Democratic Militarism

One of the best known theories of Political Science is the "Democratic Peace Theory" which notes that democracies rarely go to war with one another.  The most prominent explanation for this historical trend is that voting brings accountability preventing leaders from unnecessarily engaging in war.  However, Daniel Larison emphatically skewers the notion that Democracies aren't particularly warlike:

States that do not respect international legal norms vis-a-vis other states tend not to abuse human rights at home (or at least they abuse them much less often), while states that abuse human rights at home want to maintain certain strong international legal norms if only to guarantee non-interference in their internal affairs. Internal and external policies are never entirely separable, because the same government is responsible for both, but looking at the last sixty-five years it is not at all clear that repressive and abusive states are more likely to disrupt or undermine international stability.

In other words, China does lots of nasty things to its own citizens, but the U.S. is a hell of a lot more likely to go invade another country and do nasty things to those citizens.  This tendency has become more pronounced in the United Nations era when international conflicts have become far rarer. The fact that two thirds of the Security Council consists of democracies, including by far the most powerful country in the world, has led to a situation where it is exceedingly difficult and costly to participate in international conflict without American sanction- which entails British participation.  Democracies, thus have become the primary instigators of military intervention by default.  Meanwhile, ending mandatory military service and using deficits rather than higher taxes to fund wars effectively anesthetized the vast majority of the voting public to pain of war.  Iraq was a moral issue for voters, rather than a personal one, and the "rally around the flag" voters actually contributed to President Bush's reelection.

China's strategy over the past three decades, on the other hand, has been to economically participate with everyone, irrespective of political considerations.  China's investment in Sudanese oil fields made coordinated international intervention impossible.  Russia's invasion of Georgia is a notable counter-example of military action from non-democracies, but that was a minor conflict and it was provoked by Georgia's disasterous invasion of South Ossetia and Azbakia.  Most of Russia's international malfeasance over the past decade has been in pursuit of aggressive energy policy, and it was pursued far more delicately than our energy moves.  

As a result of China and Russia's economic strategy and the rather abject failures of the last two Western military adventures, they a have moved into a position of strength for the next conflict.  Washington came hat in hand to Russia and China to beg for sanctions on Iran to supplement the American sanctions in place for three decades to no result.  Perhaps if we had begun to open up with Iran when there wasn't anything at stake then we would have something of our own to bargain with, or if we hadn't invaded Iraq then Iran wouldn't feel the need to pursue nukes in the first place.

Larrison views the Iran sanction strategy skeptically:

The less integrated in the global economy a state is, the easier it is for that state to resist and ignore outside influence, and the more sanctions Western nations impose on a state the greater the incentive for other major and rising powers to fill the void left behind by departing Western investment and businesses. Every time Washington imposes economic and financial sanctions on this or that authoritarian state, it is actively denying the United States added influence and leverage in the future. Many Iran hawks seem to believe that it is Iran we will be isolating and weakening by imposing increasingly stringent sanctions on Iran, but ultimately it is U.S. influence that will be weakened and all of the other major and rising powers in the world that will gain. 

I second the basic premise, that in the long run treating some countries as enemies drives them towards our rivals, while incorporating them into the global community eventually draws them into our much gravitational pull.  However, in this specific case the push for sanctions has to be understood as a compromise away from the full invasion of Iran by the U.S. or Israel.  That sanctions won't work seems like a reasonable enough criticism, but the negotiations around the sanctions serve as a valuable delaying tactic preventing the human tragedy of Iranian invasion.  This is the messy nature of democracies, we have to compromise towards better policy instead of enacting the best policy.  Hopefully, we also learn from our mistakes.