As events in Iran take centre stage in the new year and the chorus of predictable voices warms up like a well-rehearsed orchestra, one can hear the familiar hymns: “Authoritarianism is bad, well, depending on who’s the conductor”.
A disconcerting one-sidedness remains. One country is relentlessly sanctioned, isolated and even bombed while the other is wined, dined, given weapons, investment, handshakes and the occasional glowing op-ed in respectable newspapers.
Yes, within Iran’s hybrid political system there are elections, parliamentary debates and a politically engaged public. However, these all operate firmly under clerical supervision, with the Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council in effect playing the role of headmaster of the Madressa.
Reformist candidates are disqualified like mischievous schoolchildren, dissent is punished, and when society pushes back the state has often responded not with conversation but with batons and bullets.
However, it would be naïve to ignore the other significant pressure shaping Iran. US-driven sanctions have kneecapped the economy, collapsed oil revenues, suffocated trade, strangled the banking system and turned the currency into tissue paper. They have enriched smugglers, empowered shadowy networks and punished citizens stuck between inflation and despair.
Reformist candidates are disqualified like mischievous schoolchildren, dissent is punished, and when society pushes back the state has often responded not with conversation but with batons and bullets.
Meanwhile, covert operations continue. Cybersabotage, assassinations and intelligence warfare — largely attributed to Israel with the US hovering supportively in the background. Iran calls it siege warfare; Washington calls it Tuesday.
None of these excuse Iran’s internal repression. Activists, journalists, students, lawyers and dissidents pay a heavy price. The judiciary is merciless, executions high, censorship routine and women continue to face systemic coercion.
Iran has a serious human rights problem. However, here’s the uncomfortable, and awkward, question: why does the world treat Saudi Arabia, which has strikingly similar flaws, like a VIP guest at the democracy banquet?
Saudi Arabia is not pretending to be a democracy. It is an absolute monarchy with zero competitive elections, no opposition politics and very little tolerance for dissent. Critics vanish, activists are jailed, journalists are murdered, religious freedoms are tightly controlled and migrant workers exploited. Power remains concentrated in a single ruling family. Human rights organisations don’t struggle for adjectives here.
Saudi Arabia is not pretending to be a democracy. It is an absolute monarchy with zero competitive elections, no opposition politics and very little tolerance for dissent.
Yet Saudi Arabia is not sanctioned. It is armed, protected, financially embraced, politically defended, diplomatically hugged. It is increasingly central to Israel’s regional thinking and remains Washington’s favourite “complicated friend”. Its human rights record doesn’t invite condemnation; it inspires investment summits, polite smiles and carefully worded press statements.
Why? Because Saudi Arabia is useful. It keeps oil markets steady. It props up the global financial system. It counterbalances Iran. It fits comfortably into US strategic plans. Iran, by contrast, insists on independence, supports inconvenient allies, challenges Western power structures and refuses to read from the approved geopolitical script.
One conforms and is rewarded. The other resists and is punished. This isn’t morality; it’s management strategy. This is the West’s Middle Eastern policy — forget democracy, human rights or noble liberal principles, it’s all about advantage.
The result is depressingly predictable as Western credibility erodes. Sanctions hurt citizens more than governments. Repression continues in both states. The region remains locked, not in a heroic struggle for freedom but in a cynical contest for dominance in which power speaks loudest, and ethics whisper politely from the back row.
Until major powers apply their loudly proclaimed values consistently to allies and adversaries “democracy promotion” will remain simply a slogan. Iranian and Saudi citizens will go on living under systems shaped not only by their rulers, but by a world order that rewards power long before it rewards justice, preferably with a handshake and a defence contract.
• Cachalia, a businessperson and management consultant, is a former DA MP and public enterprises spokesperson, and chaired De Beers Namibia.
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