Tag: Premium

The Competition To Hate Obamacare The Most

Steinglass spells out Ted Cruz’s strategy:

First, you identify a demon, and spend a few years whipping up a hysterical frenzy over the threat it poses. You want to tie it to a few key words that you can repeat in a derogatory, contemptuous tone of voice, over and over, until the very signifier evokes such a feeling of loathing in your audience that anyone associated with it is contaminated. Let’s call it Thing X. Now, most people will think your goal here is to drum up a successful campaign against Thing X and against your opponents, who support it, but this is at most part of the mission. Thing X itself may or may not be terribly important, and your opponents are your opponents; there’s not much you can do about them. What is crucial here, though, is that once you’ve firmly established your followers’ revulsion towards Thing X, you can use it to annihilate your “allies”—also known as “rivals”—by accusing them of insufficient vigilance against Thing X.

Beutler contends that six months from now “the right’s anti-Obamacare single-mindedness could easily become a real liability” in the next election:

Republicans are setting themselves up to tumble into a discontinuity of their own creation. The surge of anti-Obamacare legislative antics has created a feedback loop between Republicans and GOP base voters, where each vote increases the right’s insistence on defeating the law, which in turn creates more pressure on Republicans to take radical steps to defund or delay or repeal it. But unless they plan on trying to take away people’s insurance in an election year, they’ll have to dial back their extreme anti-Obamacare procedural tactics at the moment that the right’s insistence on keeping up the fight is most pitched.

It might look right now like Obamacare will dominate the politics of 2014, but I think that’s a premature judgment. At least some Republicans will feel pressure to change their views about the law — or at least their view that it should be repealed — next year. Certainly after primary season is behind them. That’ll be an awkward turn for them to take.

The Damage Of Delaying The Mandate

Annie Lowrey has a primer on it:

Congress could substantially mar the law by stripping or delaying the tax penalties on Americans who decline to buy insurance — the so-called “individual mandate.” And it is one tactic that Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio is mulling.

A new Urban Institute study explains why. Using Congressional Budget Office figures, it shows that delaying the individual mandate for a year would reduce coverage by about 11 million people in 2014. That would save the government some money. However, the effect on the health insurance marketplace might be profound. Many young and healthy people would decline to buy insurance coverage, with no penalty. The pool of the insured would be relatively sicker. Insurers would be forced to increase rates, as the healthy would do less to cross-subsidize the ill. Premiums would shoot up.

Kliff makes related points:

“The individual mandate is inextricably linked to the ACA’s insurance market reforms,” says Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans. “All of the premiums that have been submitted for exchange coverage are based on the individual mandate being in effect. If the coverage requirement were to change, premiums would have to be modified to account for fewer young and healthy people signing up for coverage.”

Ezra highlights another reason for Democrats to resist delay:

Democrats point out that Obamacare’s implementation schedule wasn’t an accident. It was purposefully designed to begin in an off-year. That way there would be a year to work out the worst kinks, and by the time of the actual election, Democrats could point to millions of people getting insurance, running ad after ad highlighting constituents who now have coverage. If implementation didn’t begin until October 2014, all voters would know about Obamacare would be the early glitches, as insurance coverage wouldn’t begin until January 1, 2015.

In other words, the GOP is trying to sell Democrats on a political nightmare they specifically wrote the law to avoid — and they’re doing so on the grounds that it would actually be a political boon!

Dissents Of The Day

A reader quotes from my reaction to Rouhani’s UN speech:

The US is exerting force to insist on Syria’s destruction of its chemical weapons arsenal, even as we send military aid to Israel, which has not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention. We have threatened force to prevent Iran getting a nuclear bomb, but we give military aid to Israel, which currently has a break-out capacity of up to 300 nuclear warheads. Is it not reasonable for humankind to look at this double standard and say collectively: WTF?

Well, no, it’s not reasonable.  Syria is being asked to destroy its chemical weapons in the aftermath of a chemical attack which more than likely originated with the Syrian stockpile.  Iran has admitted to sponsoring terrorism and given the nature of terrorists, they are far more likely to use such weapons than even Iran would be.  Given Iran’s rhetoric towards Israel, it’s pretty reasonable to not want them to have those weapons.

If you can think of a comparable situation where Israel has 1) used chemical weapons or 2) put nukes in the hands of people who would use them, then it would be a double standard.  Here, the standard applied by the US isn’t hypocritical at all.

