beebe is right now in a very tough place. what he would really like is for an iranian attack. the arab world is no longer a threat to israel. but iran is the one enemy that might justify his claim to power. i do not think the iranians want to play into that. sharon: you do not think the hardliners could carry that? >> decisions with iran are not made like this. iran has a national security process. there is a supreme national security council -- >> we once did too. [laughter] >> exactly. the supreme leader, after soleimani's, it was the first funeral in 20 years he presided over. i think in this case we wanted to make sure the recommendations that come out of it would not be out of his control. but, look at all of these and the hardliners are sort of bound by that consensus that emerges. the security side in iran is fairly bureaucratized. . command-and-control driven. if a decision is made to go after israel, it is a regime decision. >> we are out of time, so i just want to see if any of you have last comments on the situation, what worries you. are you hopeful? >> it is hard

george beebe, vice president of the center for the national interest.i want to ask about an episode from past history and ask to what degree it might provide some insights into how we might be creative and even with the problem in the korean peninsula today. and that is europe in the 1960s. there we had a situation where we had a divide continent. we had two hostile military blocks facing one another. nuclear weapons, large conventional forces deployed against one another. and he had a soviet leadership at the time that wanted a couple of big things. one, it wanted recognition of soviet control over eastern europe by nato and the transatlantic community. and, two, it it wanted access to technology and trade that would provide economic benefits to the soviet union and the soviet bloc. neither of those two things were things that the west wanted to grant to the kremlin. we in turn wanted to talk about things that the soviet leadership didn't want to talk about, including human rights and democratic governance, environmental issues. and we struck what was