National Review's Victor Davis Hanson examines the four international
challenges facing the U.S. today: Russia, China, Iran, and ISIS. About Iran he wisely notes:
It is a self-proclaimed revolutionary theocracy, with periodic fits of end-of-days rhetoric. Whether these are genuine expressions of a looming twelfth-imam apocalypse or simply feigned bouts of lunacy that are useful strategies in nuclear poker, no one quite can be sure.
We dismiss religious leaders as not believing the dogma they preach; whether this is true of Iran's ayatollahs is unknown, perhaps unknowable. Nation-as-suicide-bomber is a bizarre concept, but not beyond possibility. About the four threats, he concludes:
All the threats are distinct but also opportunistic and interrelated. A phony red line, an empty step-over line, a serially repeated deadline against any one threat only encourages the other three to become bolder. In contrast, firmness against one aggression lessens the likelihood that there will be further aggrandizement elsewhere.
If this administration is not careful, by next year it may find ISIS at the gates of Baghdad, Russian forces massing on the border of Estonia, Japan and China shooting at each other over disputed air and sea space, and Iran stockpiling its growing enriched-uranium supplies for a not too distant multi-bomb nuclear rollout. We think the world is growing tense; in fact, it is only the calm before the storm.
Normally downbeat Hanson is a super-jeremiah in this column.
