These problems suggest that an American air campaign to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities would be just the beginning, not the end, of a war with Iran.

If Iran were to rebuild, the president of the United States would not be able to just shrug his shoulders. If Iran retaliated, and killed Americans, the president would almost certainly have to respond, if not escalate.

I fear that if we started using force in the belief that we could keep it limited, we would either fail and find ourselves facing an enraged, nuclear Iran, or be dragged into another large-scale, protracted war in the Middle East.

Containment is hardly a perfect policy, but I see the costs and risks as more easily mitigated than those of war.

Containment is not appeasement. It would not mean simply letting the Iranians do what they wanted. That is not how we contained the Soviet Union — or Cuba, or North Korea or even Iran in the decades since the 1979 revolution.