JimSciutto

I have to say it's the territorial dispute between China and Japan in the South and East China Seas. When I was in China, this was at the top of the news virtually every day, but back home it only occasionally captures attention. Fact is, it's about much more than a few tiny uninhabited islands (Senkaku's to the Japanese, Diaoyu's to Chinese). It's about China's growth as a regional power - and expressions of that growth - and Japan's nervousness with that growth. It's also about intense emotions in each country, going back to WW2. Trouble is, politicians on both sides stoke those emotions and once they do, they're hard to tamp down. I had a worrying conversation with Chinese university students last year who told me they think war with Japan is inevitable. If you're youngest and brightest are saying that, that's a problem.

I think it's that some of us imagine the only threats are the violent ones such as terrorism or war, which are very real. But our lives are impacted directly by so many other challenges that we often forget - like how well we're educating our kids, or upgrading our infrastructure from building better airports to increasing broadband speeds, to how we're managing our public discourse in the US. As a big traveler, I gotta smile when I can get a better cell signal in Beijing than NYC, or faster internet in Seoul than SF.

I think Iran is a country which suffers from a phenomenon a lot of countries do: a focus on caricatures. Americans have a caricatured vision of Iranians, based in part on the over-use of images like the "death to america" chants for instance. Part of the reason for this is that too few foreign journalists visit Iran, or are able to. It's also due to a broader temptation among journalists to fall back on caricatures to add impact or to shorthand complicated issues. Here's an example. I've been to Iran 11 times and every time I talk about how most Iranians want better relations with the US. But every time I go back, friends and colleagues ask me if I'm scared to go!

Well, Twitter, FB etc are still blocked there, so I had to access those through my international smartphone. Instagram is open. Pres. Rouhani promised to end those blockages but has yet to deliver and I heard a lotof frustration with it there. Of course the great irony is that Rouhani, Zarif and others all use Twitter and FB themselves! So I asked Zarif about this and he told me two things: one, they're still working on it but have opposition from hard-liners and two, he uses a VPN himself!

Absolutely not. Look at how these kids reacted when I told them I'm an American: http://instagram.com/p/jukonpvKH5/

But I've always found that Iranians tend to like Americans more than people from many of our allies in the region - and the public polls back this up. Look at Americans' favorability ratings in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, and they're not too warm and fuzzy! In 11 trips to Iran, even when relations between Tehran and Washington were ice-cold, I have almost always gotten a respectful and warm welcome form most Iranians.