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You are correct, of course, my not caring is about their polities qua polities. My frustration is that there is little one could do to ensure better outcomes. Similar how life under the Taliban is obviously terrible for a lot of people, but there is preciously little the rest of the world can do to fix it. We do not have the will to permanently occupy Afghanistan, Israel and Iran permanently (or until they wisen up and become slightly less murderous in another century or so), and I don't require an EA impact analysis to notice that past occupations have been terrible on a QALY-increase per dollar spend metric (and a lot of other metrics beside that).
I would liken dealing with such countries to dealing with a chronically suicidal ex-partner. Of course you care if they suicide (or nuke each other), but you also don't want to spend the rest of your life doing crisis intervention. Bombing Iranian enrichment facilities, or having your ex committed to a psychiatric hospital for some time is a stop-gap measure which kicks the can down the road, but makes the problem worse in the long run.
Nobody has the stomach to occupy Iran or have someone long-term committed for suicidality. If someone wants to kill themself, or a regime is willing to pay the price of tens of millions of their civilians being murdered in reprisal for them murdering tens of millions of 'enemy' civilians in turn, that is hard to prevent.
Personally, I would have preferred to take my chances with a timeline in which Iran gets a nuke earlier but also does not have a history of Israel and the US bombing the shit out of them for a few decades to delay their nuclear program, and hope that both sides would be rational enough to play cold war like responsible adults.
With Trump in charge, your guess is as good as mine.
Generally speaking, I think that China is unlikely to start a war in a theater it can not win, and I do not see them winning a naval war in the ME against the US (though I am also not very well informed on relative naval capabilities).
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