I’m not persuaded that Iran, given its history in foreign policy, would ever hand off nuclear weapons to terrorist proxies, especially given the devastating consequences that would ensue. Mercifully, not even the Pakistanis have done that, and Pakistan is a far more troubling nuclear power than Iran would be.

My point is about non-proliferation. If we are as intent on it in the Middle East as we seem to be under Obama (I’m more of a believer in deterrence than non-proliferation, for what it’s worth), then leaving the one nuclear and chemical power out of it – and never even mentioning it – does seem like a whopping double standard to most people around the globe. I’m unaware, either, of Iran assassinating Israel’s nuclear technicians. And yet we accept the reverse with nary a quibble. At some point, the US has to deal with this glaring discrepancy in the eyes of the world. Another reader:

I’m confused. According to your logic, Obama was right to threaten force in Syria because that was the only way the world would get serious about Assad’s chemical weapons. But AIPAC/neocons are wrong to push Obama to threaten force in Iran because that would … scuttle the possibility of a deal and give them the war you allege they’ve been gunning for?

Putting aside your caricature-ish portrayal of what the “Greater Israel Lobby” “wants” (by the way, do you really think anyone who cares seriously about Israel wants a war with Iran, which is almost certain to bring reprisals against Israeli citizens and interests and embolden the mullahs – or do you concede that at some point Israel might calculate a strike to be its least worst option?), let’s inject some discipline into the argument.  Essentially you admitted Obama’s threat of force in Syria compelled Russia to act, producing an outcome on Assad’s CW stockpile that was at least minimally acceptable to us.  If this is the case, why wouldn’t the continued pressure of sanctions and an on-the-table military option serve a similar goal in helping us get the best deal – for us, Israel, and the Gulf states – with Iran?  Chuck Schumer has called for just this approach: openness to talks while keeping Iran’s feet to the fire.  In short, the best diplomacy is armed diplomacy, and the surest means of avoiding a strike, either by us or the Israelis.

Yes, but there is always a moment at which that constant threat of force makes diplomacy very difficult, for a simple reason. Countries have pride. No country, and certainly not one with as ancient a civilization as Iran, wants to be seen to be cowed into submission. There comes a point at which a strategy of force-backed diplomacy has to open itself up to simple diplomacy. Reagan did it. Obama can too. To get a deal, we need to find a way for Iran to save face. With Syria, that meant giving Putin a big feather in his cap, allowing Assad to claim the decision as his own, and argue that the chemical attacks were the work of others (preposterous, I know, but necessary for him to save face). With Iran, at some point it means taking the threat of force slowly off the table – especially since they claim they want the same thing we do.

I’d argue, in any case, that the threat of military force has been less integral to Iran’s recalculation of its interests than crippling sanctions. The Iranians know that we cannot truly destroy their nuclear technology from the sky. And that technology cannot be unlearned, even if Israel assassinates mere scientists. And after such a potential attack on nuclear facilities, any regime would regard it as a point of honor to reconstitute its nuclear program as soon as possible thereafter. It’s not really a solution, as the sanest Israelis understand. But the sanctions that are wrecking the economy in a country whose regime rules by brute force and whose legitimacy, certainly in the major cities, is close to non-existent? In this case, these economic sanctions have been our major tool – and they have been critically backed by Europe as well.

In other words, the threat of force is not as effective with Iran as economic isolation has been. Using such force would cost us a great deal too. Sanctions, in contrast, cost us relatively little. It will require real statesmanship to detect the right moment to make the leap toward true engagement, to take force off the table for a while – but that’s what we elected Obama for. It’s also, it seems to me, what the Iranian people elected Rouhani for. And these opportunities do not occur very often.

Carpe diem.

What Obamacare Will Cost You

I hope you’re sitting down. After all the stories about a “train-wreck”, after every Dr Seuss classic read out loud in the Senate, after sticker shock shock and crazy-ass Forbes hit-pieces, we now greet something called reality. The gist of the new report on Obamacare premium prices:

The report, released Wednesday by the Department of Health and Human Services, showed significant variation in the insurance premiums that Americans shopping on the individual market could pay under the president’s health-care overhaul. Across the 48 states for which data were available, the unsubsidized monthly premiums could be as low as $70 for an individual and as high as $1,200 for a moderate plan for a family of four.

