"During the run up to World War II, Europe failed to heed the warnings" coming from Germany and from Western leaders such as Winston Churchill, Kyl told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute on Thursday.

Hitler was explicit about his intentions. So are Iran's current leaders.

As Churchill wrote later, recalling Europe's failures to stop the explicit Nazi threat in the 1930s, "there never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action."

Alternately, the United States could chose to follow Ronald Reagan's example in the 1980s, when he confronted the Soviet Union and brought the Cold War to an end.

"Natan Sharansky knew we would win when he read Ronald Reagan's characterization of the USSR as the evil empire," Kyl said, referring to the then-emprisoned Soviet refusnik, who went on to become an Israeli cabinet minister.

While no one can predict the ultimate results, Kyl believed that tough sanctions and divestment, coupled with a better targeted public diplomacy campaign aimed at supporting the pro-democracy movement inside Iran, could have dramatic effects. [....]

Ronald Reagan once observed that "history teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap."