BEIJING—China’s capital looks like an American big city. Tall office buildings. Large shopping malls. Squat government offices. Horrid traffic jams.

The casual summer uniform is the same: shorts, athletic shoes, skirts, t‑shirts, sandals, blouses. Even an occasional baseball cap.

It is a country which the Communist revolutionaries who ruled only four decades ago would not recognize. True believers still exist. One spoke to me reverently of Mao’s rise to power and service to the Chinese people. However, she is the exception, at least among China’s younger professionals.

Indeed, younger educated Chinese could not be further from Communist cadres once determined to create a revolution. The former are socially active, desire the newest technologies, and worry about going to good schools and getting good jobs. Cynicism about corrupt and unelected leaders is pervasive.

If there is one common belief, it is hostility toward government Internet controls. Students have complained to me in class about their inability to get to many websites and readily shared virtual private networks to circumvent state barriers.

But such opinions are not held only by the young. A high school student told me that his father urged him to study in America because of Beijing’s restrictions on freedom.

While Chinese from all walks of life are comfortable telling foreigners what they think, sharing those beliefs with other Chinese is problematic. The media, of course, is closely controlled. Internet sites are blocked, deleted, and revamped. Unofficial intimidation, legal restrictions, and even prison time await those who criticize Communist officialdom on social media and blogs.

But increasingly globalized Chinese are aware of their online disadvantage compared to their peers in the West. Google, YouTube, and Twitter are verboten. Today Bloomberg and the New York Times are beyond reach.

Last week as BBC television began to detail official abuses my TV went black. A couple minutes later BBC was back, after the China report had finished.

While internet and media restrictions have not prevented rapid economic growth, barring the PRC’s best and brightest to a world of information is likely to dampen innovation and entrepreneurship. Moreover, those denied their full freedoms are more likely to leave home. Many of China’s wealthiest citizens have been departing an authoritarian system unbounded by the rule of law.

Repression also stultifies China’s political evolution to a more mature and stable political order. Democracy provides an important safety valve for popular dissent.

The Chinese Communist Party’s control may not be as firm as often presumed. The oppressive establishment which most Chinese have faced for most of their lives is Communist.

Indeed, for many if not most party members, Communism is a means of personal advancement, even enrichment. President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign is popular, but is widely seen as politically motivated.

Moreover, Xi has abrogated the well-understood “deal” of the last four decades, that rulers can retire and be immune from future prosecution. Will incumbents so readily yield power in the future?

Perhaps even more threatening for the CCP is the potential for an economic slowdown and consequent political unrest. Already protests are common against local governments, which tend to be ostentatiously rapacious. What if that antagonism shifts against the center?

A poorer PRC means a poorer world: China is a major supplier and increasingly important source of global demand. A politically unstable Beijing would have unpredictable effects on its neighbors.

As I wrote for Forbes online: “Since Mao’s death in 1976, the PRC has changed dramatically—and dramatically for the better. But this second revolution has stalled. Economic liberalization remains incomplete. Political reform never started. Individual liberty has regressed.”

The Chinese people deserve to be free. The Chinese nation would benefit from their freedom. The rest of the world would gain from a freer Chinese nation. Everyone desiring a peaceful and prosperous 21st century should hope for the successful conclusion of China’s second revolution.

My article in this week’s Washington Examiner magazine argues that because U.S. wars seem so cheap, they tempt us into making war too casually. I explain that while this tendency isn’t new, recent technology breakthroughs, which allowed the development of drones, have made it worse. We now make war almost like people buy movies or songs online, where low prices and convenience encourage purchase without much debate or consideration of value. I label the phenomenon one-click wars.

If we take occasional drone strikes as a minimum standard, the United States is at war in six countries: Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, with Libya likely to rejoin the list. In the first three, U.S. military action is exclusively the work of drones. Regular U.S. ground forces are present only in Iraq, where they avoid direct combat, and Afghanistan, where they mostly do.

There’s something remarkable in that combination of militarism and restraint. How can we be so willing to make war but so reluctant to take risks in making it?

