Fareed Zakaria has an interesting — though silly — column up mocking Sarah Palin’s suggestion that Obama get tough on Iran. It’s interesting because Zakaria’s grand solution to the deeply complex Iran problem is to simply lock them into a deterrence paradigm with the U.S. and Israel –more colloquially, his solution is to do nothing.

Deterrence could work, in a sense. But even during the Cold War, where mutually assured destruction reigned supreme, deterrence simply redirected warfare down other, smaller avenues like Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, Africa, Grenada, et al. In that sense, ownership of atomic weapons would free Tehran’s terrorist proxies to unleash unrestricted warfare on Israel and regional U.S. forces. Israel’s limited defensive options in such a scenario would be to assault, hold, and occupy territory in frontline border states (similar to Lebanon from 1982-2000). Therein lies the real danger in an atomic Iran: Introduce nuclear weapons into one of the most volatile regions on earth and violence becomes an inevitability.