranian Islamists’ ideology views the possibility of their own people dying “as an incentive, not a deterrent,” explained my late friend, Princeton’s legendary Middle East expert Bernard Lewis. They seek this “free pass to heaven.”
While working the Russian back channel, I also collaborated with America’s vice president Al Gore on the US-Israeli initiatives to stop proliferation. After rounds of negotiation, we scored a big success during one visit to Ukraine in 1998. One of Ukraine’s state-owned enterprises, Turboatom, produced giant steam turbines for nuclear power plants. It had a multimillion-dollar contract to sell two turbines to the Iranians. Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma and his security adviser Volodymyr Horbulin canceled the order.
I called Vice President Gore from Kuchma’s office, trying to show the Ukrainian president that we grateful Israelis would continue urging the Americans to thank the Ukrainians with new contracts and jobs. A few years later, Ukrainian diplomats complained to me that the Americans never followed through on their financial promises.
We never succeeded with the Russians. Russian technology continued flowing to Iran, even as we cooperated with Boris Yeltsin’s government on other security matters.
In 1998, the head of the new Russian KGB organization, the FSB (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or Federal Security Service), visited Israel for the first, and so far only, time. I was asked to host Nikolay Dmitrievich Kovalyov—who had joined the KGB in 1974—at an intimate official dinner in the Mishkenot Sha’ananim neighborhood in Jerusalem. The date added to the surrealness of the situation: we dined on July 14, 1998, the twentieth anniversary of the day I denounced the Soviet court and received my thirteen-year sentence.
I enjoyed reminding guests like Kovalyov about such milestones. They liked to look impassive when I needled them. Then they would declare, “It’s all behind us.”
“Well, maybe then it’s time to open up the archives, so other Refuseniks and I can read our KGB files,” I replied, pressing my advantage. Kovalyov promised to look into the question.
I didn’t expect much, especially since he lost his job to Vladimir Putin almost as soon as he returned from Jerusalem. I joked, “That’s the price a KGB man pays for visiting Israel.”
During my next visit to Russia in February 1999, I met Putin in his new office in the infamous Lubyanka, the former KGB headquarters that now housed its successor, the FSB. I expressed my usual concerns about Iran and Russian technology. I objected, as usual, to the anti-Semitic statements some new Russian leaders made. I warned that, historically, such rhetoric gave extremists a green light and encouraged violence.
Rather than deliver the usual loyalists’ denial, claiming Russia had no anti-Semitism, Putin answered cleverly. “Look, some stupid people say and do stupid things,” he admitted. “But make no mistake about it. We fear pogroms more than you do. For you, it’s a few people being beaten here and there; for us, it’s a loss of control. If one group succeeds in taking the law into its own hands, do you have any idea how many other groups might follow? So don’t worry, I will not permit any violence against Jews.”
As the meeting ended, Putin surprised me again. “I know you requested to see the materials of your case,” he said. “If you want, you can see them right now.” Dumbfounded, I walked with my staffers to the imposing office of the former KGB head Yuri Andropov. It had been turned into a shrine to his memory. So there I was, about to read my court files, right by the desk of the man who had authorized my arrest and the arrests of many of my friends. I plowed through the papers I had last read in 1978 for trial prep: fifteen thousand pages in fifty-one volumes.
Postponing my return to Israel for a day, I continued reading. Sitting there all day, reading those files, I kept shaking my head and smiling. I was sorry Andropov couldn’t come back from the dead, see all the buzz around me in his office now, and then return to the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Red Square.
By the time I met Putin again, he was president. Slowing Iran’s rush to go nuclear and get ballistic missiles remained Israel’s priority. In my reports describing my meetings with Putin and other Russian officials, I emphasized that I believed Russia didn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons. The Russians feared their own Muslim extremists in Chechnya and elsewhere. But it was also obvious to me that Putin was playing Iran as a card to force American acceptance of post-Soviet Russia as a superpower. Russia seemed ready to continue helping Iran get close to going nuclear, without crossing the line.
Putin and other Russian leaders always emphasized that the Europeans—especially the Germans, the French, and the Dutch—were making big money selling technologies to the Iranians. “Why shouldn’t we Russians profit too?” they wondered. “We won’t repeat Ukraine’s mistakes.”
When Ariel Sharon became prime minister, I lost my informal role as the back channel to Russia. When it came to any pressing strategic questions, Sharon relied on a small group of foreign policy advisers who resented outsiders.
