President Obama believes that despite their hatred for the West, Jews and Christians, the Iranians are a rational people who will understand that their best interests are in not starting a nuclear war.
Thing is, rational is a very subjective measure to a man.
History, and even the present, is full of examples that reason and rational vary from place to place and from time to time.
In the 1980’s serial killers were considered a western phenomena by Soviet sociologists and so dozens of Soviet serial killers got away with killing thousands of children. In the 1950’s Chairman Mao ordered all Chinese to surrender their steel and iron tools to help in the Great Leap forward. Millions starved. After the first bomb obliterated Hiroshima, it took a week and another bomb on Nagasaki, to get the Japanese to give up. Most infamously the murder machines of the death camps in Nazi Germany continued to work while the Red Army was marching on Berlin.
None of those policies made any sense from a rational point of view or at least from a rational American point of view.
Each and everyone of them made some kind of sense if one was a Communist, Fascist or Nazi. People like their world views, they like their world views so much that they will pretty much do anything to keep those views, even if it means suffering to keep them.
Kind of explains why the Iranians endured 20 years of economic sanctions when it just made simple sense to stop waging war against America and the West.
And now peace has broken out or so it is being touted.
Thing is, we don’t see the Iranians becoming rational Americans in their thinking.
They are still Persians. Arab hating, Sunni loathing, Shiite Persians who believe either in the coming of the Shiite Messiah, the Mahdi, in the very near future, or in the inherent superiority of Persian culture over any other culture in the world.
For Americans to believe that we can somehow convert the Iranians to stop waging war because it makes our kind of sense is about the most irrational belief we have presented.
The Persians are sharpening their knives and building their bomb because it makes sense to them.