Dan Henninger's latest Wall Street Journal column makes a super-important point about America's current mix of enemies: deterrence doesn't work against them:
Not one of these countries is a conventional opponent, subject—as the Biden national-security team believes—to incentives offered through diplomatic overtures to reduce their aggressive behavior. Iran, Russia and China aren't just military threats. None of them operate inside the West's traditional understanding of power relationships governed by a balance of interests. Instead, all three under their current leadership have become messianic political movements.
Political messianism has three characteristics: It is relentless in its pursuit of its goals, outward-moving and virtually unappeasable. We read daily about Iran's "proxies" in the Middle East, but that bland word undervalues the fanatic energy driving Iran's goals. At this late date it would require extraordinary myopia not to recognize that the Islamic Republic of Iran was, and always will be, a messianic movement.
Like Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are seeking the restoration of centuries-old cross-border empires. These goals aren't propagated merely for internal consumption. Each of these men believes it.
At the 2021 centennial of the Chinese Communist Party, Mr. Xi described China's "national rejuvenation" as a "historical inevitability." Mr. Putin has likened his invasion of Ukraine to Peter the Great's 18th-century expansions into northern Europe. A year ago he called Ukraine a "watershed moment for our country" and said the West's opposition is an attack on the Russian Orthodox Church.
These are enemies who can't be deterred with the standard mix of carrots and sticks.
All the talk from both the Biden administration and commentators on the right about the need to restore "deterrence" against Iran needs to understood in this light. It might slow down Iran a bit, but, as Henninger points out, the revolutionary expansionism is part of the nature of the Iranian regime. Historian Bernard Lewis's formulation of this was that for people like this, the Cold War concept of "mutual assured destruction" was not a deterrent, but "an inducement."