The incredibly stupid game we have been playing with Iran

In PJ Media, Charlie Martin writes in part,

When you reward a behavior, you get more of it. And we have: since the Obama deal, Iran has increased its military budget using the money the Obama deal supplied; support for terrorism has actually increased.

Of course, this is what we'd expect: we keep rewarding the Iranian government, they keep doing what gets them rewarded.

A lot of the responses, so far, have been sanctions. Sanctions sound like a great idea: sanction a country and its people suffer, and they pressure the government to mend its ways.

Unfortunately, that doesn't help much with an authoritarian theocracy that is willing to gun down 1500 protestors. "Hey, you can make our people suffer, but we kill them! Top that!"

As Skinner found out, negative reinforcement is not as effective as positive reinforcement. To work at all negative reinforcement has to be negative — it has to hurt, or at least be unpleasant.

Trump appears to understand this simple truth, easily explained to a sixth-grader: don't keep rewarding what you don't want. Soleimani proves it. Making it our policy to hurt Iran instead of rewarding them for bad behavior is, at least, a worthwhile change.

Read more here.