Iran's leaders are not suicidal

The frailty of Brooks’s historical argument becomes clear when he cites examples of the West’s refusal to take its enemies’ ideology seriously. “Western diplomats,” he claims, “assumed that the world leaders before 1914 would not be stupid enough to allow nationalist passion to plunge them into a World War.” But depending on how you define “Western,” at least two of the five major combatants in World War I were “Western” themselves. Which means, according to Brooks, that British and French diplomats underestimated the danger of “nationalist passion” not only among their foes, but in their own countries as well.

By backhandedly acknowledging that passion drove the “West” in World War I too (that certainly includes the wartime United States, which under Woodrow Wilson became fanatically repressive and xenophobic), Brooks undermines his own argument. The point of his column is that Americans should not project their own pragmatism onto a fervently ideological regime like Iran’s. But Americans can be fervently ideological too, even if democracy is a preferable ideology to theocratic Islam. Just read George W. Bush’s second inaugural address or listen to Bill O’Reilly’s recent declaration that the United States is fighting a “holy war” against radical Islam or watch Sheldon Adelson tell a cheering crowd that the U.S. should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran. In warning Americans not to assume that Iran’s leaders “put G.D.P. over ideology and religion,” Brooks forgets that America doesn’t always put GDP first either.

To varying degrees, ideology motivates all regimes. But Brooks’s argument is that Iran is an extreme, “apocalyptically motivated” outlier. It’s so fanatical that it cannot be relied on to adhere to any diplomatic agreement. And if it gets a nuclear weapon, it may well use it, even though such a move would likely lead to the death of Iran’s leaders and the destruction of their country.