Broadly speaking, those who want to play “Let’s Make A Deal” with nasty foreign dictators aren’t always wrong. Some dictators like Franco just want to be left alone; others have a need to keep pushing. It’s a legitimate argument and subject for discussion about whether the Iranians are jerks like Franco who will settle down to peacefully hang homosexuals and torture dissidents at home if left to themselves or whether they are megalomaniacal nutcases who will interpret our forbearance as weakness — if we let them have Czechoslovakia they will start reaching for Poland.

Maybe this is a sign of my entire unfitness to write about foreign policy, but it’s not easy for me to see why a nuclear Iran would be less pushy and demanding than what we have now. If the mullocracy is arming terrorists, interfering with neighbors, inflaming the Middle East and making intercontinental nuclear deals with the bad guys when Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons, what makes us think that becoming less vulnerable to American countermeasures would make the Iranians settle down into responsible world citizens? If they blow off our threats and respond with contempt to our overtures when they are weak, why would they treat us with more respect as a nuclear power? Won’t getting nuclear weapons over our objections prove internally that the radicals were right while the moderates were vacillating, cowardly and wrong? And if we are unwilling to stand up to them effectively when they don’t have nuclear weapons, who on Planet Earth will think we will rediscover our backbones when they do?…

President Obama is going to have a tough time with this one. His current policy of seeking sanctions while gathering international support is less a policy than a way of marking time. There is no clear and obvious way forward, and Iran is doing everything it can (with Hamas, with Turkish and Brazilian diplomacy, with anything else it can gin up) to muddy the waters and throw the US off-track. As President Obama and Secretary Clinton try to make the agonizing decisions that almost inevitably lie ahead, I’m afraid the appeasers will be back. We can neither threaten Iran now nor seek regime change, they will say. It’s all our fault anyway because we outraged Iranian nationalism by our thoughtless acts in the past. If we can simply understand Iran’s legitimate concerns and give it what it rightfully wants then it will calm down. After all, it is only aggressive and hostile because the poor dears feel so threatened.

These arguments have led to millions of deaths and launched world wars in the past.