But Arik was always fascinated to hear about my conversations with Putin and other Russian leaders about Jewish issues. He was especially interested in Putin’s reaction whenever I pushed the Russian leader about the fate of the Jewish oligarchs who had fallen from grace the moment he felt they were no longer completely in his camp. It didn’t matter to me whether they were wealthy or not. It mattered that the man serving me tea was violating their human rights. I doubted my interventions would help, but I knew I had to try.
At the same time, I developed close ties with some key American officials. So the Iran briefings continued, usually to deliver messages to our closest ally. Along with other Israelis, I kept trying to convince the Americans that Iran was the real number-one threat to the free world and was growing more dangerous. This discussion began long before the United States invaded Iraq and continues today.
In Israel, there’s a broad, multiparty consensus among politicians and security professionals that Iran poses the biggest threat to our country too. The debate revolves around the most effective way to protect ourselves: militarily, covertly, or economically through sanctions. During this often harrowing debate, one person stood out. The legendary diplomat Uri Lubrani, Israel’s last ambassador in Iran, predicted the shah’s fall in the 1970s. Until his recent death in 2018, Lubrani kept anticipating regime change in Iran. He kept in close touch with Iranian dissidents, in Iran and worldwide. Predictably, Lubrani’s approach made him an isolated Don Quixote–type figure. Just as predictably, I endorsed his strategy, as did Bernard Lewis, who insisted, “There is only one solution to the Iranian threat, and that can only come from the Iranian people.”
Lubrani and I became such good friends that I always kept a bottle of the special vodka he liked at our home. We often discussed the unique situation in Iran, which had a middle class that should be primed for dissent. “The Islamic Republic of Iran reminds me of the last years of the Soviet Union,” Mikheil Saakashvili told me when he visited Israel as Georgia’s president in 2004. “Every official there speaks so critically about America in public—and just as glowingly about America in private.” I kept quoting this insight to others. But Lubrani and I were among the few Israelis who appreciated such an analysis. It meant that Iran, like Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, had reached that final phase, when even the elites become doublethinkers.
Although my belief in linking human rights and international relations found few takers at home, I found a surprising champion abroad: President George W. Bush. Despite being raised as a member of the American Establishment, despite a background in oil and baseball, Bush understood the dissident mentality and vision in profound ways.
I first met Bush when he visited Israel as a presidential candidate. To be honest, I wasn’t impressed. He knew nothing about the Soviet Jewry struggle. He knew nothing about his father’s contribution to freeing Jews from Russia and Ethiopia. Shortly after our meeting, Bush sent me a formal thank-you note. His more personal PS added: “By the way, my parents really do know you and remember you fondly.”
After al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the United States eight months into the Bush presidency on September 11, 2001, I applauded Bush’s tough stance against terrorism. I expected little on the democracy front.
On April 4, 2002, days after the Israeli army launched Operation Defensive Shield against the Palestinians’ terrorist strongholds, President Bush addressed the situation. In his White House speech, as expected, Bush demanded we withdraw immediately. He added, however, that the Palestinians needed democratic leadership as a prerequisite for serious negotiations. “They deserve a government that respects human rights and a government that focuses on their needs, education and health care, rather than feeding their resentments,” he insisted.
These were difficult times. Amid the sound and fury of battle, it would have been easy to miss the president’s pointed message. Not me. I felt like pinching myself as I read it. Finally, after nine years of being dismissed as a romantic—with even close friends rolling their eyes whenever I talked about Oslo, peace, and democracy—the ground shifted. The president of the United States spoke in the Rose Garden about Palestinians, peace, and democracy.
Days later, I flew to Washington to address the public rally supporting Israel’s defensive operation against terror. Commenting on CNN, I applauded Bush’s surprising, exciting, overlooked remarks welcoming democracy as the best force to secure peace with the Palestinians.
During my trip, I met Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. The president’s speech had received much notice, she said, but I seemed to be the only one who acknowledged his freedom agenda. “We’re going to pay more and more attention to this approach now,” she explained. Inspired by the administration’s new commitment, I decided to write up a Marshall Plan–style proposal I had been thinking about, linking increased aid for Palestinians and investment in their economy with clear marks of democratic progress in building civil society. Just as much of the world had turned toward capitalism and away from socialism in the 1990s, I hoped the world might turn toward democracy in the twenty-first century.