My explanation starts with power. Wealth, technological prowess, and military might give the United States unique ability to make war around the world. But labor scarcity, liberal values, and our isolated geography that makes the stakes remote limit our tolerance for sacrificing lives, even foreign ones, in war. This reluctance to bear the human costs of war leads to reliance on long-range technology, especially airpower.

Airpower, despite its historical tendency to fail without help from ground forces, always offers hope that we are only a few bombs away from enemy capitulation. The promise of cheap, clean wars is always alluring. They would let you escape the choice between the bloody sacrifices war entails and the liberal values it offends. 

Recent developments added to our proclivity to go for the quick military fix. Innovations in surveillance and targeting greatly enhanced airstrikes’ accuracy and paved the way for armed drones. Jihadists spread out among complex Islamist insurgencies. Meanwhile, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan restored the U.S. public’s aversion to casualties, which the September 11 attacks had suppressed.

The belief that we can fight riskless war is a good problem to have. Its causes are good things: wealth, power, and safety. But it’s still problem for a couple reasons.

One is a tendency to corrode democratic government and encourage dumb decisions. Our government’s division of war powers follows from the theory that conflict and debate about policy tends to improve it. That requires Congress to jealously guard its war powers. Unfortunately, it has tended to abdicate them where low costs keep the public disinterested. An engaged Congress is no antidote to dumb wars. But wars started by unchecked presidents are more likely to rely on dubious rationales and thus to be foolish.

The other problem is that wars are rarely as cheap as they initially seem. That’s especially true of drone strikes, I argue, because their costs are hard to see:

They initially either occur downrange, in the form of dead people whose families can’t vote, or in the future, as abstractions like resentment. Because these costs are slow to arrive and obscure, while the benefits are relatively concrete and immediate, drone strikes have a specious attraction. That makes them especially resistant to judicious debate.

I agree with those who argue that one of those risks is blowback, meaning delayed violence or diplomatic consequences. I also discuss the less-appreciated danger of escalation, where the strikes, by getting us involved in conflicts without winning them, create pressure for more costly measures.

My admittedly partial solutions to this problem of feckless war-making involve efforts to capture war costs up front to heighten debate about rationales. The piece mentions several ways to do so. It ends with the suggestion that because bombing people tends to produce unanticipated trouble, “those unwilling to pay much for wars should probably avoid them.”

A new Cato Institute/YouGov poll finds a solid majority—58%—of Americans supports the main components of the Iran nuclear deal, in which the United States and other countries would ease oil and economic sanctions on Iran for 10-15 years in return for Iran agreeing to stop its nuclear program over that period. Forty percent (40%) oppose such a deal.

Americans also prefer Congress to allow such a deal to go forward (53%) rather than block the agreement (46%). Support declines slightly when the deal is described as an agreement between the “Obama administration and Iran.”

Full poll results found here

Despite support for the deal, Americans remain skeptical it will stop Iran’s nuclear program. Fifty-two percent (52%) of Americans say the agreement is “unlikely” to “stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons,” including 32% who say it’s “extremely unlikely.” Conversely, 46% believe the deal is likely to achieve its primary goal.

However, Americans are more optimistic the deal will delay Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The poll found 51% of Americans think the deal will likely “delay” Iran’s nuclear development while 47% disagree.

The survey also offered Americans an opportunity to select which one of several policy options would be “most effective” in reducing the likelihood Iran develops nuclear weapons. Doing so found a plurality –40%— think the Iran nuclear agreement would be more effective than taking military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities (23%), imposing new economic sanctions against Iran (23%) or continuing existing sanctions against Iran (12%).

Ultimately, 63% of Americans say it would be a “disaster” if Iran developed nuclear capabilities while 32% say the problem could be managed and 5% say it wouldn’t be a problem. Nevertheless, Americans tend to have confidence that the Iran nuclear agreement may be the next best step toward reducing that possibility.

Four years ago, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ordered the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to consider the public’s input on its policy of using strip-search machines for primary screening at our nation’s airports. The TSA had “advanced no justification for having failed to conduct a notice-and-comment rulemaking,” the court found. It ordered the agency to “promptly” proceed in a manner consistent with its opinion.

