Model international actors Iran and North Korea came together to block the adoption of a treaty regulating the $70 billion dollar arms trade at the United Nations on Thursday, no doubt endearing them to the National Rifle Association.

The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) has been in negotiations for the past two weeks, the second attempt to gain a unanimously agreed upon text. The final draft was put before the delegates on Wednesday, with the assumption that it was set to cruise to an easy approval. That assumption was trampled once the Iranian delegation rose to break the required consensus for the treaty’s passage. Iran’s disapproval opened the door for North Korea to join in blocking the treaty. Syria also took umbrage at the text, leading to it and Iran reportedly both objecting to the lack of reference in the treaty’s final draft to foreign occupation or “crimes of aggression.” The President of the Conference quickly suspended the debate before a final vote could be held, leaving the door open to bringing the Iranian and North Korean delegations around, but the chances remain slim.

While not perfect, the treaty had still managed to appease the concerns of many advocates for stronger treaty-language. In particular, a hard fought clause regulating the import and export of ammunition and munitions made its way into the final text. Given the United States’ past hesitance in moving forward on the treaty — including its insistence that the ATT Conference work through consensus — and its current support, the late hour block from Iran and North Korea comes off as slightly ironic. The irony is even more pronounced when one considers that the Iranian delegate, in explaining his objection to the treaty, denounced the U.S.’ influence in shaping the treaty. “The right of individuals to own and use guns has been protected in the current text to meet the constitutional requirements of only one State,” Iranian ambassador Mohammad Khazeee said.

The treaty will now likely move to the General Assembly, however, where it will find the two-thirds necessary to finally pass next week. Given the crazy rhetoric present the last time it almost passed, the eventual passage of the ATT will be sure to provoke even more inflammatory opposition now. In opposing this version of the treaty, the National Rifle Association was much quieter about its lobbying effort, including a push for provisions exempting so-called “civilian firearms” from the treaty’s effects. There is no sign of that influence in the final draft of the ATT. However, the NRA still seems set to come out with a win on this one. Either the treaty is delayed, allowing more time to take it down for good, or it passes with the individual protections it supports hard-coded into the final document.

Their domestic influence will be marshaled once more though once the treaty is signed. At that point, the ATT will go to the U.S. Senate for ratification, where several Republicans have already made abundantly clear their skepticism regarding the very idea of regulating the arms trade. For years now, conservatives have used the supposed threat that an Arms Trade Treaty would entail as a fundraising tool or way to burnish their right-wing credentials. The Heritage Foundation has been slamming each successive draft of the ATT, and will now likely begin a campaign alongside the NRA to doom it in the Senate.

The National Security Council has reportedly recommended that the United States provide non-lethal aid such as night-vision goggles and body armor to Syrian rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. However, President Obama has yet to make a decision on the recommendation.

Numerous media outlets have reported that the President has been thinking about whether to approve this kind of non-lethal assistance to the rebels and there has been speculation that it would be part of the aid package that Secretary of State John Kerry announced in February.

But Foreign Policy reports that the plan has the backing of Obama’s top security advisers in the National Security Council, which include Kerry, Vice President Biden, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon.

Back in early February, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Dempsey said they supported a push by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus to come up with a plan to arm the rebels. Gen. James Jones, Obama’s National Security Adviser until late 2010, said recently that he also supports arming vetted rebels.

The French are also looking at the possibility of providing night-vision equipment. And British Foreign Secretary William Hague announced earlier this month that the UK will provide body armor and armored vehicles to Syria’s rebels. “Each month of violence in Syria means more death, wider destruction, larger numbers of refugees, and bloody military confrontation,” Hague said. “The international community cannot stand still in the face of this reality.”

Pressure from Congress, including key Democrats in both houses, is mounting on Obama to increase American involvement in helping to end Syria’s ongoing two-year civil war. The White House, and NATO, rebuffed a Syrian opposition leader’s request this week for military assistance.

The former head of the U.N.’s peace monitoring mission in Syria on Wednesday called for a no-fly zone in Syria. “I have come to the conclusion there has to be a leveling on the playing field,” Norwegian General Robert Mood told the BBC. “To level the playing field now in the military terms would be to consider no-fly zones, to consider whether the Patriots in Turkey could have a role also in taking on some responsibility for the northern part of Syria.”

A new report out Thursday finds that right-wing extremists on Twitter are “highly engaged” with the mainstream conservative movement and the Republican Party and highlights the role the GOP has to play in countering their more violent fans.

The report — titled “Who Matters Online: Measuring influence, Evaluating Content and Countering Violent Extremism in Online Social Networks” — originally sought to examine the way that extremists use social media to interact among themselves, in this instance focusing on white nationalists’ use of Twitter. But throughout their investigation, the study’s authors, International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation associate fellow J.M. Berger and Bill Strathearn, inadvertently discovered something interesting.

They began with 12 “seed” Twitter accounts for their unambiguous status as white nationalists. The authors then created a dataset of 3,542 Twitter users who interacted with those 12 seed accounts, of which 44 percent self-identified as white nationalists. After analyzing the interactions between the 3,542 users and the 12 seed accounts, the authors identified the 200 top-scoring accounts, of which 83 percent self-identified as white nationalists (for the top 400, the self-ID rate was 74 percent).