My final proof that this president identified with dissidents and understood that Western leaders must support their work to build democracy came when I heard Bush eulogize Ronald Reagan in June 2004.
Attending the funeral in Washington’s National Cathedral was a strange mirror-image moment: I seemed to be leading the Israeli delegation to the funeral. In fact, I was defying my prime minister’s direct order not to attend. When I heard that Ronald Reagan had died at ninety-three, I assumed a high-level Israeli delegation would go to the funeral. I submitted an article to the Jerusalem Post honoring Reagan’s exceptional moral clarity in denouncing the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.” While writing a condolence letter to the Reagan family, I spoke with someone from Sharon’s office. No one from the government was flying from Israel to honor Reagan. I asked why not and received some vague technical explanation.
I called Israel’s president, Moshe Katzav. “Natan, you are right. It’s not good for Israel not to be represented there. I am ready to go. But I don’t want to defy the prime minister. He has to ask me to go.” I called Netanyahu, who was minister of finance. “Of course, it’s a mistake,” Bibi said. “Let’s both go. I will call Arik and arrange it.”
When I arrived home, Avital offered to join me, to show her gratitude to Reagan too. Bibi then called, warning, “Arik absolutely opposes our going. It’s too awkward for me to cross him on this.” Reporters were constantly scrutinizing the intense Arik-Bibi rivalry, looking for trouble. “But I will back you if you still want to go.”
Confused about all this resistance, I entered the car with Avital. On the way to the airport from Jerusalem, I called the cabinet secretary, Israel Maimon, to inform him that I would end up missing the usual Sunday cabinet meeting. Maimon soon called back to say, rather formally, “Prime Minister Sharon directs you not to attend President Reagan’s funeral.” Sharon was sending his ambassador in Washington, Danny Ayalon, to represent Israel. That was it. Many other ministers had wanted to go, Maimon said. “If you go, it will cause jealousy and confusion.”
I called Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein. Fortunately, the drive to Ben-Gurion Airport takes time and could accommodate all the back-and-forth calls. “If the prime minister directs me as a member of the cabinet not to attend this kind of function, can I go nevertheless as a private citizen?” I asked. “I’m not asking for permission. I only want to understand the law.” Rubinstein said the prime minister could fire me anytime. Beyond that, I was free to go.
I then called Maimon to inform him that I was taking a few personal days to attend the funeral as a private citizen. I directed our travel agent to pay for our two tickets from our personal account.
As I entered the National Cathedral, someone handed me a ticket Reagan’s family had reserved for me. Before I knew it, I was sitting in the front of the church, right behind Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev.
At the first cabinet meeting after my return, one minister noted how gratifying it was to see “the Israeli delegation”—me—seated so prominently at the funeral. This confirmed our “special relationship” with the United States. I glanced at Arik, who was silent. I replied I was honored to represent Israel there, to give this hero who had helped bring down Communism and free Soviet Jews the farewell he deserved.
Eventually, I discovered the most plausible explanation for Sharon’s grudging behavior. In his 2014 biography of Sharon, the former editor of Haaretz David Landau noted that when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Reagan was furious. Sharon knew that much of Reagan’s criticism of the war was directed at him as defense minister. He never forgave Reagan for his angry pressure to withdraw and saw no reason to honor him.
By contrast, when eulogizing Reagan, President Bush had praised him for calling “evil by its name,” adding that “there were no doubters in the prisons and Gulags, where dissidents spread the news, tapping to each other in code what the American president had dared to say.”
“My God, Bush is quoting my article,” I thought to myself, moved again by finding an ideological comrade in arms after so long.
The dissident-as-democratic-champion idea had caught Bush’s imagination. His eulogy confirmed that, finally, someone powerful was listening to my analysis about how to defeat fear societies.
I was more surprised when Bush emerged as one of my book’s first readers. Nine days after his reelection in November 2004, Bush hosted me at the White House. I was already in the United States to promote The Case for Democracy. Peter Osnos, my publisher and a former Washington Post reporter who had helped me in Moscow, had shared galley proofs with Tom A. Bernstein, a friend of President Bush’s and former partner of his in the Texas Rangers baseball club. Bernstein then passed the book to Bush.
