Sanctions simply do not work! And hurt the wrong people!

Any reasonable deal is vastly better than the confrontation we used to have and still have with a hopelessly impoverished North Korea! These are not dry academic arguments Alon, but involve real people and real harm!

Over 100,00 thousand Kids were killed by the Iraqi sanctions!

And Heaven knows how many Iranians needlessly paid for the nuclear sabre rattling of a former Leader?

If we'd had the balls to send a cruise missile through Saddam's bedroom window while he slept inside! (good trustworthy intell) more than a million lives could have been spared!

And something as inherently evil as ISIS would never have been created!?

Moreover, given such an outcome, we could have stayed the course in Afghanistan until democracy and freedom was well and truly rusted on?

How many women will have to pay with their lives or freedom for us not having done so?

A surgical removal courtesy of a radar beating unannounced cruise missile hurtling through a tyrant's bedroom wall? About where his head would rest?

Something worth considering if the Iranian deal goes pear shaped?
Alan B.

This is a very handy pocket map of the current geopolitics playing out in the Middle East.

"more than one vaccuum" are created. Liberalism is a perfect philosophy as a theoretical map, but it is a very imperfect one as to its practical applicability. There are areas where it brings more chaos than order when applied. Applied in the Middle East as the policy of democracy promotion, it has brought miseries on tens of millions of innocent people. People of the Middle East have hardly any reason for feeling thankful to the West.
(When applied as a theory of international trade, it has created vaccuums in important industries and tremendous income and wealth gap in a nation. But this is not the place to talk about it.)

The Ottoman, Persian and Russian empires had at least one thing in common, which the Chinese empire did not share. This one thing, perhaps like a few other things, distinguishes China from the rest.
"One determining influence on East Asian civilization has been its relative isolation from the other great civilizations of mankind...Western civilization grew up in closely connected areas such as Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece. Only after it had spread to include most of Europe, North Africa. and Western Asia, dit it divide into its two present halves, Western Christian civilization and Islamic civilization...Alexander's of the Indus Valley in327 B.C. is but one example of the close early contact between the West and India...The home of early East Asian civilization in North China was very much more isolated than were these other early centers (Edwin O. Reischauer, East Asia, co-authored by Fairbank and Craig)."

PS It is amazing how poor Americans are at knowing China, as I said in my comment, It Is Not China's Fault, Nov. 16, 2015, on Michael Pillsbury/The Hundred-Year Marathon, amazon usa.