One day in June, the administration decided that it would strike a deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran regarding sophisticated weaponry. The president put a trusted aide in charge of the negotiations and, one day in June, that aide corresponded with the Secretary of State:

"[This] makes it clear that instability in Iran is accelerating, with potentially momentous consequences for U.S. strategic interests. It seems sensible to ask whether our current policy toward Iran is adequate to achieve our interest."

Ultimately, the administration decided on its own to sell Iran some missiles, and that, as far as we know, was the last time that the United States concluded an arms agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Until today. This time, in concert with our allies, we struck an agreement aimed at disarming Iran. Things are certainly looking up!

Mr. Obama emphasized that the accord was preferable to the alternate of having no agreement and of an unbridled Iran touching off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. "Put simply, no deal means a greater chance of more war in the Middle East," he said. He added that his successors in the White House "will be in a far stronger position" to restrain Iran for decades to come than they would be without the pact.

This is the biggest gamble yet for an administration that appears to be reacting to its lame-duck status by ignoring it entirely. An administration that, as we have pointed out previously, has upturned its big bag of fks and discovered that it has no more there to give. The Republicans -- especially those running for president -- are going to go indiscriminately up the wall, and Benjamin Netanyahu nearly beat New Horizons to Pluto after having given it a nine-year head start. And he wasn't the loudest hysteric in the room

Most apocalyptic was the education minister, Naftali Bennett, leader of the far right Bayit Yehudi, who warned: "The history books have been rewritten again today, and this period will be deemed particularly grave and dangerous." He said: "Western citizens who get up for another day at work or school are not aware of the fact that about half a trillion dollars has been transferred to the hands of a terrorist superpower, the most dangerous country in the world, who has promised the destruction of nations and peoples. "Today it may be us, tomorrow it may reach every country in the form of suitcase bombs in London or New York. Israel has done everything possible to warn of danger and in the end it will follow its own interests and will do whatever it takes to defend itself."

(Strumming the same tune on this side of the world is Senator Huckleberry J. Butchmeup, who has hit the fainting couch with the impact of an anvil dropped from an airplane: "You've ensured that the Arabs will go nuclear. You've put Israel in the worst possible box. This will be a death over time sentence to Israel if they don't push back...You put our nation at risk." And the alternative is another war, somewhere down the line. You first, senator.)

Central to the knee-jerk dismissal of any agreement with Iran regarding nuclear weapons is the belief that the Iranian regime is fundamentally suicidal, that its leaders actually would commit themselves to a course of action that would result in the complete annihilation of their country. In 2012, at a campaign event, Rick Santorum said this flat-out, that the Iranians would launch a nuclear exchange, which they surely would lose, because they don't fear such cataclysm based on their belief that it would bring about the arrival of the 12th Imam. Santorum -- and have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick Rick Santorum is? -- was not laughed off the stage. This is exactly the same kind of nonsense we heard during the Cold War when the nuns assured us that the Russians didn't fear nuclear war because they were atheists anyway.

In fact, I'm old enough to remember all the fights we had in this country over arms-control deals with the USSR. (You may recall that it is a controversial arms-control treaty that kicks off the plot -- in every sense of the word -- of Seven Days In May.) These continued right up until Ronald Reagan went to Reykjavik and nearly gave away the store to Mikhail Gorbachev. The two of them struck up a relationship over the issue of nuclear weapons and some of Reagan's staunchest supporters went absolutely up the wall.

But that was nothing compared with the howls of outrage that accompanied Reagan's dovish turn toward the Soviet Union. In 1986, when Reagan would not cancel his second summit with Gorbachev over Moscow's imprisonment of an American journalist, Podhoretz accused him of having "shamed himself and the country" in his "craven eagerness" to give away the nuclear store. Washington Post columnist George Will said the administration had crumpled "like a punctured balloon." When Reagan signed the INF Treaty, most Republicans vying to succeed him came out in opposition. Grassroots conservative leaders established the Anti-Appeasement Alliance to oppose ratification and ran newspaper advertisements comparing Gorbachev to Hitler and Reagan to Neville Chamberlain. Reagan, wailed Will, is "elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy."

(By the way, I am now proposing a constitutional amendment banning any use of the Hitler/Chamberlain/Munich analogy in our politics for the next 50 years. Who's with me? Not this cluck, obviously.)

Ever since the end of World War II, and the rise of what Garry Wills calls the "Bomb Power" in our politics, any arms-control treaty faced the same opposition on the same grounds from most of the same people. (If you compare Reagan to Chamberlain, you truly have wandered far from the rest of the pack.) Our groaning and bloated arsenal has become such an essential part of our national identity that a) we can't imagine defining America without it, and b) we can't imagine that any other country doesn't feel the same way. The idea that our 4800-odd nuclear weapons -- and god alone knows how many chemical and biological weapons we may have -- might scare our enemies somehow is construed as weakness because our enemies are always all-powerful and always one small step away from destroying us and taking over the world because an Exceptional Nation requires Exceptional Enemies, and because our arsenal exists largely to protect our lamb-like innocence in a world of wolves.

I spent most of my childhood -- including 13 harrowing days in October of 1962 -- hiding under my desk because the godless Communist Russians could strike at any time. At that time, the Soviet Union really was a vastly powerful military rival, albeit one with an economic system that proved unsustainable in the long run, which is why Reagan and Gorbachev ultimately became such pals. Iran makes intolerable mischief in its own part of the world. It is ruled (at the moment) by a claque of fundamentalist clerics of whom the world would be well-rid. But, after 14 years of United States meddling in that region that has come to violence and destruction, maybe it's time for a little potential peacemaking, regardless of what the American right thinks of it. Back in April, one of its principal foreign policy stars wrote this:

Iran is already, right now, while under sanctions that are badly hurting its economy, spending vast amounts of money and effort to "mess with Israel." This administration's reaction has been to seek a nuclear deal that will give Iran more economic resources to dedicate to its hatred and violence against Israel, but will in no way whatsoever limit Iran's conventional weapons and its support for terrorism.

The author is Elliott Abrams who, when he was in the Reagan Administration, was so committed to the project of selling the Iranians missiles that he found it necessary to lie to Congress about it. Me? As long as we're not arming them, or sending bureaucrats to Teheran with a Bible and a cake shaped like a key, I think things are looking up.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io