The average national premium for an individual policy will be $328 in 2014, before including any of the tax credits that will be available to low- and middle-income Americans to help them purchase coverage.

It gets worse for Republicans. Kaiser Health News notes that many red states will have relatively low premiums:

One of the report’s most striking findings is that states like Texas and Florida, where the law has faced fierce opposition despite high rates of uninsured residents, will see rates at or below the national average.

“There is no clear political pattern to these premiums,” said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan research organization. …“Some conservative, anti-Obamacare states have lower-than-average premiums, and some pro-Obamacare states have higher-than-average premiums.”

Yglesias compares these numbers to the CBO’s projections:

HHS reports that in about 94 percent of cases the CBO overestimated how high premiums would be.

Specific premiums are going to vary quite widely from state to state and according to your age and the size of your family. But nationwide health care spending has grown more slowly than people had expected over the past couple of years, and in most states insurance companies have offered fairly aggressive bids to participate in the exchanges. Obviously this could all change 18 months from now when people are actually in the plans, but for now it looks like Obamacare will be cheaper for families and taxpayers than was thought at the time Congress voted on it.

Cohn provides more details on the report:

The HHS report spotlighted only silver and bronze plans, which are the ones people are most likely to buy. Based on a quick skim, the most expensive unsubsidized policies I saw were in Jackson, Mississippi, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. In those places, a family of four too wealthy for subsidies will pay more than $1200 a month for the second-cheapest silver plan. The least expensive were in Nashville, Tennessee, where the full “sticker price” of the second cheapest silver plan will be $559 a month.

There’s a lot less variation for families whose incomes qualify them for those subsidies. And that’s very much by design: The law effectively tries to dictate what people will pay for the second-cheapest silver plans, no matter where they live. For a family of four with income of $50,000, the cost for such a plan in almost every city and state is $282 a month. But because of the way the subsidies work, applying those subsidies to even cheaper plans can reduce premiums even more—and at varying levels, depending on location. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that family of four making $50,000 a year could get the cheapest bronze plan for $96 a month. A similar family living in the Virgina suburbs of Washington, D.C., could get one for nothing.

Drum weighs in:

After tax credits, that family of four in Texas will pay $3,384 per year for the second lowest-cost silver plan. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average family with employer health coverage pays $4,565 per year in contributions. Those aren’t directly comparable, but they’re close. What it means is that although Obamacare is hardly free, it does allow individuals to buy coverage for roughly the same amount they’d have to pay with an employer plan. No one is shut out of the market any longer.

Talking To Our Enemies Isn’t A Concession

Walt sighs:

Refusing to talk to people or countries with whom we differ is really just a childish form of spite and one the United States indulges in mostly because we can get away with it. But it also makes it more difficult to resolve differences in ways that would advance U.S. interests. In short, it’s dumb.

Did it really help U.S. diplomacy when we refused to recognize the Soviet Union until 1934? Were U.S. interests really furthered by our refusal to recognize the People’s Republic of China for more than two decades after Mao’s forces gained control there? Has keeping Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the deep freeze since 1961– that’s nearly 53 years, folks — brought his regime crashing down, helped the lives of Cubans, or even advanced the political goals of Cuban-American exiles? Has our refusal to conduct direct talks with Iran slowed the development of its nuclear research program and helped us explore possible solutions to the problems in Afghanistan, Syria, or the Persian Gulf itself?

Obviously not. But because the United States is so powerful and so secure, it can usually afford to snub people or governments it doesn’t like.

Larison adds:

It is remarkable how much importance has been attached to the mere possibility that Obama and Rouhani might briefly meet this week. If we were talking about bilateral relations between almost any other pair of governments, such meetings would be commonplace. The question wouldn’t be whether such a meeting would take place, but rather how productive it would prove to be. The U.S. and Iran can’t even begin to find out what kind of deal is possible so long as holding meetings between top officials is itself treated as making a concession to the other side. All of this should remind us how abnormal and counterproductive it is to have no formal diplomatic ties with Iran. There are hardly any other states where the U.S. has gone this far out of its way for so long to avoid high-level contacts with a foreign government, and it severely limits our government’s ability to conduct effective diplomacy.