The real surprise came almost accidentally, when studying the content of the tweets members of the dataset sent out, with a substantial amount of it linked to the conservative movement in the United States and the Republican Party. Among the most popular hashtags used by those featured in the dataset included “#tcot,” or top conservatives on Twitter; “#teaparty,” and “#gop.” The study also looked at the links these users sent out, categorized into mainstream, content-neutral, alternative, and extremist categories. More than half of the alternative links these users sent out were also to conservative websites, such as World Net Daily and Brietbart.com.

The authors of the study determined that the usage seemed to be “driven more by white nationalists feeling an affinity for conservatism than by conservatives feeling an affinity for white nationalism.” They were also quick to note that the data were pulled during a period of time surrounding the Republican National Convention, potentially providing a boost in references to the GOP. However, a comparison group — composed of left-wing anarchists — did not yield similar results linking them to progressive ideals or the Democratic Party.

This seemingly unidirectional engagement, however, has a potential upside. Due to their influence, the GOP could help reduce the affect that violent extremists have on the national stage, the report says:

Since the data suggests white nationalists are actively seeking dialogue with conservatives, CVE [countering violent extremism] activists should enlist the help of mainstream conservatives, who may be considerably more successful than NGOs at engaging extremists with positive messaging. Further research may also suggest avenues for engagement between other kinds of extremists and other mainstream political and religious movements.

The report comes out on the heels of a Southern Poverty Law Center report identifying a spike in far-right anti-government groups, with their number having reached an “all-time high” in 2012. As the Republican Party is desperately seeking to rebrand itself from being seen as a “scary” party of primarily white people, it would do well to listen to the ICSR’s recommendations and not those of people who would defend slavery.

The White House on Wednesday announced that President Obama will be traveling to Latin America for the first time this term, heading for Mexico and Costa Rica in early May. The former in particular holds several challenges for the President, given Mexico’s proximity and close ties to the U.S. and the many difficulties Mexico’s new President faces. Here’s a few of the issues President Obama will have to confront during his travels:

• Border Security

  Given the domestic agenda in the United States, there’s little chance that Obama’s discussions with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto will manage to avoid the issue of immigration between the two countries. The debate in the U.S. has particularly focused on the security of the border between the U.S. and Mexico, with Republicans clamoring for more. Two GOP members of the U.S. Senate’s so-called “Gang of Eight” working on immigration toured parts of Arizona’s border on Wednesday, noting that they witnessed a woman scaling the fence between the countries. The woman was quickly apprehended, showcasing the billions of dollars already being spent on border security.

• Economic Ties

  Issues of border security aside, Presidents Obama and Pena Nieto will likely discuss migration patterns and the economic links between the two states substantially. While the U.S. is home to an estimated 12 million immigrants from Mexico, net migration from the U.S. southern neighbor fell to nearly zero in 2012, possibly due to a less than robust U.S. economy. Despite that, the U.S. and Mexico engaged in over $200 billion worth of cross-border trade in 2012. Even more of an indicator of the ties between the state of the two economies, despite remittances — money immigrants send to their native country — dropping in 2012, they still made up over $22 billion.

• Drug Trade and Violence

  Given Pena’s inheritance of former President Felipe Calderón’s war on drugs, the power of Mexico’s drug cartels is sure to top the agenda of the two leaders. Over 50,000 Mexican civilians have died in the conflict, which has so far not managed to crack the hold of the cartels on many towns and cities. In Nov. 2012, the Zetas — the largest cartel in Mexico — managed to take total control of the third-largest state in the country. A general inability of the central state to provide public security exists throughout many areas, resulting in vigilantes taking over towns and arresting the police. But even when central government can provide the forces necessary to provide security, the human rights abuses they’ve been accused of perpetrating tend to outweigh the benefits of their protection for civilians.

  The United States has done its part to help along instability in Mexico. A recent study shows that when the U.S. allowed the assault weapons ban to expire, the effect was felt heavily in Mexico. As much as 16 percent of the increase in homicides in Mexico can be tied to that expiration, according to the study. In terms of direct support for the drug trade, a new study of the Custom and Border Patrol’s own data shows that Americans are involved in as much as 80 percent of the drug trafficking across the border.

(Photo: Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto speaks with President Obama)

The Department of Defense is reinstating a popular tuition assistance program that was eliminated in the sequestration budget cutting process.

USA Today reported earlier this month that hundreds of thousands of troops would lose tuition assistance for classes this year because of the mandatory, across the board, military spending cuts that took effect on March 1. As USA Today noted, the program “covers tuition costs for attending college classes during off hours or even online while on combat deployments.”

But facing backlash and protests from servicemembers, Congress included a measure in its plan to fund the government through September that compels military officials to reinstate the program.

“We will comply with the recently enacted legislation to provide tuition assistance to all service members across all the services,” Pentagon Press Secretary George Little said on Wednesday.

“Based on the legislation that just passed, tuition assistance is to be reinstated across the services,” said DOD spokesperson Mark Wright, in a statement Wednesday as reported by Foreign Policy. “DOD agrees with Congress that the tuition assistance program is very important, both to the department and our service members. Each service is responsible for funding and administering its tuition assistance program in accordance with the DOD tuition assistance policy. We are working with the services to develop a plan to comply with any legislation.”