Everybody has their favorite “rules to live by.” Most are instilled in us by our parents or authority figures we come to admire. My experience falls squarely within this paradigm. For example, my parents taught me to never indulge bullies. This species of reprobate is by nature insatiable: It will always return to collect more of your goodies where there is no penalty for doing so. Similarly, my admiration for Winston Churchill has been focused on his unwavering determination to never give in to bully-bad guys—even where such belligerence was inconvenient (or worse) for his career ambitions.

These life lessons are especially relevant in geo-politics circa 2016. Just take a look at Mr. Obama’s foreign policy initiatives – that collection of high sounding, feckless policy ploys that has led to a far more dangerous world than many of us could have imagined eight years ago. And nowhere is the failure to follow the “do not indulge bullies” moral more obvious than the infamous Iranian nuclear deal.