A Church For Atheists

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Kate Engelhart drops in on a rapidly growing congregation:

Like the Sunday Assembly’s founders, stand-up comics Pippa Evans and Sanderson Jones, I don’t think religion should have a monopoly on community. I like the idea of a secular temple, where atheists can enjoy the benefits of an idealized, traditional church a sense of community, a thought-provoking sermon, a scheduled period of respite, easy access to community service opportunities, group singing, an ethos of self-improvement, free food—without the stinging imposition of God Almighty.

Evidently, I was not alone. [Within months], SA was boasting 400 to 600 regular attendees. As the hype mounted, Evans and Jones began receiving emails from all over the world from would-be Sunday Assembly founders. Jones admits that he had aspirations to expand from the get-go. Eventually, the founders opted for a controlled unfolding, choosing to personally license and launch 22 Sunday Assembly branches within a 2-month period.

An irony Engelhart notes: “As the atheist church becomes more church-like, however, it seems to be deliberately downplaying its atheism”:

Where the Assembly once stridently rejected theism (at April’s Assembly, Jones poked fun at the crucifixion), it is now far more equivocal. “How atheist should our Assembly be?” Jones wrote in a recent blog post. “The short answer to that is: not very.”

“‘Atheist Church’ as a phrase has been good to us. It has got us publicity,” Evans elaborated. “But the term ‘atheist’ does hold negative connotations. Atheists are often thought to be aggressive, loud and damning of all religion, where actually most atheists, in the UK anyway, are not defined by their non-belief.” At a recent assembly, Jones opined: “I think atheism is boring. Why are we defining ourselves by something we don’t believe in?”

Franzen vs The Internet: Round 37, Ctd

A reader writes (with several updates below):

As a medievalist, I should point out that, when Jonathan Franzen writes, “If I had been born in 1159, when the world was steadier,” he has no idea what he is talking about.

Being born in 1159 would have put Franzen in the center of the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century. The cathedral schools had by then replaced the old-fashioned monastic schools, introducing a far more secular and rationalistic way of thinking than Europe had seen since the fall of the Roman Empire. Translations from Greek and Arabic texts were making scientific and philosophical texts accessible, which were in turn fostering the development of scholasticism and the rationalization of Christian theology. The University of Paris had just been founded, introducing an institutionalization of higher learning that we continue to live with today. With Gothic cathedrals replacing Romanesque cathedrals; polyphonic music replacing monophonic music; romances replacing epic literature; and guilds, fairs, and new trade routes transforming economic life, virtually every aspect of culture was different than it had been a generation, let alone two or three generations, earlier.

We are the first people to feel that “Any connection to the key values of the past has been lost”? What about all of the twelfth-century intellectuals who referred to themselves as “moderni,” in contrast to the “antiqui” who came before them? Franzen may be right to claim that, “As long as modernity lasts, all days will feel to someone like the last days of humanity,” but he would do well to recognize that the “moderni” of the twelfth century – who knew the Book of Revelations really well – would have shared this view.

I’m not sure whether Franzen is ignorant of medieval history or just using the Middle Ages as a heuristic device – an allegedly dull, monolithic, unchanging time period against which to contrast our allegedly fascinating, diverse, and dynamic era. But how would it change his argument if he recognized that culture has always been in a process of change and that it has gone through many periods of very rapid and disorienting change?

Update from a reader:

I’d like to point out to the condescending mediaevalist “has no idea what he’s talking about.” Franzen’s a Scandinavian name. Being born in today’s Sweden in 1159 means there’s a very decent chance Franzen wouldn’t even have been Christian, let alone affected by cathedral vs. monastic schooling or the rationalization of Christian theology. And of course, if he were born in the Slavic half of Europe, it would definitely have meant being part of what was effectively a “dull, monolithic, unchanging time period.” I know it’s hard for many to admit, but Europe does in fact mean more than England, France, Italy, and Germany.

Another keeps the academic debate going:

Having just finished my early Russian history class for the morning, I can assure your reader that 1159 was no more “dull, monolithic, and unchanging” for eastern Slavs than it was for other Europeans. The central town Kiev was losing economic and political power and in fact would be sacked – by a Russian prince – in ten years. New Russian powers were rising to the west in Volhynia and north in forested Vladimir. To the east Turkic, mostly pagan nomads were both raiding villages and marrying into the local elites, creating a highly mixed population of people who were both Slavic and Christian yet closely related to Turks. The monks who wrote the chronicles hated all of this.

