Kissinger’s 1957 analysis of how the status quo powers respond to revolutionary powers seems sadly applicable to the situation with Iran today: “All their instincts will cause them to seek to integrate the revolutionary power into the legitimate framework with which they are familiar and which to them seems ‘natural.’” They see negotiations as the preferred way to manage emerging differences. The problem is that for a revolutionary power, a negotiation is not “in itself a symptom of reduced tension,” as the status quo powers would have us believe, but merely a tactic to gain time. Whereas for normal nations, a treaty has legal and moral weight, for the revolutionary power, treaty talks are merely a concessionary phase in the continuing struggle. Think of how North Korea has skillfully—and repeatedly—used the promise of giving up its nuclear capability as a negotiating tool to secure other benefits, from fuel oil to relief from sanctions.

“Iran,” Kissinger told me, “merely by pursuing nuclear weapons, has given itself a role in the region out of proportion to its actual power, and it gains further by the psychological impact of its being able to successfully defy the United Nations Security Council.” Nevertheless, he went on, he does not consider Iran a threat of the “same order of magnitude” as the 1950s’ Soviet Union, even as it “ideologically and militarily challenges the Middle East order.”

When I asked Kissinger whether a nuclear Iran would be containable, he suggested that he would want to take tough measures to prevent a nuclear Iran in the first place. He did tell me that the United States had “different deterrence equations” to consider: Iran versus Israel, Iran versus the Sunni Arabs, Iran versus its own dissidents, and Islam versus the West. All of these dynamics, he explained, would interact in the event of an Iran that goes nuclear, and lead to “even more-frequent crises” than we currently have in the Middle East.

But in spite of Iran’s refusal thus far to avail itself of “the genuine opportunity to transform itself from a cause to a nation,” Kissinger told me, the country’s true strategic interests should “run parallel with our own.” For example, Iran should want to limit Russia’s influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia, it should want to limit the Taliban’s influence in neighboring Afghanistan, it should accept stability in Iraq, and it should want to serve as a peaceful balancing power in the Sunni Arab world.

Indeed, I would argue that because Sunni Arabs from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, and Egypt perpetrated the attacks of September 11, 2001, and because Sunni hostility to American and Israeli interests remains a conspicuous problem, the United States should theoretically welcome a strengthened Shiite role in the Middle East, were Iran to go through an even partial political transformation. And demographic, cultural, and other indicators all point to a positive ideological and philosophical shift in Iran in the medium to long term. Given this prognosis, and the high cost and poor chances for success of any military effort to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, I believe that containment of a nuclear Iran is the most sensible policy for the United States.