Here's another example: Imagine that the Democratic-controlled Congress of the early 1970s, under House Speaker Carl Albert and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, had invited Taiwan's Chiang Kai-shek to give an address denouncing the Nixon administration's opening to mainland China.

Obviously that didn't happen, and as best I can tell nothing quite like Netanyahu's planned address ever has before.

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2. Was the administration's miffed reaction a surprise? In a news-making interview with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, Ambassador Ron Dermer contended that he and his prime minister had no idea that the speech would be seen as disrespectful to a sitting U.S. president.

To which anyone who knows about American politics should say: Oh, please. For reasons based on point No. 1, above.

Netanyahu is practically an American, after his years at Cheltenham High School, MIT, and the Boston Consulting Group, plus his countless visits and dealings with politicians here. Dermer was actually born and raised American and worked on congressional tactics with Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz. These people certainly know the lay of the land in Washington and elsewhere. In saying that they are shocked, just shocked, to have an insulting gesture toward a sitting president taken as an insult, they are asking us to believe either that they are unbelievably naive, or that they are simply unbelievable. Take your pick.

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3. On the merits of things, what year should we be thinking of? Is 2015 more like 1938? Or like 1971? The heart of the disagreement over Iran turns on what Prime Minister Netanyahu himself (and others, for instance, here, here, and here) have described as the belief that we're living through 1938 again. Nine years ago, in a speech in Los Angeles, Netanyahu laid out his views about Iran in just those terms. As an account in Haaretz put it:

"It's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs," Netanyahu told delegates to the annual United Jewish Communities General Assembly, repeating the line several times, like a chorus, during his address. "Believe him and stop him," the [then] opposition leader said of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "This is what we must do. Everything else pales before this." While the Iranian president "denies the Holocaust," Netanyahu said, "he is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state."

In case the implications aren't obvious, let's spell them out. If it's 1938 again, then the threatening power of this moment is equivalent to Nazi Germany; the ambition of that power should be understood as the full extermination of its foes, starting with the Jewish people; there can be no compromise with flat-out evil; the only failure lies in being too slow to recognize the threat; and anyone who dreams of compromise risks being seen by history as similar to the man who shook hands with Adolf Hitler in 1938, Neville Chamberlain.