Professors Tom Nichols and John Schindler have responded to my critique of their contention that Russia is now a “peer” to the United States when it comes to influence in the Middle East, and that, indeed, Washington has “outsourced” the management of regional security to Moscow. The dispute is in part over empirical factors, but more broadly it represents a distinct set of normative assumptions and policy prescriptions regarding America’s role in a changing Middle East.

You might not guess it from your Internet bill, but the United States has some of the cheapest broadband in the world -- right up there with Kazakhstan, India and Bangladesh. That’s one of many surprising, and occasionally puzzling, revelations in a new report from the International Telecommunication Union, which tracks the use, cost and penetration of information networks around the world.

What if China was beating the US as its own super-power game in the Pacific and we didn’t even notice? While Washington distracts itself with shutdown shenanigans and failed attempts to control the situation in the Middle East, president Obama’s “pivot to Asia” looks increasingly shaky. Beijing is quietly filling the gap, signing multi-billion dollar trade deals with Indonesia and calling for a regional infrastructure bank.

Until yesterday, 400,000 Defense Department employees were furloughed without pay due to the government shutdown. At the Treasury Department, the offices that enforce and monitor sanctions on North Korea, Syria, and Iran have been reduced to a skeleton crew. And large numbers of CIA analysts and logistics officers—including, until last week, 72 percent of the civilian workforce—have been told to stay home until the government has a 2014 budget.

As the program to destroy Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons begins, the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is winning some rare praise from the West for its cooperation in the ambitious mission. Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that it was a “credit” for the Assad regime that the process of destroying the chemical weapons had begun in “record time” and with the compliance of Damascus.

This weekend, the United States conducted two raids against militant Islamists in Tripoli, Libya and Barawe, Somalia. Though the action in Tripoli appeared to be more successful—FBI and CIA agents nabbed Abu Anas al-Liby, a suspected leader of Al Qaeda—the significance of both raids lies less in their immediate success and more in their implications for American involvement in Africa.

Tension, distrust, hostility: For more than 30 years, those words have described the relationship between Iran and the United States. But there's one other overriding word to describe it: silence. Since 1979, no American president had spoken with a leader of Iran. That all changed on Sept. 27, when President Obama entered the White House briefing room and said that he had spoken with Hassan Rouhani, Iran's new president, by telephone.