The other day, John Derbyshire posted a column of questions he would like asked of prospective presidential candidates. One of them was about Iran.

Nuclear proliferation.  Pakistan, a dysfunctional kleptocracy maggoty with Muslim fanatics, has for nigh on 20 years had nuclear weapons, and now has missiles with which to deliver them.

North Korea, under the control of a Mafia-style gangster family utterly ruthless in maintenance of its power, is similarly equipped.

Fifty years ago, communist China, under the autocratic control of a megalomaniac who had just got through watching impassively while his policies caused 30 million of his countrymen to die of starvation, got the bomb, and is now a major nuclear power.

Deterrence has an excellent track record, even with regimes at the furthest extremes of craziness and cruelty. Should Americans be concerned about Iran going nuclear? Why?

I’ve been mulling that one over for a while and I don’t think I agree with what Derb is suggesting. Pakistan is a mess now, for sure, but it was not always this sort of a mess. The secular rulers have, even now, been able to keep the religious crazies from gaining control of the nukes. In other words, so far we have been lucky.

To say deterrence has any impact on Pakistan is simply wrong. The world has been lucky so far. Maybe the almost certain annihilation of the country that would come from India, if the Muslim crazies got hold of the nukes has made the secular elements more determined. That feels like a stretch to me. Dumb luck looks like the right answer here and who knows how long that holds.

North Korea is not run by religious fanatics and the sanity of the ruling class is not in question. We may think it is nuts to operate as a hermit kingdom, but that’s a matter of taste, not fact. Otherwise, we are dealing with rational people who are pretty smart.Given their position in the world, they have managed to survive despite a lot of big enemies.

Has deterrence altered their behavior? We have no way of knowing.  We do know they have sold nuclear technology to Syria and missile technology to Iraq and Iran. If they have not been deterred from that, there no reason to think they will be deterred from selling a nuke. We can’t know these things, which means we can’t say deterrence has worked here.

China and the Soviet Union are the two good examples. Russia and China are old countries run by smart people. These are people with no history of messianic religious impulses. There’s nothing in the history of these people to think they are anxious to usher in the end times. Deterrence works with these countries for the same reason it works for the US. It’s not fear of destruction. It’s fear of blowing up the planet.

Iran is nothing like China or Russia. Persia is an old society, but there’s not a whole lot of Persia left. Genetically, Iranians are just Arabs. I’m sure the average guy walking the streets of Tehran is in no hurry to blow up the world, but we know a lot of them are tossing and turning every night dreaming of it.

Here I’ll share a story from an Iranian I knew in the 80’s. He was a conscript fighting against the Iraqis. His unit was in the Basra area as the Iranians threw everything they had at the city hoping to end the war. They were faced with a minefield and volunteers were called for to clear a path. A bunch of Revolutionary Guards volunteered. They cleared a path through the minefield by running through it, exploding the mines.

The point is Iran is not China or even Pakistan. The people in charge are messianic fanatics. A good portion of the population supports the leaders on religious grounds. Maybe they are not that serious about destroying Israel and ushering in the end times. Maybe it is just what they say to keep up appearances. We can’t know that.

I think if I was asked to pick the worst country on which to test the deterrence theory, I’d pick Iran. Even the Saudis seem to be more constrained in their actions and they may be the most thoroughly Muslim society on earth. Iran defines itself in opposition to the West and therefore seeks out ways to cause mayhem in the West. Deterrence does not seem to have had any effect so far.

There’s a tendency on the Dissident Right to blame American foreign policy for everything wrong in the world. The Paultards do this a lot. I think it is fair to say America has bungled a lot of things in this realm. When it comes to the Arabs, American has been stunningly incompetent. None of which changes the fact Iran is run by messianic fanatics who talk constantly about blowing up the world.

Of course, there’s good old fashioned indifference, which I find appealing, generally speaking. Iran is not going to nuke America. If they did, we could easily wipe them off the map. We would lose a city, but they would not exist. Iran is a problem of Europe, Israel and the Arabs. There’s an argument there, but it is not deterrence. It is indifference.

Regardless, It seems pretty clear that the Obama administration is prepared to let the Iranians go nuclear. Who knows, maybe they will be right this time.