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 former chief of staff, had been snookered by them.
Reagan's list of loonies included Iran, Libya, North Korea, Cuba and Nicaragua. In fact, this is a list of small states that have tormented the U.S., delivering pinpricks that America has found impossible either to tolerate or prevent. Admitting this, however, is difficult. Easier to dismiss it all as the work of crazy states. Reagan was certainly right that these countries are "united by their fanatical hatred of the United States." But that in itself is not proof of derangement. Hatred is a common, often useful, phenomenon in international relations. And fanaticism is a measure of passion, not irrationality.
But assume, for the sake of argument, that there are regimes -- Hitler's, Amin's, Khomeini's -- whose ends are irrational. It is a mistake to think that because a state has lunatic ends, it must be clumsy, erratic or incompetent in carrying them out.
The fanatic can be both wise and wily. Indeed, the fanatic has a distinct advantage in choosing means. So utterly convinced is he of the rightness of his ends that he lacks ordinary inhibiting scruples in his choice of means. He need consider only their instrumental value, not their moral valence. Not for him messy moral conflicts when matching means and ends. Everything matches.
Zealotry, in fact, produces a kind of hyperrationality of technique. The trains carrying innocents to the Holocaust ran remorselessly on time. That is fanaticism's special gift, its special horror: its ability to routinize, to rationalize, to bureaucratize murderous irrationality.
The coexistence of irrational ends and rational means is an enduring source of astonishment. It should not be. Once you decide to murder every Jew in Europe, Auschwitz follows logically. Once you have decided that the city is parasitic on the countryside (Khieu Samphan, leader of the Khmer Rouge, decided that at the Sorbonne and made it a tenet of his doctoral thesis), then the forced emptying of Cambodian cities at the cost of millions of lives follows logically. After all, the extirpation of parasites is a public service. Once you have decided, as did Ayatullah Khomeini, to redeem the Islamic world from idolatry, and once you believe, as he does, that martyrdom is the quickest way to the joys of paradise, then sending 14-year-old boys into the teeth of machine guns is by no means irrational.
This is not to say states cannot act crazily. It is to say we should not expect bizarre behavior from states just because we find their ends incomprehensible. In American dealings with Iran, for example, it is the U.S. that has behaved erratically, even laughably. After all, who sent whom the cake?