The axis of the global confrontation is dictatorships against democracies

By: Carlos Sánchez Berzaín - 28/06/2025

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The conflict in today’s world -globalized, capitalist, and undergoing an Artificial Intelligence revolution- places us in the First Global War that has three active fronts: Russia’s invasion to Ukraine, the Gaza strip, and the Israel/Iran conflict. The armed combat solely takes place in specific areas and between limited actors, but all States are part of the conflict and no one is neither impartial nor neutral, because the axis of confrontation is dictatorships against democracies.

Russia’s invasion to Ukraine started the Global War because it conformed two blocs. The one comprised by dictatorships subservient to Russia and the other comprised by democracies who back Ukraine. Democratic countries’ sanctions imposed on Russia and the cost and effort required for the war produced higher levels of Russia’s dependence on China, Iran, North Korea, and 21st Century Socialism dictatorships in Latin America along with para-dictatorial governments, and dictatorships from Africa. The terrorist attack against Israel opened a second battlefront in the Gaza strip that the same bloc has ratified.

As a threat to international peace and security, Iranian insistent violation to develop nuclear weapons produced the third Israel/Iran battlefront that reaffirms, with clarity, the existence of a bloc of dictatorships and para-dictatorial governments who backs Iran and a bloc of democracies who backs Israel. The battlefront of the armed fight is the territories of both warring countries, but the confrontation is global with the political, diplomatic, economic, propagandistic, logistical, intelligence, communications, operatives’ intervention and worldwide mobilization, and all sorts of assets of both States of the conflict.

We must remember that a “Global War” is “the general confrontation in which the armed fight only includes specific parties in one or several geographic areas, but the strategic, confrontation includes; political, economic, financial, technological, propagandistic, and of all sorts of variables from all countries, wherein no one is neutral.” The “Cold War” was the clashing of two blocs, with a clear and undisputed leader in each one of them; the United States with capitalism and the Soviet Union with communism. That situation no longer exists because in none of the blocs of a Global War there is a single leader, or sole commander. “World War” is the confrontation in an armed clash involving and including all countries from the world, just as it had happened the past century.

Democracies are founded on freedom and human rights, the acknowledgement of the people’s sovereignty who, through electoral and institutional processes grants temporary mandates to elected rulers who have the obligation of subjecting themselves to -and maintaining- the rule of law, to be held responsible, and to be accountable for their acts. Dictatorships concentrate all power by force and/or violence onto a person or a group, repress human rights and individual freedoms, and wield power indefinitely through the use of State-terrorism, political persecution, imprisonment, exile, and other common crime, and enjoy impunity for their acts.

Dictatorships cluster around each other not because they have the same ideology, given in-fact that their pretext for domination and their narratives is quite different; Russia’s is nationalism, Iran’s is theocratic, China is communism, North Korea is familial. They do so because they are all the same in the way they wield power and subject their peoples, producing a bloc based on coincidental similarities of crimes they commit, must coverup, and continue committing, in order to indefinitely stay in power. This generates a common enemy that must be weakened, attacked, and destroyed, and this enemy is democracies. Dictatorships constantly and permanently attack democracies with “Hybrid Warfare” and with an armed fight that has turned out to be the First Global War.

Today, not a single country is excluded from the global war and the recent strategic bombing by the United States to three Iranian nuclear installations; Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, is only part of the global conflict of dictatorships against democracies. Iran’s dictatorship directly or indirectly threatens and attacks, sustains terrorism and hybrid wars against the United States, Europe, and democratic nations from throughout the world. In our region, Iran has as its launching bases the dictatorships from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua.

The United States has not just entered in to the war of Israel against Iran, it is simply a part -since many years back- of the Global War. The US has clarified its stance to its enemies now included as part of the bloc of dictatorships comprised by China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, and also to Para-Dictatorial governments from Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Honduras, as well as African dictatorships from Congo, Uganda, Chad, Eritrea, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and elsewhere, and to terrorist groups such as; Hamas, Hezbollah, the FARC, ELN, and more. To prove the dictatorships’ alignment, we only need to read the statements and declarations from the leaders and regimes of these States regarding the three fronts of the Global War.

The threat of a “Third World War” is only part of the terrorist narrative of dictatorships, it is not probable, and it would be impossible if democracies defend themselves timely and resolutely. Dictatorships are not in condition to singly risk their subsistence just to sustain Iran whose fundamentalist and theocratic regime is wobbly and sooner than later will be toppled by the peoples.

The geo-political change is already underway and its range and scope depend on the resoluteness and solvency of democracies in the defense of their peoples and of peace.

*Lawyer & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».