Today on the homepage, we publish Part II of my “Baltic Journal.” Here on the Corner, I’d like to make a point about Iran — a well-worn point, but a point nonetheless.

The Baltic countries are vulnerable to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which never stops harassing them with military exercises, propaganda, etc. I quote Janos Kazocins, a veteran Latvian security official: Putin “tries to be unpredictable — it’s a KGB thing. But he is entirely rational, if you consider that his aim is to stay in power, or to die in bed, unlike Ceausescu or Qaddafi.”

And because Putin is rational, he can be deterred. In the Baltics, as elsewhere in the world, deterrence is the name of the game. If anyone has learned the lesson of appeasement, taught so starkly by the 20th century, it’s the Balts.

Okay, Iran: Can the mullahs and their political partners be deterred? Professor Bernard Lewis says that, to them, massive retaliation, resulting in mass death, is “not a deterrent but an inducement.” Senator Lindsey Graham describes Iran’s rulers as “religious Nazis.”

That is a problem. As North Korea is a problem. Vladimir Putin kills his political opponents, invades sovereign countries, and does whatever else he can get away with — but, as Kazocins points out, he would like to die in bed.

Russia is a hard and miserable problem, but Iran is a very hard and miserable problem, and so are the Norks.

Rarely has the Free World needed wiser, cooler leadership than it does now.