Brain Lock

My daughter is having trouble with brain lock.  It's not life threatening, in fact, it's pretty common for a seven year-old.  Actually it's pretty common for people no matter how old they are.  Here's what happens:
You don't want to do something (in Caitlyn's case eat cabbage or clean her room), but unfortunately for you the thing you don't want to do is required by people in authority (in her case Michele and me, her parents).  Instead of accepting that the unpleasant duty is simply something you must perform in order to avoid negative consequences, you decide to throw a tantrum of some sort.  This tantrum precipitates negative consequences of an entirely different order, most notably that the authority is now irritated by your very existence and immediately seeks to put an end to your presence (via early bedtime).  Rational thought processes would allow you to see that the unpleasantness of the duty at hand is not nearly as unpleasant as the punishment that will surely be forthcoming from the authority that demands your obedience should you fail to render said obedience.  Your own emotional state, however, does not allow these rational processes to take place and therefore makes the more drastic negative consequences practically inevitable.  That is brain lock.
It would make me happy to say that it only afflicts children, but it afflicts adults as well, and the consequences of adults, especially at a national level, getting brain lock can be rather disastrous.
Let's take the most frightening and possibly catastrophic instance that is taking place at the moment: Iran's nuclear capability.  In this instance Iran is the child and the international nuclear non-proliferation agreement is the dictate of authority.  It has been recognized, as surely as broccoli is good for you, that it is no good for more and more nations to gain the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons.  We understand that we can't put the genie entirely back in the bottle, but we can at least make sure we don't accidentally wish for the world to become a smoking cinder.  For decades, the idea of mutually assured destruction has more or less held the nuclear powers in a state of detente.  It hasn't always been comfortable, but for the most part, it is stable.
Enter Iran, which has demonstrated a rather troubling proclivity towards irrational and violent behavior.  Most of the parents agree that it would be a good idea to keep little Iran, what with his extremist theocracy and "death to America" t-shirt, away from things that can vaporize entire cities.
But Iran appears to want what he wants, even though it is fairly clear that no one is just going to stand back and let it happen.  His parents try to reason with him and get him to see that it's just a bad idea, nukes are not   something you really want to use on anyone, no matter how much of a raging hate you have for them.  The US used them on Japan and we have felt so guilty since then that we paid to rebuild their country for them, set them up in business and then watch them get insanely rich doing the things that we used to do better than anyone (build cars and TVs and such).  Using nukes is really a bottomless pit when it comes to public relations: yeah you win the war, but everyone gets to look down their nose at you because you unleashed a horrifying destructive force on largely civilian populations.  But they will make your enemies surrender in a big hurry, even the Japanese, who officially sanctioned their soldiers committing suicide in the course of war, as long as they could take some of the enemy with them.
The parents are trying to warn Iran, "don't do it! It's not worth it! and besides if you do, we might just have to demonstrate why these things are so bad."  It's like the old punishment of making the kid smoke a whole pack of cigarettes and get sick as a dog, that ought to learn them (or perhaps speed up the process of nicotine addiction, but who can tell).  The only problem is that there is this crazy uncle, who never much cared for little Iran very much in the first place, in fact they've had a long standing animosity going back about  5000 years.  That uncle is the nation state of Israel, and they are telling Iran and the parents that if that kid even looks like they're going near the gun cabinet Uncle Bibi Netanyahu is gonna pop a cap in them so fast they won't know what hit them.
You can't really blame Israel can you, they have to live virtually next door to Khomeni and, if there's one thing Islamic maniacs hate more than America, it's Israel.
Reagan and Gorbachev started to end the Cold War by looking at pictures of each other's grandchildren.  I don't think that strategy is going to work here, because their grandchildren would probably be hatching plots to blow each other up.  It's the definition of the word intractable, especially when everybody's got the brain lock.