The best book about conflict ever written, Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War , accounts for this 30-year cataclysm, where Athens and Sparta slugged it out all over the eastern Mediterranean, by one overwhelming factor: the rise in the power of Athens.

There had, hitherto, been no civilisation so brilliant, and for that matter there has been none since. We still look at the statuary as the finest ever, we read the plays with delight and use them as metaphors (the Oedipal complex, for example), and arguably, philosophy has been a series of footnotes to those 5 th century BC savants ever since.

It all came to a crashing end with a crushing Spartan defeat of the Athenian Fleet in 399 BC. Because Sparta and Athens had fought together against the Persians, Sparta only demanded the demilitarisation of its enemy and the world moved on.

20 years ago, analysts in the United States began fighting over how to counter the rising power of China. Of course, there was the school that saw military containment as the solution: it was working successfully against the Soviet Union, so why not apply it to China?

But the smarter analysts saw the key difference. Soviet power suffered an immense imbalance between the military and economic underpinnings, spending 25 percent of a gross national product a fourth the size of America's just could not be sustained.

China, in contrast, had put the horse before the cart and reorganised its economy from the ground up and has soared ever since. Its military build-up was just frosting on the cake. Sure, America could have tried to penalise the Middle Kingdom through economic sanctions against the growing military might. King Canute also could try to make the waves stop, about equally effectively.

So, America made one of its few smart decisions of recent years, made a virtue of necessity, and began dealing with China at every level. Not a democracy? Well, you don't push a great power around the way you can (and should) a rotten and squalid regime like Mugabe's in Zimbabwe.

You hope that rapid economic growth will empower citizens to demand more say. It's working, too. It wasn't ‘containment,' it was reality. The point was that China's growing military power rode on top of a dramatic shift in the world's economic correlation of forces. Those only change slowly.

So now there has been a shift in the correlation of forces in the Middle East. Iranian missiles, shown by recent and dramatic tests, can reach not only Israel but all American regional military installations.

There are of course choices. Bomb the hell out of Iran before it becomes even more powerful. Sure, stuff the genie back into the teapot, order the waves to stop. And wait for Teheran to move even more coherently to rebuild - and threaten, with an often-hostile population fervently united before the theocratic regime. How do you teach a power to unlearn capabilities long striven for?

Recognise Teheran's might

The other choice is to deal with the new realities, the way Western powers have with China, not to mention nuclear-armed India. This doesn't mean pretending Iran is no longer a threat. Of course it is to its Sunni neighbours and to Israel.

But there is no evidence that Teheran wants to invade its neighbours. It had one smack of a lesson about that during the protracted war with Iraq in the 1980s, which cost the two powers upwards of a trillion dollars, not to mention some of its best and brightest young men.

Surely part of what Iran seeks is recognition of its new status. When there is an underlying shift in the correlation of forces anywhere, it behoves every capital to pay it the respect due. That doesn't mean appease, capitulate or grovel.

But it surely means doing everything possible to bring the effects of globalisation to Iran, something far more threatening to the theocracy, even than Israel military might. Treat Iran as the regional power it is, even though it's a status without much meaning, with nuclear India and Pakistan to its east and American military power to its West.

So Teheran makes silly statements about Israel. It's made adequately clear that it knows it cannot win that war. It's good public relations on the Middle East street to be the most vocally antagonistic against the Jewish state, especially since Israel is quite a long way away with powers in between that both Jerusalem and Teheran abhor.

These days, the way you get help from the enemy is to harness the natural forces against it on its own turf - look how Vietnam won its war against America on the US campuses. A Nobel peace prize to an Iranian woman did more to drag the regime kicking and screaming into the modern world than all the missiles arrayed against it. This process takes time.

States rise and fall. Right now, Iran is rising, thanks to the price of oil and determination of its leadership. What it lacks is the industrial know-how to harness all that new wealth, and it can get that only from the West.

Will giving it to them just make Iran more dangerous? You mean tying it into an increasingly globalised world makes it more dangerous? Kindly note that since China's vast rise, it has stopped bullying its neighbours about islands in the South China Sea. It was happy to receive ‘tribute' in everyone's recognition that the Son of Heaven had a place at High Table. Which it merited.

There doesn't have to be a repeat of the Peloponnesian war in the Persian Gulf. Everyone would be the loser. The regime in Teheran couldn't be more silly in its beliefs and pronouncements, especially those about Israel. Let TV and radio waves reign, let trade flow, educate its young people all over the world and treat the country - not the regime - with the status it is due as a local powerhouse, and watch its dire threats trickle into the sand.

W SCOTT THOMPSON is a national security expert who served four American Presidents and is a professor emeritus at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is the author or editor of 13 books on world political issues and resides in Washington, Bali and Manila.