The comedy of errors that is nuclear proliferation 21st-century-style

As the Economist points out, it is pretty funny how American intelligence is so finnicky and clearly uncertain, even as various ideologues use it for all-too-certain-and-deadly purposes.

But the headline on this article is kind of funny given the failures of the least 4 years.

Pressure works ("high confidence")

Here's my question for the Economist editors:

Given the uncertainty of all intelligence claims, including what I believe to be a dubious claim that pressure rather than a whole host of alternate causalities is responsible for it's claim that Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons (though it is clearly still trying to develop weapons-grade uranium and its ambitions and rhetoric were very likely accelerated, not halted, I believe, by American-led efforts to pressure them to give up their pursuit of the bomb; if you can't tell, I'm a little skeptical of the NIE findings, even as I welcome their efforts to turn down the heat)...

How many years would the advocates of pressure as the vehicle for denuclearization give the current strategy before they would be willing to give it up?

Meaning, if pressure failed for 10 years rather than 4 years, would you be willing to give it up?

If it failed for 15 years, would that be enough time? How about for 20 years? Or 50? Or 100?

It's important. Because it took 70 years for the Soviet Union to give up force as a governing philosophy before it gave it up. And much destruction was wreaked along the way.

No matter how many times the Washington Post, the Economist editors, Thomas Friedman, Joe Nye, Francis Fukuyama, or any other combination of folks who perpetually end up having to face yet another reality that challenges what I believe to be underdeveloped ideas about hard and soft power and a good cop/bad cop philosophy of doing business in international politics, they have this habit of adapting the evidence to fit their assumptions rather than questioning their assumptions to fit the evidence.

The latter is the basis for reason and more empirical assessments of evidence and policy questions. The former is an accomodation of reality rather than an embrace of empirical evidence as the basis for forming conclusions.

It also happens to be a rationalization of illiberalism and abuses of power and an example that the illiberal world has been following all-too-closely up to this point.

And the irony of this godforesaken rationalization is:

If it turns out that I am right, which I'm pretty sure I am, and that the democratic community who has been feeding this aggressive policy trend are wrong, will there be someone, anyone, who might step up and take responsibility for the mistake? In this era of responsibility, will anyone be willing to step up and take responsibility on this one? So far, responsibility has not been terrible forthcoming, certainly not enough to reassure me that the current strategy is the best means of eliciting greater responsibility.

And the larger problem is that we prolong and make more serious the already very serious problems of nuclear proliferation and a whole host of policy problems we face as long as we rationalize what I believe to be an aggressive abuse of democracy and power. There are better ways to deal with Iran, Iraq, Israeli/Palestinian peace, and a whole host of serious issues that we face that are more effective and consistent with our liberal values. But to get there, at some point, we would actually need to take those values seriously.

Perhaps this is our moment.