Over the next 20 months, the TSA produced a short, vague paragraph that did nothing to detail the rights of the public and what travelers can expect when they go to the airport. At the time, I called the proposed rule “contemptuous,” because the agency flouted the spirit of the court’s order. In our comment on the proposed rule, Cato senior fellow John Mueller, Mark G. Stewart from the University of Newcastle in Australia, and I took the TSA to task a number of ways.

The comment period on that proposal closed more than two years ago, but the TSA has still not proceeded to finalizing its rule. Continuing the effort to bring the TSA under the rule of law—and into the world of common sense—the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed suit against TSA yesterday, asking the court to require the agency to finalize its strip-search machine rule within 90 days.

Once the rule is finalized, it can be challenged in court under the Administrative Procedure Act’s “arbitrary and capricious” standard. This will be an important step toward bringing the TSA to heel. The D.C. Circuit, which is very familiar with health and safety regulation in which lives are at stake may recognize that the Department of Homeland Security does none of the work that other agencies do to cost-effectively protect life and health. The resulting waste of money and loss of privacy for travelers are not costs the American people should have to pay. Given the strip-search machine program’s results—failure 95% of the time in recent tests—a reviewing court may recognize that the TSA is acting incoherently.

Having the TSA under law in this case will pave the way for bringing other TSA policies within the law. Slow going it is, but the strategy I outlined four years ago is continuing to play out.

A better alternative to this time-consuming process, of course, would be for Congress to restore responsibility for air security to airlines and airports, which can do better than any federal agency at balancing safety and security, cost-control, privacy, and customer service. Speaking of long times passing, it’s now been a decade that I’ve been arguing for that very policy. This Reason piece, a debate with Bob Poole from March 2005, has stood the test of time, I think.

With a potentially historic agreement on Iran’s nuclear program in place, President Obama immediately focused his attention on the fight at home. When he announced the deal Tuesday morning, the president warned Congress that he would “veto any legislation that prevents the successful implementation of this deal.” A few hours later, he sat down with the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman to sell it on its merits.

“We are not measuring this deal by whether it is changing the regime inside of Iran,” the president said. “We’re not measuring this deal by whether we are solving every problem that can be traced back to Iran, whether we are eliminating all their nefarious activities around the globe.”

The aim of the negotiations was on ensuring that “Iran could not get a nuclear weapon.”

And that is where he wants the ensuing debate over the final terms of the agreement to be focused. “What I’m going to be able to say, and I think we will be able to prove,” he told Friedman, “is that this by a wide margin is the most definitive path by which Iran will not get a nuclear weapon, and we will be able to achieve that with the full cooperation of the world community and without having to engage in another war in the Middle East.”

That is what the president would like people to believe. But it may not be so simple.

Congress has 60 days to review the deal for final approval, but many GOP leaders have declared the agreement dead on arrival. Some Republicans, as I noted, lambasted the administration for appeasing the Iranian regime even before the details were announced. Accordingly, the administration will likely focus most of its time on reassuring skeptical Democrats to block the passage of legislation that would undo the deal, or, failing that, to sustain a veto.

An override seems unlikely, but the coming congressional debate will not be limited to the merits of the deal.

As Justin Logan and John Glaser wrote on CNN​.com:

The debate over Iran diplomacy was really two debates, in which each side was arguing over something different. On the one side was a strikingly broad consensus of nearly the entire arms control community, which recognizes what the deal can achieve in terms of nonproliferation and regional stability. On the opposing side is the Iran hawk community, which focused less on the nuclear issue than on finding ways to isolate and ultimately destroy Iran’s clerical regime, by military force if necessary, nuclear program or not.

The agreement is a clear success for nonproliferation advocates. Unfortunately, that’s not what matters to some of those who now control its fate. 

I really like Sandusky Register reporter Tom Jackson’s piece responding to my post yesterday about congressional appropriators and our national ID law, the REAL ID Act. Jackson is paying attention to all that is said about Ohio’s congressional delegation. Not just following the herd, he’s looking out for new and different things that might be interesting to the folks back home.

