| | | | Fareed: America's Mass Shooting Cop Out | | The mass shooting in Las Vegas has brought with it the usual calls to tackle mental health in the United States. But don't fall for the rhetoric, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column. "[I]t is a dodge, a distortion of the facts and a cop-out as to the necessary response."
"[T]urning immediately to the 'sickness' of the shooter and piously calling for better mental-health care is, more often than not, an attempt to divert attention from the main issue: guns. (It's also breathtakingly cynical because the politicians who use this rhetoric are typically the ones who also aim to cut funding for mental-health treatment.) Every conversation about gun deaths should begin by recognizing one blindingly clear fact about this problem—the United States is on its own planet. The gun-related death rate in the United States is 10 times that of other advanced industrial countries. Places such as Japan and South Korea have close to zero gun-related deaths in a year. The United States has around 30,000."
| | Iran Is Complicated. Team Trump Should Exploit That | | President Trump is increasingly looking like he will decertify the Iran nuclear agreement next week. But the reality is that the four alternatives—economic sanctions, challenging Iran's influence in the region, regime change from within, or direct military action—aren't particularly appealing, a new CATO Institute report argues. Instead, the administration should take a more conciliatory approach that recognizes that Iranian politics are complicated.
"Iranian politics, though not fully democratic, are dynamic and competitive, and include various factions, from conservative hardliners to moderate reformists," the report argues. "The nuclear deal is widely popular in Iran, but antagonism from the Trump administration will bolster the prominence of Iranian hardliners who felt Tehran capitulated too much in the negotiations and who use fears of U.S. duplicity to undermine the idea of constructive engagement with Washington.
"Similarly, perceptions that the United States is failing to live up to its side of the bargain—or is taking new steps that may undermine Iranian security—weaken political support for pragmatic reformists who see value in making concessions to the West in exchange for sanctions relief and integration with the outside world. Ultimately…further engagement with Iran when possible will strengthen Iran's more moderate political factions and weaken hardliners, providing a more hopeful future for U.S.-Iranian relations."
| | The Other American Gun Problem | | A little-noticed plan to move oversight of the sale of U.S.-manufactured small arms from the State Department to the Commerce Department might trim the red tape for American weapons makers. But it could undermine U.S. foreign policy in the process, argues Daniel DePetris for Reuters.
"The new administration policy has the potential to squander the inclusive diplomatic processes Washington has encouraged in order to promote peaceful approaches to conflict resolution in states as varied as South Sudan, Ukraine, and Colombia," DePetris argues.
"According to the Small Arms Survey, the United States is already the world's top exporter of small arms, having reached a total of $1.1 billion in 2014. While this figure is small compared to the far larger conventional weapons contracts U.S. defense manufacturers sign every year, the possibility that even a fraction of these commercial weapons could leak into a conflict zone would have a deeply negative impact."
| | Nobel Peace Prize Winner: Nice Idea Going Nowhere | | It's easy to see why this year's Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. After all, the group succeeded in securing support for the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. But the treaty is unlikely to do much to diminish the danger posed by nuclear weapons, The Economist suggests.
"The best approach to reducing the threat posed by nuclear weapons is through serious arms-control negotiations between the nuclear states themselves, above all between America and Russia," The Economist says.
"Those two countries still command the vast majority of the world's arsenal. Talks should be aimed at cutting numbers further, banning some categories of weapon (such as battlefield or tactical devices) and taking land-based systems off hair-trigger alert (by shifting from launching weapons on warning of an attack to launching after an attack has begun). Unfortunately, there is little prospect of substantive new negotiations as long as relations between Russia and America remain poor." - There was something missing from this year's Nobel Prizes…This year's Nobel Prize winners in the sciences were all worthy winners. But there was something missing from the list of recipients, writes Hannah Devlin in The Guardian: Women.
"Perhaps if this were a one-off, it would be easier to shrug and move on. But the last time a woman won a Nobel prize for science was in 2015 when Tu Youyou was recognized for discoveries that led to a treatment for malaria. And you have to go back a full 54 years to find the last female Nobel laureate in physics," Devlin writes.
"In recent years, the average age of recipients has been steadily climbing. Between 1931 and 1940 the average age of physics laureates was 41. It has risen steadily since, and so far this decade, it is 68. This over-cautious approach, where scientists are rewarded for discoveries often decades-old, means younger scientists who are still active, a greater proportion of whom are women, miss out…If it continues on this trajectory, the Nobel prize risks looking not just traditional, but like a relic, gathering dust."
| | Why Tillerson Should Go: Lowry | | | Rex Tillerson's impromptu press conference pledging his support for President Trump was just the latest reminder of how lost the Secretary of State is. With no obvious allies in government, it's probably time for him to resign, suggests Rich Lowry in National Review.
"Recent Republican secretaries of state provide two models. There's the Colin Powell approach of attending to the needs of 'the building,' i.e., the civil service, and neglecting your relationship with the president. Then there's the Condi Rice approach of tending to your relationship with the president and ignoring the building. Tillerson has done neither," Lowry argues.
"In a nationalist administration, he is a man without a country. He doesn't have a constituency in the foreign-policy establishment, in the media, in Congress, or in the bureaucracy. He and his top aides are a thin layer spread atop the org chart to little effect." | | Stop Treating Special Forces Like a Band-Aid | | The death of three U.S. Green Berets in Niger is a reminder of the growing role America's special forces are playing in counterterror operations around the world. And of how they are too often treated as a Band-Aid for any call for force, suggests Gayle Tzemach Lemmon for CNN Opinion.
"An exceptionally high price is being paid by these elite American forces designed for unconventional warfare: in 2016, for the first time ever, special operations deaths outnumbered those of conventional forces. This is a striking fact, given that special operations accounts for not even 5% of all American troops. And special operations leaders want America to know their forces are neither superheroes nor catchalls for American military efforts." | | | | | | |
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