THE CITY
dictable. We can truly expect the worst of people who fit the category of irrational and suicidal—who contemplate setting off a nuclear holocaust to welcome the Hidden Mahdi. Assumption Two brings little comfort. Just because we can catego‐ rize the regime as rational but having problems operating logically shouldn’t encourage us. International relations theorists for genera‐ tions have argued over the Rational Actor model and whether it real‐ ly gives us the kind of explanatory and predictive power we seek. I happen to put great stock in this model as a means to determine what options we should be ready to use, but we have to recognize its limitations that might well be demonstrated in the present Iranian case: regimes that isolate themselves from the world, whose leaders never have left or hardly ever leave their country or talk to anyone who does, who don’t know much about the modern world, are hard‐ ly able to calculate rationally because rational action requires access to information and the ability to question hypotheses. In foreign af‐ fairs conducted according to reason, surety is not attainable and not sought; probability is sought and flexibility is maintained. So there remains Assumption One, the idea that the regime is as rational as any modern state can be. This is the best situation we can hope for, but problems remain. The Iranian regime has chosen a path of theocracy overlaying a pseudo‐republic. All its efforts to oppose the West both at home and abroad and to impose a strict Shia inter‐ pretation of Islam have left it economically deprived and politically unstable. Worse still, the Arab Spring has toppled Ben Ali, Mubarak, Gaddafi and perhaps quite soon Bashar al‐Assad. And Iran is in‐ creasingly surrounded by enemies and an emboldened Europe ap‐ parently ready to deal with the Iranian threat once and for all. The regime has painted itself into a corner so that it might have little choice soon but to produce the weapon it believes it needs to protect itself, but that will be the very thing that causes its enemies to fall upon it. So just because the Iranian regime might be acting ra‐ tionally does not mean it is not the threat that many perceive it to be. Its very rational behavior in the quagmire it produced for itself make it very dangerous indeed. So, what is the United States to do if it faces a power that is dan‐ gerous whether it is acting rationally or not? 42