The gist of his argument is that calling Ohio Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur 75 percent supportive of REAL ID is unfair because she voted against it when it passed the House as a stand-alone bill in 2005. She did vote against it that once, but she also allowed a voice vote on the rule that attached REAL ID to a later appropriations bill, and she voted for that bill and the conference report, both votes helping to make REAL ID a federal law.

Rep. Kaptur doesn’t stand out as a pro-national-ID legislator—true—but that is precisely how log-rolling in Washington works. Bills that tie controversial matter like a national ID law to broadly supported priorities like military funding and money for tsunami relief allow representatives like Kaptur to vote for a national ID twice without standing out.

I didn’t do a good enough job of explaining the procedure by which REAL ID was passed, and Jackson understood me to be blaming Kaptur for funding REAL ID. In fact, my post focused on votes for passage of REAL ID itself. But Kaptur and other appropriators will be voting soon on the FY 2016 Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill, which year after year provides funds to push state implementation of REAL ID. The bill has lots of other priorities in it, but Rep. Kaptur and her colleagues on the Appropriations Committee’s Homeland Security Subcommittee are responsible for all of the bill’s content. Given that any of them could de-fund REAL ID and the national ID project with a simple amendment, I believe it’s appropriate to hold all of them to account for not doing so.

Today’s Iran deal is a victory for U.S. nonproliferation efforts, and while it may not be perfect, it goes a long way towards ensuring that Iran cannot develop nuclear weapons, and that the IAEA will regain crucial oversight access to Iran’s nuclear facilities. But though it is fundamentally an arms control agreement, some of the biggest impacts may in fact be felt in global oil and gas markets, as easing sanctions allow Iran’s hydrocarbon sector to reopen to the world.

Much of the text of the deal focuses on the sanctions which will be lifted in exchange for Iranian concessions on nuclear enrichment and processing. These include agreement by both the U.S. and EU to permit the import of oil and gas, as well as lifting asset freezes and bans on the export to Iran of technology and equipment for oil and gas extraction. More importantly, bans on investment, financing and service provision in the industry will be lifted, paving the way for European and American firms to provide technical services and invest in the country.

Oil prices have been volatile since the deal was announced, falling almost two percent before recovering. The initial price drop reflects the expectation that Iran may release some of its approximately thirty million reserve barrels of oil onto the market as soon as it is able. Iran also has the potential to impact oil prices in the long-term, holding the world’s fourth-largest reserves of crude oil, and second-largest gas reserves. Production has been depressed by sanctions, but once they are lifted, it is plausible that Iran could increase production to its pre-sanctions levels (2–3 million barrels a day) within several years.

A surge in Iranian production will only increase the current global oversupply of oil, driving prices lower, and setting Iran up for a confrontation with its partners in OPEC. This would be good news for consumers, but bad news for American shale producers, whose profits have already been dented by falling global oil prices. Yet, it could also be good news for large U.S. oil firms, opening the door to exploration and joint ventures in Iran.

Such investment may be particularly tempting given the recent closure of Russia’s oil market by sanctions. Companies like ExxonMobil, which lost access to its $3 billion joint Arctic exploration project with Rosneft, may find Iranian alternatives attractive. The fact that most of Iran’s reserves are onshore fields — rather than hard-to-access offshore or arctic deposits – may also prove popular. American firms will likely be engaging in competition with European firms like ENI and Total, who were the major international players in Iran’s oil industry prior to the current sanctions regime.

Certainly, there are still obstacles to overcome before Iran reenters the market, a fact reflected in the volatility of oil prices this morning. The deal must clear congress, though opponents of the deal are unlikely to successfully overcome a presidential veto. Sanctions mitigation will not take effect for at least ninety days, as the lifting of the sanctions is tied to successful completion of many of the deal’s requirements by Iran. And there is always the risk of ‘snapback,’ the idea that sanctions may be suddenly reinstated if Iran fails in its obligations. American oil companies may be hesitant to get involved in Iran until these risks diminish.

There is no denying, however, that the successful implementation of the deal will have major consequences for global oil markets, driving prices lower and opening up new investment opportunities. Ultimately, some of the biggest winners of the Iranian deal could be U.S. consumers and companies.