When Natan Sharansky, the Israeli cabinet minister and former Soviet dissident, was in Washington last week to talk about his new book, “The Case for Democracy,” he reportedly met for an hour with President Bush. It’s unlikely that the subject of China came up.

The main focus of Mr. Sharansky’s book, written with Ron Dermer, is the failure of the West to apply the lessons of the struggle against Soviet tyranny to the Middle East.

Even so, Mr. Sharansky’s acute observations of Western accommodation of Soviet totalitarianism and Arab dictators, apply equally well to China.

Mr. Sharansky’s credentials to judge the free world’s policies toward such regimes the: nine years in Soviet prisons. Isolation behind bars by no means prevented Mr. Sharansky from grasping the essential fact that the behavior of other countries was important, even decisive, to the survival of the Soviet regime. Mr. Sharansky and his fellow inmates were by turns devastated and elated by the West’s posture toward Moscow. When Pravda quoted the Reverend Billy Graham making moral equivalence between religious restrictions in the Soviet Union and America, Mr. Sharansky was “dumbfounded.” But he and fellow inmates were “ecstatic” about Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, the news of which they shared by tapping in code from cell to cell through drained toilets.

Reagan’s challenge to the Soviet Union, both economic and moral, was crucial to the collapse of the regime, according to Mr. Sharansky.

Detente, he says, “had given the Soviets the chance to have it both ways, gaining benefits from the West and also controlling their own people.” There were, of course, some early dissenters from realpolitik in the 1970s, and it is they, Henry Jackson and Millicent Fenwick, whom Mr. Sharansky credits with recognizing and deploying the West’s considerable influence to undermine the Soviet Union’s grip on power.

Where China is concerned the West’s policy is just detente by another name.

The arguments have been settled in favor of engagement, against using pressure and the power of trade sanctions, and in favor of accepting, indefinitely, the Communist Party’s dictatorship. The very same lever that Mr. Sharansky credits with decisively under mining the Soviet Union, linking trade benefits to human rights, has been discarded in favor of permanent normal trade relations. There is no serious, systematic effort to measure China’s human rights performance or hold Beijing accountable. The U.S. pursues – only a “dialogue” divorced from any consequences.

The free world will come to rue this approach, if Mr. Sharansky’s book is any guide. Dictatorial regimes, require not only internal enemies to justify their control, but external ones. Repressive regimes retain their belligerent natures as, Mr. Sharansky points out, Egypt does, having intensified its anti-Semitic propaganda since making peace with Israel.

Certainly, Beijing’s drive to take Taiwan is as strong today as ever, and increasingly dangerous, thanks to a concerted military build-up. Domestic repression has increased.

Mr. Sharansky’s arguments are persuasive. But the portraits of individuals, of himself and others, make his points most effectively. A few years ago, he received a call from a Palestinian Arab businessman using a public telephone to avoid surveillance by the Palestinian security services, Omar Karsou, called to ask if Mr. Sharansky was sincere about seeking democracy and accountable government for Palestinian Arabs. Of course, replied Mr. Sharansky, who writes wistfully of the exchange between two ostensible foes, a Palestinian Arab and Israeli who shared a commitment to democracy and human rights. At least in the Soviet Union, Mr. Sharansky writes, dissidents knew they had support from outside. “Omar Karsou, however, cannot rely on that solidarity. Few are ready to help in his struggle for Palestinian freedom. Why? Because they do not want to weaken the Palestinian Authority.”

Few, if any, democratic leaders today wish to weaken the Chinese Communist party which they imagine vital to stability, at home and abroad. Mr. Sharansky’s book shows how foolhardy such thinking is. I hope this book is translated into Chinese. Dissidents there will recognize their struggle not only against their government, which vilifies them as enemies, but against the misguided policies of the free world.

Some day, one will write an account like Mr. Sharansky’s, who went from dissident to Cabinet minister in a democracy. But in order for that to happen, some brave souls outside China will have to challenge the conventional wisdom.

Ms. Bork is deputy director of the Project for the New American Century.