When Bush and I discussed the book, he zeroed in on a metaphor my coauthor and I had used, comparing a tyrannical state to a soldier pointing a gun at a prisoner for hours on end. Eventually, the soldier’s arms tire. He lowers the gun, and the captive escapes. The dissident Andrei Amalrik had used that metaphor in 1969, when he wrote his courageous essay Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? Now, the president’s interest brought Amalrik’s metaphor back to life.
Bush said, “I always felt that freedom is not an American invention, but a gift from God to all people. You succeeded in explaining it rationally.”
I appreciated Bush’s graciousness, although I was no longer falling for his “I’m just a simple guy from Texas” act. His commitment clearly ran deeper than my book. He admitted, “That thinking, that’s part of my presidential DNA.”
I told Bush that he was a true dissident. Rather than following the polls, he remained true to his beliefs and fought for them. Dissidents are lonely, I cautioned, but history is ultimately on their side. Countering the condescending claim that the Palestinians weren’t ready for democracy, I recalled how many of the armchair experts used to decree that, while democracy is wonderful, our cause as dissidents would never shake the Soviet Union. I said he was acting in the tradition of Henry Jackson, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan, linking foreign policy to human rights.
The Oval Office meeting wowed me. But I started worrying that I had violated diplomatic protocol. Israeli ministers are not supposed to meet the US president without informing the prime minister. I called Sharon. I reported yet again that Bush was going to focus on this democracy agenda and that it might be time to link any further concessions for peace to concrete Palestinian steps toward civil society. Arik remained unenthusiastic, saying, “We will discuss it when you return home.” He was in the middle of a massive power struggle to push the Gaza disengagement through Likud and the cabinet. I had already condemned the move, and Arik was waiting to confirm Bush’s support.
I returned home with my first box of books and gave a copy to Arik. “It’s good that you convinced Bush about things that don’t exist,” he said sarcastically. Sharon was not about to let anyone distract him from his disengagement plan.
When I resigned from the government to protest the disengagement, I wrote President Bush a long letter explaining my actions. Bush responded, emphasizing that he shared my beliefs in democratization and that we would remain kindred pro-democratic spirits. Still, as president, he had to trust his friend “General Sharon.”
My warm relations with President Bush complicated my relationship with many American Jews. Today, many liberal Jews, like most Democrats, hate President Trump so intensely that they forget how much they detested Bush. At the time, the hatred was absolutely vitriolic. Then, as now, many American Jews could not even thank the president when he backed Israel enthusiastically, while many Orthodox Jews could not criticize the president because he was so pro-Israel. Then, as now, some of Bush’s harshest Jewish critics assumed that if this despicable president was so pro-Israel, there must be something wrong with Israel.
I liked quoting Bush’s line that “freedom is not an American invention; it’s a gift from God.” This universal expression struck me as something that every liberal Jew should applaud. So I was stunned when I used the line while addressing an important Jewish organization and the room turned hostile. “How can you be friends with that man?” one obviously secular woman, who looked like she had not been inside a synagogue for years, snapped at me. “Don’t you understand that his god is not our God?”
I didn’t even understand how his stance on democracy wasn’t our stance.
I did, however, understand the growing frustration with Bush as his presidency was bogged down in the Iraq War. In 2007, when a Jerusalem Post reporter asked me to assess Bush, I called him “a lonely dissident for democracy.” He deserved great respect for raising the democratic question at a critical moment in world history, in the true dissident spirit.
At the same time, a president should be bold, yet not so bold as to be lonely. I criticized the way Bush coddled the Palestinians and the way he, like most presidents, couldn’t comprehend that the charming, generous Saudis feared democracy even more than they feared Iran.
Underlying my analysis was my fundamental disagreement with President Bush’s faith that once citizens were voting, they were free. A free society is necessary for truly free elections to take place. Bush’s faith in elections left him unprepared for the chaos in Iraq and for the Hamas takeover in Gaza.
Nevertheless, I admired Bush’s consistent support of democratic dissidents. I estimate that Bush met with more than one hundred dissidents from around the world. It didn’t matter to him where they fought for freedom. It could be against regimes that were hostile to the United States, such as North Korea and Sudan, or competing powers such as Russia and China, or so-called friendly dictatorships such as Egypt. Bush put so much pressure on Egypt to release the democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim from jail, including suspending aid increases, that Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak refused to visit the White House during Bush’s second term.
