Why Containment can't work in the future the way it worked in the Cold War

Many today suggest that Iraq and North Korea can be contained the way the Soviets were. These people are not physicists. Attempt this simple problem. Imagine a world in which there are two centers of gravity and determine the results. A strait forward Newtonian problem. These centers of gravity, (aka masses) will attract one another with a force equal to the sum of their masses divided by the square of the distance. Easy enough to predict. And where we can predict, we can fashion a managable policy. Now introduce a third object. This is the three-body problem. It took over a century of familiarity with Newton's Theory of Gravity to work out the math for a three body problem. Prediction is much, much harder. Nixon, being a very smart man, was able to do the calculus and go to China. Today proliferation is rampant. The number of countries who have nuclear weapons and act independently has grown considerably. The calculus gets harder and harder to make. It was challenging enough to face off against the Soviet Union when there were just two power blocs. States like Iraq and North Korea are wild cards. Containment would force us into keeping them on the page of every action we took. Just like our whole foriegn policy took the Soviets into account, in many ways perverting our foreign policy (imagine Vietnam without the context of opposing Communism), our foriegn policy would be contorted by the need to maintain containment. We might very well find ourselves in bed with terrible dictators for the sole reason that they are on our side in the question of Iraq or North Korea. We already find ourselves in that sandbox with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, but those are temporary situations. Fixing the problems of Iraq and North Korea permenantly will allow us to pursue the policy we want to pursue, rather than containing ourselves in order to contain the nuclear rogue states.