As Trump barrels toward war with Iran, it’s worth putting ourselves in the Iranians’ shoes and imagining the roles were reversed.

Suppose for a second that Iran had the largest, most powerful military in the world, that its military budget was roughly thirty-seven times the size of the United States’. Imagine that by virtually every metric, from the number of military personnel to air and naval power, the US was vastly outstripped by Iran.

Imagine that Iran was closely allied with several equally hostile countries in North America, whose military budgets also dwarfed that of the US. Imagine the US had no nuclear weapons as a deterrent; in fact, imagine that it was Iran who had the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, and was the only country in history to have used them on civilian targets. And imagine that one of its American allies, say, Venezuela, was secretly stockpiling anywhere between eighty and three hundred nukes.