Nothing is more difficult for the reasonable, settled, status quo state than to contemplate fanaticism. Those whose politics is determined by consensus and compromise become hopelessly unsettled in the face of single-minded zeal. The tendency is then to mistake it for irrationality. Ronald Reagan once famously referred to a group of regimes that defy the rules of international conduct as the "strangest collection of misfits, Looney Tunes and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich." Less than two years later it was discovered that Reagan not only had dealt with these Looney Tunes but, in the words of his...
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