Graham Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard Kennedy School, said in an interview with Bloomberg that China is rivaling the U.S. in virtually every domain. Because of the dynamic between these two powers, Allison warned that the future will be "extremely dangerous."

Never before has a nation risen so fast on so many dimensions. 

As the policy community prepares to assess an agreement between the U.S. and its P5+1 partners and Iran, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker asked me to review the history of analogous agreements for lessons that illuminate the current challenge. In response to his assignment, I reviewed the seven decades of the nuclear era, during which the U.S. negotiated arms-control treaties, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968; strategic arms limitation talks and agreements from SALT to New Start; the North Korean accord of 1994; the agreements that helped eliminate nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus in the early 1990s; and the pact that eliminated the Libyan nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Among many lessons and clues from this instructive history, five stand out