The once shoe-in favorite for the GOP presidential nomination Mitt Romney has been taking a beating lately — from his own supporters and advisers. Much of the criticism centers on Romney’s policies in various parts of Asia. Just this week, Romney supporter Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) parted ways with his candidate of choice on whether to enter into talks with the Taliban, with McCain supporting the Obama administration’s position. But a much more significant gulf may be opening up between Romney and his camp on China, particularly about his strident criticisms of Obama’s “pivot.”

Last week, Romney wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion piece blasting Obama’s Asia policy, particularly on China (albeit while misrepresenting said Obama policy). That afternoon on MSNBC, former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, who endorsed Romney after dropping his own presidential bid, said Romney’s China policies were “wrongheaded” and that he “would disagree with what some of what Governor Romney said.”

Now, a top Romney foreign policy adviser — not merely a supporter — has come out and praised Obama’s Asia policy, particularly his work on China. Appearing on the Colbert Report to promote his book, neoconservative Brookings scholar Robert Kagan, an Iraq hawk who advises the Romney campaign, said Obama “has a good policy in Asia, particularly in dealing with China”:

COLBERT: How can you advise Romney and like anything the President does?

KAGAN: I think that when the president does the right thing, it doesn’t matter what party you’re in, you should be supportive.

COLBERT: Killing bin laden doesn’t count. Killing Awlaki doesn’t count. Killing Qaddafi doesn’t count. Supporting the Arab Spring doesn’t count. So what else has he done?

KAGAN: Well, I think he’s done some things wrong. I think he has a good policy in Asia, particularly in dealing with China. I think he’s strengthened our position in Asia with our allies. On some issues I think he’s been a lot weaker.

Watch the video, starting at the four-minute mark:

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Kagan’s assessment that Obama has “strengthened our position in Asia with our allies” flies in the face of what Romney said in his Wall Street Journal piece. The GOP candidate wrote:

[Obama] has only encouraged Chinese assertiveness and made our allies question our staying power in East Asia… The supposed pivot has been oversold and carries with it an unintended consequence: It has left our allies with the worrying impression that we left the region and might do so again.

But maybe no one should be surprised that Kagan is a fan of some Obama policies. After all, the feeling seems to be mutual. Last month, Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin and the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote that Obama spoke effusively about Kagan’s essay in the New Republic (also here) about “the myth of American decline.”

A U.N. body that regulates telecommunications ruled that Iran, among other nations, must stop jamming and interfering with international broadcasts. At the World Radiocommunications Conference, members of the U.N.’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) voted overwhelmingly to mandate that authorities take “necessary action” to end jamming in their jurisdictions. “Jamming is a fundamental violation, not only of international regulations and norms, but of the right of people everywhere to receive and impart information,” said Richard Lobo, the director of the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau, which beams U.S. government-sponsored channels like Voice of America’s Persian service into Iran.

Rights groups lauded the decision. Aliakbar Mousavi, a former member of Iranian parliament, praised the move in a statement released by the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI):

This is the first meaningful action taken by the ITU and the UN to make legal provisions to counter censorship of satellite programs within various countries. The Iranian regime will have no more excuses to breach these regulations.

But Iran does not appear ready to give up. RFE/RL reporter Golnaz Esfandiari tweeted an article from an semi-official Iranian news agency showing Iranian authorities leaping from rooftop to rooftop in East Tehran in order to confiscate illegal satellite dishes in the name of “social security” — that is, securing “social” values. Here’s a picture of police standing over dismantled dishes:

The ITU ruling comes after Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists raised alarms about intimidation of family to employees of Britain’s state-sponsored Farsi-language news service, BBC Persian, which is also beamed into Iran against the wishes of the regime.

But the vote itself is only the start of enforcing the decision, ICHRI notes. In a December Wall Street Journal opinion piece, ICHRI spokesman Hadi Ghaemi and Shirin Ebadi, a Nobel Laureate and Iranian human rights lawyer, laid out how companies like the European group Eutelsat allow Iran to block signals for channels like BBC Persian but at the same time allow Iranian state-owned operators to use their satellites unencumbered. They wrote:

The European Union and U.S. should take immediate and decisive action requiring that these satellite companies end their cooperation with Iranian censors. … Without pressure on these companies from both sides of Atlantic, the people of Iran will remain cut off from the outside world.

In today’s ICHRI statement, Ghaemi said: “The ITU has now made Iran’s legal obligations perfectly clear. But the international community, including telecommunications corporations like Eutelsat, needs to sustain its efforts to make sure Iran stops jamming satellite broadcasts.”

Jamming satellites, though, are by no means the only way Iran controls the flow of information. This month, journalists and others reported that Iran increasingly curtailed internet access ahead of next month’s parliamentary elections — in addition to cracking down on journalists themselves.

As the “drumbeat to war” with Iran, as Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) warns of, grows louder, a number of journalists have begun to compare the hawkish rhetoric from pundits with the calls for military action against Iraq in 2002. Scott Shane, writing on the frontpage of today’s New York Times, observed, “Echoes of the period leading up to the Iraq war in 2003 are unmistakable, igniting a familiar debate over whether journalists are overstating Iran’s progress toward a bomb.” Indeed, the ombudsman of The Washington Post and the public editor of The New York Times criticized their own journalists for overstating the evidence of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

Over the past week, journalists have raised the alarm about the increasing carelessness of the mainstream media in hyping the calls for war with Iran. But Fox News commentator and The Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson openly called for war against Iran and argued for the full-scale annihilation of the Islamic Republic during an appearance on Fox News’s late-night show Red Eye. Carlson responded to a question about U.S. military action:

CARLSON: I think we are the only country with the moral authority [...] sufficient to do that. [The U.S. is] the only country that doesn’t seek hegemony in the world. I do think, I’m sure I’m the lone voice in saying this, that Iran deserves to be annihilated. I think they’re lunatics. I think they’re evil.

Carlson, having called for the annihilation of Iran — a country with a population of over 74 million people — went on to acknowledge that “we should assess what will happen to the price of energy were we to do that.” Watch the clip:

Carlson doesn’t bother to make a case for why the U.S. should destroy Iran. But presumably he’s referring to the crisis over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. However, neither the IAEA nor U.S. intelligence reports conclude that Iran has restarted its nuclear weapons program. The IAEA and U.S. intelligence have expressed concerns about possible military aspects to Iran’s nuclear program and suspicions about Iran’s program intensified after Tehran refused IAEA inspectors access to facilities thought to be used for tests on how to produce nuclear weapons. Tehran also refused to agree to a process by which it would address IAEA concerns about “possible military dimensions” to its nuclear program.

But, much as in the case of the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, many journalists and politicians are ignoring the facts on the ground and pushing forward with calls for increasingly aggressive actions. Carlson, however, may stand alone in publicly calling for Iran’s outright annihilation.