Today, through his George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Texas, Bush has Republicans and Democrats working together to support dissidents worldwide. The bipartisan nature of his Human Freedom Advisory Council, on which I serve, is particularly impressive during these partisan times. Unfortunately, neither of his two immediate successors, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, have followed through on Bush’s core commitment to fighting dictatorships by boosting dissidents.
When Obama won the presidency in November 2008, I shared in the electric excitement that swept much of the liberal world. I wrote an op-ed saying that the world understood that Obama intended to revolutionize American policy and distinguish his presidency from Bush’s. Amid all the inevitable changes, I pleaded with Obama to follow in Bush’s footsteps by supporting democracy, by personally meeting with democratic dissidents and looking out for them.
I had one discussion with Obama during his presidential run, in March 2007, when I visited Washington to invite President Bush to address our dissidents’ conference in Prague. To broaden our coalition, I invited leading Democrats to join us too. Although he was too busy with his freshly announced candidacy to travel that far, Senator Obama responded to my call immediately and graciously invited me to his Senate office.
Obama impressed me with his Clintonesque charm, presence, and enthusiasm. We discussed the importance of the fight for freedom within fear societies. When I raised the question of Iranian dissidents specifically, he spoke passionately about his support for these heroes. Unfortunately, as president, Obama repeatedly prioritized engaging with dictatorial regimes over challenging their human rights records. In Cairo in June 2009, Obama spoke beautifully about democratic principles, about respecting women, about championing human rights. Yet, somehow, in that lengthy, well-publicized, carefully drafted speech, he ignored Hosni Mubarak’s oppressive actions, including the pro-democracy bloggers, critics, and journalists the Egyptians had thrown in prison.
Even worse, Obama faltered during the critical moments of Iran’s Green Revolution in 2009. According to Iranian dissidents with whom I later spoke, millions of Iranians were at a tipping point, wavering, poised to cross that critical psychological line between doublethink and dissent. At that moment, Iranian democrats needed an American administration ready to state unequivocally that it supported their goals and stood firmly at their side. Barack Obama let them down.
Obama’s priority was reaching an agreement with Tehran over its nuclear program. He feared alienating the regime by supporting the dissidents. His passivity at this key juncture poured cold water into an almost boiling pot; he discouraged revolutionary fervor precisely when he could have encouraged meaningful change. When I confronted Michael McFaul, Obama’s senior adviser on democracy issues who later served as ambassador to Russia, he claimed the administration feared for the Iranian dissidents’ safety. American support would make it easier for the mullahs to tag these dissidents as traitors.
I recognized this argument from my Soviet days. That’s what politicians in the free world usually say when they don’t want to upset their totalitarian partners. Dissidents, who have already crossed the line, have nothing to lose and want the help. It was later revealed publicly that Obama also blocked the CIA from supporting the dissidents secretly. In The Iran Wars, the veteran foreign affairs correspondent Jay Solomon blames Obama’s moves on his “obsessive commitment” to negotiations.
When Donald Trump was elected, he, too, wanted to distance himself from his predecessor. Nevertheless, he followed Obama by abandoning dissidents. Trump has taken America’s human-rights-free foreign policy to absurd new depths. His assertion that North Koreans support Kim Jong Un with “great fervor” undermined America’s moral standing, sabotaged North Korean dissidents, and legitimized an evil dictator. Trump’s shocking refusal to confront President Vladimir Putin over Russia’s blatant interference in the 2016 US presidential election highlights his mysterious unwillingness to protect Americans’ democratic rights, let alone Russians’ human rights or others’ democratic aspirations.
There are vast differences in tone and substance between Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Yet both have moved the world away from human rights linkage and back to a cynical realpolitik. Obviously, Bush’s pro-democracy policies didn’t work out in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he deserves credit for the consistency of his vision and the tremendous support he offered dissidents.
Some might wonder: Why bother with the dissidents? Why consult them? How much influence can they have? Dissidents are always a small minority. They often look weak and disconnected.
But democratic dissidents play two key roles in their societies. First, they function as a litmus test. Understanding the split between true believers and doublethinkers, they can identify the invisible armies of doublethinkers, even when the regime looks strong from the outside. Having broken out of the dictator’s forced illusions, they can help outsiders see past the façade. And second, they can be the agents for change, helping societies transition from fear to freedom.
