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Good morning and welcome to The Rundown. This year President Obama is going above and beyond the call of duty, pardoning turkeys and state sponsors of terrorism alike. Best, Your AEI Foreign and Defense Policy Studies team

Tweet of the Week

Michael Auslin @michaelauslin #Iran should closely study #NorthKorea strategy of delay and doing just enough to keep US at table while undermining core of deal.

In the News
Iran
The deal to curb Irans nuclear program faces stiff opposition from Congress, as leaders of both parties are threatening to break with President Obamas policy and to pass new sanctions. Danielle Pletka summarizes the implications of the deal in an AEIdeas blog post: Iran has given something, but nothing that halts its progress towards a nuclear weapons capability. It has simply pushed back a break-out date which was immaterial to Iran, which has little intention of immediate break-out in any case. In return, it has earned something far more valuable than the concessions it granted: an advocate for the current regime in the White House. See John Bolton's piece in The Weekly Standard, "Abject surrender by the United States ." Bolton writes, "After raising expectations of a deal by first convening on November 8-10, it would have been beyond humiliating to gather again without result. So agreement was struck despite solemn incantations earlier that 'no deal is better than a bad deal.'" Michael Rubin reacts to the announcement of the deal in an op-ed for CNN Global Public Square: President Barack Obama was triumphant. Today, that diplomacy opened up a new path toward a world

that is more secure a future in which we can verify that Irans nuclear program is peaceful and that it cannot build a nuclear weapon. He should not be so certain. Rather than prevent Irans nuclear breakout, historians may mark the Geneva deal as the step that most legitimized Irans path to nuclear weapons capability. In a blog post for AEIdeas, Matthew McInnis asks, What's next for the Iranian regime? Among other questions, he asks, Since anti-Americanism is a principal tenet of the regimes ideology, how will having the first signed agreement with the US since the 1979 Revolution affect the Iranian leaderships self-perceptions and policies that directly oppose US interests globally? Also visit the AEIdeas blog for a piece by Maseh Zarif: "The elimination of Irans nuclear weapons programincluding the verifiable dismantling of all enrichment and reprocessing capabilities unnecessary for peaceful nuclear activitiesis no longer the standard when it comes to dealing with this facet of the broader Iranian threat. The U.S. and the international community are now choosing to go down the dangerous path towards containment of an Iranian nuclear weapons program." Zarif will also have a piece in New York Daily News later this week.

Dancing with the Devil

Whether wielding nuclear or chemical weapons, sponsoring truck bombs, or taking hostages, rogue regimes and terrorist groups continue to threaten the US and its allies. How should America address the rogue threat? Highlighting research from his new book, Dancing with the Devil: Lessons from Negotiating with Rogues and Terrorists (Encounter Books, February 2014), Michael Rubin will describe not only lessons Americans have learned from decades of engaging Iran, North Korea, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Taliban, but also what rogue regimes and terrorists have concluded about dialogue with Americans. Click here to RSVP to the lecture on December 2 at 5:30 p.m.

Asia
A war of words between Japan and China escalated today, two days after Beijing issued new rules for all flights within a disputed zone in the East China Sea. At a Capitol Hill event on Wednesday, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) gave a keynote address in which he stressed that the US should first and foremost promote economic reform and free enterprise in India, echoing several themes of Sadanand Dhume's most recent report, Falling short: How bad economic choices threaten the US-India relationship and India's rise. Click here for a full video and summary of the event. In his most recent column, India's Modi and the market, Sadanand Dhume asks, Can Narendra Modi revive Indias economy? He writes, In some ways, this is the central question India n voters face when the country goes to the polls next summer. Yet as with most anything that concerns the Gujarat chief minister and opposition Bharatiya Janata Party prime ministerial candidate, opinion in the country is sharply divided. Having recently returned from a trip to the region, Dan Blumenthal makes Six Japan observations in a post for Foreign Policy magazines Shadow Government blog.

Nicholas Eberstadt takes a look at Chinas damaging social experiment, the one child policy. The long term damage that the One Child policy has wrought on the Chinese family may be the measures lasting legacy. Those costs may be both truly historic and utterly incalculable. Read why on the AEIdeas blog.

National Security
With a politically turbulent Middle East, a financially teetering European Union, and an increasingly technologically competitive Asia-Pacific region, Obama and his administration will face critical foreign policy decisions in the second half of Obama s final term. Join AEI, the New America Foundation, and the Center for a New American Security on Tuesday, November 26, for an in-depth discussion of these challenges. This event continues a unique collaboration among these institutions that began during the 2012 presidential campaign season. Past conversations covered the US role in the world, US policy in East Asia, and the US national security budget. Registration is now closed, but check back here later in the week for a full video and summary of the event.

Defense
Congressional armed services committees are scrambling to salvage this years defense authorization bill after the Senate failed to pass the measure this week. The defense industry is hard-pressed for good news these days considering budget cuts, sequestration, and the government shutdown. But the industry received some good news last month when new export control reforms went into effect. The reforms involved transferring authority for key categories of arms exports, including military aircraft parts and engines from the US State Department to the US Department of Commerce. William Greenwalt writes for Breaking Defense: In an increasingly interconnected world, commercial and foreign innovation will be a vital component of preserving American military technological supremacy into the future because the U.S. military will be increasingly unable to afford to replicate commercial technology in military unique facilities and defense firms. Yet, this supremacy is at risk if Congress and the federal government believe the problem is now solved and they do not get serious about reforms that address how export controls impact technology cooperation and commercial R&D decisions in a globalized world.

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