And another:

It may be that the person writing in about medieval Scandinavia is just trying to make a point about the vibrant, diverse communities in medieval Europe and that a single narrative doesn’t fit every nationality. If so, I agree with the spirit of it. However, this correction seems to be misapplied to what Franzen is saying and also is just not very historically informed. Franzen’s own presentation of the medieval as something static and unchanging clearly assumes a single experience of medieval life. But the comment is also blissfully unaware of the actual history of the region in question. By 1159 Iceland, Denmark, and Norway had been pretty thoroughly Christianized for well over a century, and Sweden did the same during the 12th century. There were certainly pagans around in Scandinavia at the time, but the upper classes would all have been thoroughly Christian for political, if not religious reasons. Scandinavia of the twelfth century was also rocked by a large number of civil wars, and a significant number of monasteries and convents were founded in the period. It was a time of change, and just because the changes occurring were not the same as those in France and other places doesn’t mean that it fits Franzen’s narrative. Even if Franzen were imagining himself in medieval Scandinavia, which hardly seems a certain proposition, he would not find it the refuge of stability he imagines.

By the way, I love this discussion, and I would love to see medievalists with knowledge of other places write in. You’d be hard-pressed to find a time and place in medieval Europe that is as stable as modern people imagine it to be.

Listening To Rouhani

68th Session Of The United Nations General Assembly Begins

There are several points (pdf) at which I spluttered. To wit:

The human tragedy in Syria represents a painful example of catastrophic spread of violence and extremism in our region. From the very outset of the crisis and when some regional and international actors helped to militarize the situation through infusion of arms and intelligence into the country and active support of extremist groups, we emphasized that there was no military solution to the Syrian crisis.

One of those regional actors was clearly Iran, protecting its Shiite ally, the murderous Bashir al-Assad. Was Rouhani criticizing some factions in his own country – or bullshitting? I’d say bullshitting. On Syria, he said:

I should underline that illegitimate and ineffective threat to use or the actual use of force will only lead to further exacerbation of violence and crisis in the region.

But of course it was only the threat of US force that prompted the world to get serious about Assad’s chemical weapons.

There were other weirdnesses – “Shia-phobia”? But nonetheless, it seems to me, Rouhani’s critique of the US as a hegemonic power is onto something – not because it is the worst such hegemon in world history. Au contraire. But all hegemonies lead to abuse, and in the case of the US since the end of the Cold War, American unipolar hegemony has led us close to a self-defeat and bankruptcy. Increasingly isolated, engaged in pre-emptive war, America’s wars of invasion and occupation have been morally corrosive failures – and incredibly costly ones at that. The neoconservative vision simply foundered in a world that simply resents the nosy bully – as you could see in the Brazilian president’s speech earlier today. That doesn’t help the US. It doesn’t help our interests. You don’t have to adopt Rouhani’s worldview to see that. We have to live in a more multi-polar world.

And in foreign relations, Rouhani has a point about Iran’s relative moderation. Yes, it exports terror via Hezbollah and Hamas. But it has not launched wars; it has cooperated even with the Bush administration with respect to the Taliban. Gone are the despicable Holocaust denials of Ahmadinejad. And he’s right about double standards. The US is exerting force to insist on Syria’s destruction of its chemical weapons arsenal, even as we send military aid to Israel, which has not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention. We have threatened force to prevent Iran getting a nuclear bomb, but we give military aid to Israel, which currently has a break-out capacity of up to 300 nuclear warheads. Is it not reasonable for humankind to look at this double standard and say collectively: WTF?

And is he not within his rights to complain about Israel’s assassinations of scientists?

For what crimes have they been assassinated? The United Nations and the Security Council should answer the question: have the perpetrators been condemned?

The key point of the speech, though, was roughly Ken Pollack’s point. Iran is an advanced society, despite crippling sanctions, and has every right to pursue nuclear power. There is no way to stop this. Indeed, telling a country it cannot develop its scientific and energy expertise this way is abhorrent. The question is whether this is about nuclear weapons. And Rouhani says no – emphatically:

Iran’s nuclear program – and for that matter, that of all other countries – must pursue exclusively peaceful purposes. I declare here, openly and unambiguously, that, notwithstanding the positions of others, this has been, and will always be, the objective of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nuclear weapon and other weapons of mass destruction have no place in Iran’s security and defense doctrine, and contradict our fundamental religious and ethical convictions. Our national interests make it imperative that we remove any and all reasonable concerns about Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.
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The second objective, that is, acceptance of and respect for the implementation of the right to enrichment inside Iran and enjoyment of other related nuclear rights, provides the only path towards achieving the first objective. Nuclear knowledge in Iran has been domesticated now and the nuclear technology, inclusive of enrichment, has already reached industrial scale. It is, therefore, an illusion, and extremely unrealistic, to presume that the peaceful nature of the nuclear program of Iran could be ensured through impeding the program via illegitimate pressures.