In 2007, I initiated a unique meeting of democratic dissidents in Prague. I cohosted it with former Czech president Václav Havel and former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar in the nearly 350-year-old baroque Czernin Palace. This grand palace served as Nazi headquarters during World War II. KGB agents pretending to be Communist revolutionaries probably pushed the democratic martyr Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk to his death from his office window there in 1948. The Warsaw Pact, the Soviet military alliance competing with NATO, dissolved there in 1991.
Amid all that history, the meeting offered glimpses of a hopeful future. It was thrilling to be in a room with democratic activists from five continents. In one corner of the room was Lyudmila Alexeyeva, my cofounder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, who was still fighting for civil society in Putin’s Russia. Near her was the chess superstar turned dissident Garry Kasparov. We were joined by old friends and veterans of the human rights struggle like Saad Eddin Ibrahim from Egypt, Mithal al-Alusi from Iraq, and the Palestinian Bassem Eid, as well as dissidents I met for the first time from China, Belarus, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Iran, and Sudan.
I had invited President Bush to address the conference. Most of his advisers objected. When I followed up with a White House contact, he told me not to worry. “There is only one person in the West Wing who wants Bush to come to your conference. Fortunately for you, it is the president.” In addition to delivering formal remarks, Bush met privately with every dissident. I knew how crucial these meetings were.
Despite coming from seventeen different countries, we spoke the same language of freedom, the language of human rights. We had all known—or still knew—the worlds of repression, of fear, of doublethink, and of nonviolent democratic dissent.
Later, the Western world would be surprised by the Iranian Green Revolution, which we kept predicting in Prague. Similarly, with the same accuracy the dissident-prophets in the Soviet Union had shown, the activists in Prague predicted political earthquakes shaking the dictatorships of Mubarak in Egypt, Qaddafi in Libya, and Assad in Syria in the next three to five years.
Listening to them, watching them, I could feel history in the making. It confirmed my sense, and Bush’s, that the free world’s greatest weapon in this struggle is the awesome power of its ideas.
The dissidents I met in Prague in 2007 got me thinking about that other forum where I had sat for the majority of the last nine years: the Israeli cabinet. Sometimes, even during the most mundane discussions, I would still get excited by the thought that here we were, shaping history. I would imagine how many generations of Jews would have found the whole scene of a Jewish democracy in action fantastic. Even during the hottest arguments with my most aggressive rivals, even after the most disappointing votes, I never lost the feeling that with these people, my comrades in arms, we were inventing new paradigms for the Jewish future.
Nevertheless, thinking of my two worlds together was jarring. Freedom-fighting dissidents and Israeli politicians exist in parallel universes but rarely speak to one another. And serving in government showed me just how difficult it could be to balance my outsider impulse and my insider standing.
When I was minister of industry and trade, building economic ties with China was becoming increasingly important. In 1997, as a Foreign Ministry official briefed me before I hosted a Chinese leader, I asked about political repression in China. “Do we know just how many political prisoners they have there?” I asked.
“We don’t have that kind of information—and we don’t talk about that,” he said nervously, looking away from me. “We leave it to the Americans.”
During our meeting, I followed the economic agenda—almost. As we finished, I said I had to add one item. I said that as a political prisoner in recovery, who was freed because people around the world were concerned about my case, I was concerned about the status of political prisoners and prisons in China. My Foreign Ministry briefer turned white, then red, then white again. But the Chinese official, unruffled, answered politely. “My dear Minister Sharansky,” he said, “I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed. Come, visit China. I invite you to join me and we will visit our prisons together. You will see they are civilized—and for criminals, not dissidents.”
I felt badly ambushing my Foreign Ministry colleague. And I understood the government’s angle: trade with China was growing, from $50 million a year in 1992, to $1 billion in 2000, to $15 billion today. But I felt worse for millions of Chinese political prisoners.
Somehow, that invitation never came—and the Foreign Ministry never again invited me to host Chinese visitors.
The split evoked my Soviet past, when I was in the worlds of the Zionist activist and the human rights activist. Too many people told me I had to choose between the two. I chose both then—in the real world, in my democracy, it was harder to balance.
Today, Israel’s success in maintaining the only democracy in a sea of Middle Eastern tyranny undermines the power of its totalitarian neighbors. At the same time, democratic dissidents fighting for freedom while proudly perpetuating their people’s traditions are paving the way for new modes of relating to one another, cooperating with one another, and maybe even starting a real peace process. I hope that history will prove, once again, that we don’t have to choose between the world of our identity and the world of their freedom. We can help one another defend both.