Every July 1, the New York Mets pay Bobby Bonilla $1.19 million. Bonilla hasn’t played a game since 2001, yet this arrangement will continue until 2035, eventually netting the former slugger nearly $30 million, far more than the Mets owed him to begin with.

What happened was this: The Mets owed Bonilla $5.9 million in 2000. Instead of paying in lump sum, the team offered to defer the payments, with interest, so it could invest the $5.9 million with Bernie Madoff.

Everyone knows what came next. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme collapsed, taking the Mets’ money with it, while the club was still on the hook for Bonilla’s deferred payments.

The closest thing modern politics has to this disaster is the annual blooming of Mideast crises whose seeds were planted by the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. That agreement is long dead—and deservedly so—but the process of negotiating it gave us a seemingly endless supply of geopolitical time bombs, the latest of which have been exploding in the Red Sea.

The Iran deal was, it turned out, no typical policy blunder. It was Pandora’s Box.

The official terms of the Iran deal itself were only part of the calculation made by the diplomats crafting the agreement. Along the way, President Obama had to compromise on unrelated issues in order to placate Iran or other countries with an interest in the talks. The most infamous example was when Obama reneged on his Syrian “red line”—that if Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his civilian population, the U.S. would respond militarily. Syria is an Iranian client state, and to avoid angering Tehran, the Obama administration stood down while Assad caused the deaths of half a million Syrians over the course of that civil war.

Yemen would descend into its own civil war during those years, the effects of which are still shaping American policy in 2024. In 2015, the Iranian proxy in Yemen, the Houthis, took the capital of Sanaa and forced the Yemeni government to flee. The country was thrown into chaos and the United Nations came down on the side of the sitting government, paving the way for the isolation of the Houthis.

The Saudis, as supporters of the Yemenite government, were particularly unnerved by the advance of the Iran-backed putschists, now a couple hundred miles from Saudi Arabia’s southern border and within striking distance of the commercial shipping traffic on the Red Sea.

The Saudis were already put in a tough spot by the Obama administration’s overall strategy of elevating Iran’s influence in the Gulf, of which the nuclear deal was a part. Fearing that the Yemen developments would push Saudi Arabia into open opposition to the Iran deal, the Obama administration had to come up with a response that would placate Riyadh without totally alienating Tehran. In the end, that meant supporting the Saudi blockade and providing logistical support to Saudi military strikes in Yemen. Once we started in this vein, we were locked in: Obama couldn’t afford to abandon the Saudis completely, but he also couldn’t risk the U.S. taking the lead in antiterrorist operations against Iran. Thus Yemen was caught between the Saudi blockade and the demonic ruthlessness of the Houthis.

The Saudi inability to dislodge the Houthis raised the pressure on the U.S. government to end its support for the blockade, and President Biden came into office promising exactly that. Indeed, Biden announced as much in March 2021, and then the administration took the Houthis off the list of foreign terrorist organizations. But reality, as it always does, intervened.

Now the Houthis have turned their fire on U.S. ships, in addition to other international commercial vessels traversing the Red Sea route. Biden’s removal of their terrorist designation only enabled their mischief, and has now been partially reversed. Nearly a decade after the U.S. began its passive participation in Yemen’s civil war, it has been forced to get directly involved by leading the coalition bombing of Houthi sites inside Yemen.

After ten days of strikes, the Biden administration has admitted that it’ll require an extended campaign to sufficiently weaken the Houthis’ ability to threaten Red Sea shipping, exacerbating the tensions within the president’s party between the hawks and the doves.

It turns out when you knowingly let a problem fester, it doesn’t solve itself. When you lead from behind, you often end up back where you started.

Every concession to Iran has been corrupting. Nearly a decade on, we find ourselves still paying for that ill-advised nuclear deal. There’s a lesson here about deferring our responsibilities in the hopes that someone will magically solve our problems for us. It didn’t work for the Mets, and it definitely won’t work for the leaders of the free world.