It’s interesting he puts the end of any ambiguity about Iran’s nuclear program as a matter of national interest. Presumably he doesn’t just mean his rather corny call to join a “WAVE” against violence and extremism. He means the sanctions. And surely there must be an overlap of interests here. Iran is not denying its nuclear capacity, like Syria did or Saddam once did; it’s broadcasting it. And it is simultaneously insisting it is not for military purposes.

That latter point can surely be tested, verified, examined. And given the awful consequences of military conflict over this, we have a moral obligation to try.

(Photo: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani addresses the U.N. General Assembly on September 24, 2013 in New York City. By Brendan McDermid-Pool/Getty Images.)

Taking A Grandstand

How Ted Cruz’s fake filibuster began:

Ezra dissects Cruz’s claim that he is speaking for the American people:

Cruz opposes raising taxes on the wealthy. The public supports it. Cruz opposes gun control. The public supports it. Cruz supports sharply cutting spending on Medicare and Social Security. The public opposes it. If Cruz actually believed his job was directly representing the will of the people, his voting record would be extremely different than it is.

Which is why it’s so odd Cruz has chosen this argument. He could just be up there arguing against Obamacare. Instead he’s arguing that we need to #MakeDCListen. He’s making a broad, quasi-philosophical argument that senators should more fully reflect public opinion. But even he doesn’t believe it. Cruz’s filibuster is self-refuting.

Douthat contrasts Cruz with the rest of the “Republican Party’s populist flank”:

Ted Cruz has thus far stood out for the, shall we say, purity of his theatrics. (Some of which are ongoing on the Senate floor at the moment.) The others in that group — Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio — have tried to initiate real policy debates and shift the party’s stance on major issues: Rubio with immigration, Paul (and Lee) with foreign policy and civil liberties, Paul with drug policy and criminal justice, and now Lee with family policy and tax reform.

But not Cruz: He’s defining himself as a national figure not by taking positions on questions that divide his party, but by picking issues where the party is basically united — Obamacare, gun control, taxes — and playing the maximalist while promising the moon. (Tellingly, on the specific fronts where the others have staked out some legitimately bold stances, the Texas senator has mostly tap-danced — he’s “somewhere between Rand Paul and John McCain”on foreign policy, somewhere in the middle of his party on immigration, and so on.) Paul, Rubio and now Lee are all trying to move the party, and conservatism, in a particular direction; Cruz is telling conservatives to fight harder, but otherwise to stay exactly where they are.

What Obama Might Achieve

Judis calls Obama’s UN speech today “his most significant foreign policy statement since becoming president.” The reason why:

If Obama does achieve a rapprochement between the United States and Iran, it could have repercussions throughout the Middle East. It could make a political settlement in Syria possible. It could ease negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. Israel’s hardliners would no longer have an excuse for ignoring the West Bank occupation, and Hamas would no longer have international support in refusing to back a two-state solution. And, finally, of course, a rapprochement could give the United States a strong ally in reducing the threat of terrorist movements in the Middle East and South Asia.

Max Fisher thought Obama’s UN speech was harder on Iran than his recent remarks:

That Obama would harden his stance toward Iran, at precisely the moment when Tehran seems most receptive to his entreaties, may seem surprising on the surface. But U.S.-Iran engagement is shifting from theoretical to actual this week. And that means the United States is a little less worried about enticing Tehran to the negotiating table, and a little more preoccupied with keeping their Iranian counterparts honest.

But the toughening stance on Iran, like the decision to privilege the nuclear issue far above detente, seemed to nod to growing concerns from Israel. … Israel does not have veto power over U.S.-Iran engagement, exactly, but it does have significant influence – and sympathetic-minded legislators in Congress could have the power to block Obama from any deals with Tehran.