Glenn Greenwald reacts in this Salon piece to an op-ed in The Washington Post by a Democrat and a Republican urging the next president to immediately prepare for war with Iran. Here is a quote that I find interesting:

It's just objectively true that there is no country in the world — anywhere — that threatens to attack and bomb other countries as routinely and blithely as the U.S. does.  What rational leader wouldn't want to obtain nuclear weapons in a world where the “superpower” is run by people like Dan Coats and Chuck Robb who threaten to attack and bomb whatever countries they want?  Even the Coats/Robb Op-Ed argues that Iranian proliferation would be so threatening to the U.S. because “the ability to quickly assemble a nuclear weapon would effectively give Iran a nuclear deterrent” — in other words, they’d have the ability to deter a U.S. attack on their country, and we can't have that.

My question then is: Is the U.S. creating the world it is reacting against, a world in which nuclear proliferation and anti-Americanism are the primary choices left to rising regional powers? Are we creating the threats, or are we prudently anticipating and reacting to threats that would exist regardless of the path the U.S. takes?