…And Mark Steyn is not Win­ston Churchill,” writes Tim Reuter in Forbes.

—a rather thought­ful piece, though a bit harsh on Mr. Steyn, who offered exact­ly the right take on Neville Cham­ber­lain. He was “an hon­or­able man who believed he was act­ing in the inter­est of his coun­try.” That was also how Churchill eulo­gized him after Chamberlain’s death in 1940.

It is reas­sur­ing to know that Iran is (thank good­ness) not Nazi Ger­many; and that the Iran nuclear deal and Munich are not anal­o­gous. But some of Mr. Reuter’s sen­tences rest uneasi­ly next to each other.

Points worth pondering

If Iran “does not pos­sess the eco­nom­ic strength to sus­tain a war with any first-rate mil­i­tary pow­er,” that’s also com­fort­ing. Pro­vid­ed there is any real pos­si­bil­i­ty that the first-rate mil­i­tary pow­er would ever decide things had become so bad that it was nec­es­sary to go to war with Iran.

“Iran’s mil­i­tary is weak­er than its economy….unable to turn the tide of the Syr­i­an civ­il war” stands odd­ly along­side: “Iran does not need a strong navy or air force to project pow­er when it has a land bridge to the Mediter­ranean Sea via Iraq, Syr­ia, and Lebanon.”

It may like­wise be true that “No gov­ern­ment yet has inten­tion­al­ly com­mit­ted sui­cide” (in this case by lob­bing a nuclear bomb, and hav­ing one lobbed back).

But speak­ing of pro­ject­ing pow­er, what of the pos­si­bil­i­ty that area nations, with­out the use of any bomb, would rush to accom­mo­date the goals of a nuclear Iran—like the nations of east­ern Europe, from Slo­va­kia to Sovi­et Rus­sia, has­tened to accom­mo­date Hitler after Munich? And what exact­ly will those goals comprise?

This may be the one point of com­par­i­son one between two very dis­sim­i­lar sce­nar­ios and tyrannies.

Churchill implored: “Study his­to­ry, study his­to­ry. In his­to­ry lie all the secrets of state­craft.” His­to­ry does not repeat. Human nature remains unchanged.