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Tweet of the Week
Roger Noriega
#Cuba's Mandelas are in prison, under house arrest, or didn't live to see their country free. Remember that when Castros "eulogize" Mandela.
In the
N
ews
Nelson M
andela
 
President Obama and former presidents G.W. Bush, Clinton, and Carter are traveling to South Africa to attend memorial services for anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, who passed away last week.
 writes a touching 
: “As head of the World Bank, I was privileged
once to have a private meeting with Mandela. The overwhelming impression was of a man who virtually radiated serenity, enormously confident and comfortable with himself but genuinely interested in his interlocutors. No doubt that quality served him well in negotiations, but he would not have succeeded if there had not been steel underneath that calm surface. He had the critical combination of strength and flexibility
that are the marks, not of sainthood, but of successful diplomacy.”
 Also, read 
blog,
.
 
 
Iran
 Amid tensions with the US over a security agreement, Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, on Sunday
agreed to talks on closer ties with Iran.
Secretary of State John Kerry will head to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to testify on the Iran nuclear negotiations. Keep an eye on the 
 for a piece by 
 about the six key questions the House Foreign Relations Committ
ee should be asking Kerry. For more on the hearing, tune in to the
 
radio show tonight, guest hosted by 
 with a special appearance by Pletka.
It’s been over a week since the Geneva accord was reached, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s
endorsement of negotiations continues to restrain dissent among hard-liners. Yet, the further targeting of
Iranian and Hezbollah assets in Syria and Lebanon is a reminder of the looming threat to Iran’s position in
the region from Sunni rivals and radical groups. 
 connects the recent Geneva accord with growing sectarian conflict within Iran in his latest 
. This is the fourth post in the new series
titled “What is keeping the Ayatollah up at night.” Keep an eye on AEIdeas early this week for the next blog
post in the series.
 analyzes the efficacy
of Iran’s “softening stance” towards the US by 
: “Whenever an
attack occurs in Iran, the Iranian press initially speculates widely but then, as an official line is formed in Tehran
usually within one or two days
the theories coalesce into one line. The Ghalenou murder is no different. Despite ample suspects among the drug runners and militant Sunni activists who traverse the Iranian-Pakistani border, Iranian officials decided to officially blame the United States and Israel. This suggests that, despite the diplomatic outreach accompanying the nuclear negotiations, old
habits die hard in certain circles of the Iranian government.”
 
Asia
 
South Korea announced yesterday that it would expand its air-defense zone to include airspace over the East China Sea that China and Japan also claim.
 writes for  
 about the recent visit of Vice President Joe Biden to
Japan, South Korea, and China amidst heightened tension regarding Beijing’s air defense identification zone
(ADIZ)
announcement: “The timing and brazenness of the action raised questions in Washington about who is really calling the shots in China, and about President Xi Jinping’s policy inclinations. Creating such doubt can serve China’s strategic purposes. Beijing ensured that the Biden trip would be focused on China’s claims in the East China Sea, rather than on Washington’s agenda of getting more support from China on
denuclearizing North Korea, pushing Chinese economic reform, and other issues China would rather not
discuss.”
 In 
, read 
take on the Obama administration’s reaction to China’s  ADIZ: “It seems the administration thinks in this instance ambiguity—
what others would call incoherence
is the right response
as we’ve now seen reinforced by Vice President Biden’s remarks in Tokyo today. Yes, Biden noted, Washington is ‘deeply concerned’ over China’s decision to create the ADIZ but then he said
nada, zilch, when it came to demanding the Chinese retract their decision. Instead, Biden offered the puffery
of China and Japan needing to create ‘crisis management mechanisms and effective channels of communication’ to avoid accidents when of course the best policy for avoiding such an accident is for China
to be told t
o stop with its provocations.”
 
ICYMI: 
 article for  
: “For too long, American business and political
leaders have accepted the notion that China is engaged in a "peaceful rise" to become a "responsible stakeholder" in world affairs, which we should placidly allow to happen. Instead of fantasizing about what China might become, it is far more sensible to consider what America's strategy should be under a range of
possible scenarios. The rosy ‘peaceful rise’ theory ignores countless other possibilities, particularly its polar opposite.”
 On Wednesday, 
is testifying before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and
Urban Affairs’ Subcommittee on Economic Policy. Click 
 to live stream his testimony on Chinese manufacturing and economic policy.  A year after a brutal gang rape in Delhi shook India's conscience, a high-profile investigation has again propelled women's rights to the center of the national conversation. In the dock stands one of India's most prominent journalists, Tarun Tejpal, the founder and editor of Tehelka, a muckraking magazine best known for using reporters with hidden cameras to expose alleged corruption and injustice. 
: “[it] displays a positive development: the increasing willingness of urban Indian women to speak up against sexual harassment rather than bear it silently.”
 
Defense
US House and Senate budget
negotiators have agreed to key elements of a 2014 budget resolution, but it’s
unclear whether they have the votes to pass it.
To the green-eyeshade editorialists of The Wall Street Journal, House Armed Services Committee
Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon is leading a “rebellion” of defense hawks, an “act of masochism” threatening the sequestration provision of the Budget Control Act. McKeon’s crime is that he’s hoping for a
2014 budget deal that would reduce the amount of defense sequestration by half. 
 discusses the harmful effects of the Budget Control Act in 
: “The effects are immediate and
unquestionably severe. There is already a crisis in military readiness
in the fundamental measures of defense preparedness. . . . The problems of current readiness are about to bloom into a larger problem both
of force size and weapons modernization, a shrinking of capacity and decline in relative capability.”
 Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made headlines Wednesday when he unveiled a plan to shrink his office by about 200 employees and reduce its budget by about 20 percent over the next five years. Read
 latest blog for AEIdeas, "
." Eaglen concludes, "Secretary Hagel is to be commended in taking the lead to rein in the DoD workforce starting with his own office, yet the Pentagon needs to be extremely clear: these kinds of reductions, while a positive step, are well below the levels that would be needed to meet sequestration-imposed caps." In the concluding session of its series with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, AEI's 
 will host General Mark Welsh III, Chief of Staff of the US Air Force, for a discussion of these questions and more. RSVP 
 for the December 11 event.
American Internationalism
 
What happens when a president fails to lead and to use his bully pulpit to make the case for vigorous  American engagement in the world?

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