Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria pooh-poohs the Iranian threat in a recent article. The gist of Zakaria's argument is that Iran is a flyspeck compared to Nazi Germany and that we do ourselves no favors by exaggerating the Iranian threat. Zakaria's rejection of the 1938 analogy is misplaced.
Sure, Iran is an economically backwards country that spends a fraction of what the United States does on national defense, and its ability to project force beyond its region is severely limited. The same argument was made a few weeks ago by the indispensable Steve Sailer. It is however just as wrong.
Advances in technology since World War II mean that every banana republic despot can severely alter our way of life if he or she is so inclined. One errant (or not errant) nuke can make much of the United States uninhabitable and bring our economy to its knees. We know that Iran is trying to acquire nuclear technology, we know they have the missiles capable of launching a nuclear warhead, we know they have imperialist ambitions (just look at their conduct in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon), and we know that they want to destroy at least one of their neighbors. Oh, and we know their current president has the eschatology of a madman and that he's crazy enough to pull the trigger.
Zakaria endorses containment of Iran, whatever that means. In the context of a state having the characteristics I described above, containment represents the absence of a strategy. The key difference between now and 1938 isn't that our enemy today is much weaker, but that his weakness is not a barrier to his desire to destroy us.
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