The past several centuries are replete with diplomatic mistakes, but what makes learning from those mistakes so hard is that they don’t all teach the same lesson. Just as investors sometimes go bankrupt because they assume too much risk and sometimes go bankrupt because they assume too little risk, governments sometimes incur danger by underestimating the zealotry of their foes and sometimes incur danger by overestimating it. Contrary to Brooks’s implication, hundreds of years of “Western” foreign policy cannot be boiled down to: Always assume that your foes are ideological fanatics willing to risk everything to dominate the world.

The frailty of Brooks’s historical argument becomes clear when he cites examples of the West’s refusal to take its enemies’ ideology seriously. “Western diplomats,” he claims, “assumed that the world leaders before 1914 would not be stupid enough to allow nationalist passion to plunge them into a World War.” But depending on how you define “Western,” at least two of the five major combatants in World War I were “Western” themselves. Which means, according to Brooks, that British and French diplomats underestimated the danger of “nationalist passion” not only among their foes, but in their own countries as well.

By backhandedly acknowledging that passion drove the “West” in World War I too (that certainly includes the wartime United States, which under Woodrow Wilson became fanatically repressive and xenophobic), Brooks undermines his own argument. The point of his column is that Americans should not project their own pragmatism onto a fervently ideological regime like Iran’s. But Americans can be fervently ideological too, even if democracy is a preferable ideology to theocratic Islam. Just read George W. Bush’s second inaugural address or listen to Bill O’Reilly’s recent declaration that the United States is fighting a “holy war” against radical Islam or watch Sheldon Adelson tell a cheering crowd that the U.S. should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran. In warning Americans not to assume that Iran’s leaders “put G.D.P. over ideology and religion,” Brooks forgets that America doesn’t always put GDP first either.

To varying degrees, ideology motivates all regimes. But Brooks’s argument is that Iran is an extreme, “apocalyptically motivated” outlier. It’s so fanatical that it cannot be relied on to adhere to any diplomatic agreement. And if it gets a nuclear weapon, it may well use it, even though such a move would likely lead to the death of Iran’s leaders and the destruction of their country.

These are big claims. Brooks is arguing that Ayatollah Khamenei is far more ideologically fanatical than Stalin and Mao, since neither of those mass murderers used nuclear weapons. To be convincing, such a claim requires more than vague references to the West’s historic tendency to underestimate the ideological devotion of its foes. It requires some evidence that in the 36 years since the Islamic Revolution, Iranian foreign policy has proved reckless to the point of being suicidal.