| | | | The Stench of Hypocrisy on Iran | | Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was quick to throw cold water over French President Emmanuel Macron's suggestion of a "new deal" on Tehran and its nuclear program. That's hardly surprising, suggests Daniel Larison for The American Conservative. After all, the US approach reeks of hypocrisy.
"If Iran had spent the last year and a half using adherence to the nuclear deal as a pretext to demand changes to whatever they don't like about US foreign policy, we all know what Washington's response would have been," Larison writes.
"If another government kept trying to revise an agreement after the fact and made new demands as a condition for adhering to the original deal, we would accuse them of acting in bad faith and we would be right." "A revealing moment from the footage before the talks will alarm EU leaders. Unprompted, Trump bemoaned the fact he couldn't use the meeting to launch talks on a trade deal with France because the unacceptable demands of other EU member countries got in the way," Rahman says.
"Macron's other successes also feel too bilateral. It isn't clear how other EU member countries will feel about a 'new' Iran deal and the additional demands the US will make." Per the Wall Street Journal: "In what appeared to be a shot at Mr. Trump's efforts to institute trade tariffs, Mr. Macron said he supported free and fair trade, and said wide-scale deregulation and a trade war would harm workers and wages."
| | Keeping Idle North Korean Hands Busy | | | Any deal over North Korea's nuclear program will have to address more than just Pyongyang's existing weapons, write former Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar in the Washington Post. There's the threat of the proliferation of nuclear know-how from North Korean scientists. To prevent that, Team Trump should look at how the US handled the former Soviet Union.
The Nunn-Lugar initiative "helped to fund productive, peaceful scientific work for scientists who had worked in the weapons complex, and also helped to prevent the proliferation of their know-how to other states and nonstate actors — including the extraordinary lab-to-lab program in which Russian and American scientists worked cooperatively to secure materials usable in nuclear weapons," they write. "North Korea's mountain nuclear test site has collapsed, putting China and other nearby nations at unprecedented risk of radioactive exposure, two separate groups of Chinese scientists studying the issue have confirmed," Chen writes. | | Why It Matters if It's Not the Economy, Stupid… | | | For decades, one of the surest paths to electoral success was delivering strong economic growth. Across the globe, though, the link between good politics and good economics is fraying – or has snapped completely, writes Ruchir Sharma in The New York Times. That could be dangerous.
"In the past populism tended to rise in bad times and ebb in good ones, so you might have expected it to recede as the global recovery increased employment and wages over the past 18 months. But economic factors may no longer matter as much in a bitterly emotional political age, and leader approval ratings have continued to fall," Sharma writes.
"These trends are worrying. Good economics should remain good politics. Democracies work best when voters hold politicians accountable for economic results. If leaders sense that the economy no longer matters, they are free to push any policy that will energize their base...
"And then there is this worrisome thought: If leaders embrace aggressively populist and nationalistic policies in good times, what will happen when the economy takes a turn for the worse?" | | The contrasting White House receptions for Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel – the French President is the first leader to receive a state visit under the Trump administration, while the German Chancellor's meeting later this week will be comparatively low key – says much about the two countries' changing fortunes. France is asserting itself on the global stage, Der Spiegel argues, while Germany is slowly disappearing.
Germany's fading influence "isn't solely the result of Merkel's tortuously protracted attempts to form a government following elections last September. That is the spin the Chancellery is now giving it. But in recent years, Merkel has frittered away much of her political capital -- particularly with refugee policies that were an affront to almost all of Germany's allies. Merkel has also seen her power in Berlin diminished significantly," Der Spiegel argues.
| | The Country with the Freest Media Is… | | Norway has the world's freest press, according to Reporters Without Borders' latest World Press Freedom Index, a bright spot at a time of growing "hostility towards the media, openly encouraged by political leaders."
Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland and Switzerland round out the top five nations for media freedom, while journalists in North Korea, Eritrea and Turkmenistan faced the most restrictions.
The United States fell two places from last year, to 45th place, thanks in part to President Trump's continuing attacks on the media, the report says. "The violent anti-press rhetoric from the highest level of the US government has been coupled with an increase in the number of press freedom violations at the local level as journalists run the risk of arrest for covering protests or simply attempting to ask public officials questions." | | | | | | |
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