Más sobre Irán

¿Debemos creerle al presidente de Irán cuando sostiene que no busca armas nucleares y al mismo tiempo sostiene que Israel tiene que desaparecer de la faz de la tierra?

James Robbins:
There are two key rules to keep in mind when looking at the world strategically. First is the inevitability of change. Stability is chimerical. The past century has seen at least five distinct strategic environments, depending on how you count them. Powers with global influence have risen and others have fallen — or both in the case of the Soviet Union. All countries seek security, and many of them also strive to increase their power and authority. When faced with a state pursuing an aggressive plan to achieve regional hegemony, the worst move is to seek to institutionalize the status quo. The rising power won't accept it, though it might say it does; and the established powers will cling to the familiar, and grow complacent. The results are what you might expect; Europe in the late 1930s, for example.

The second rule is to give credit to people that they are sincere in their beliefs. Western liberals, who prize reason, are subject to the tendency to explain away beliefs they consider unreasonable. Progress and freedom are inevitable because they are the natural courses of history. Ideologies that do not fit our predetermined vision of the future are not worth taking seriously. Extremism cannot triumph because it does not make sense. Therefore, the Bolsheviks and their successors were not really after global Communist revolution, even though they said they were. The Nazis would not really commit armed aggression and genocide, even though they advocated both. And while Khmer Rouge military leader Khieu Samphan's 1959 doctoral thesis identified the urban bourgeoisie as a parasite class that had to be removed to the countryside, they wouldn't really empty Phnom Penh of its 2.5 million citizens and subject them to collectivization, reeducation, and execution, would they? Isn't that just plain crazy?

So when a freshly ambitious Iran claims it has "the inalienable right to have access to a nuclear fuel cycle," and radical President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denies that Iran seeks to build nuclear weapons, states that Israel must be "wiped off the map," should we be concerned? Perhaps "concerned" is an understatement.