By Steve Hynd

In my last post, I gave my opinion that Iran 2009 will be more like the repressed damp squib of Tiananmen 1989 than the revolutionary tsunami of Tehran 1979.

So what next? Is Obama's talk of negotiating even with America's enemies dead in the water? Matthew Yglesias thinks so.

    The hope behind an engagement strategy was that the Supreme Leader might be inclined to side with the more pragmatic actors inside the system—guys like former president Rafsanjani and former prime minister Mousavi. With those people, and most of the Iranian elites of their ilk, now in open opposition to the regime, any crackdown would almost by definition entail the sidelining of the people who might be interested in a deal. Iran would essentially be in the hands of the most hardline figures, people who just don’t seem interested in improving relations with other countries.

    Under the circumstances, the whole subject of American engagement may well wind up being moot.

Yglesias explicitly endorses Robert Farley's view that

    the repression has opened greater opportunity for what might be termed a non-interventionist coercive strategy; this is to say that more and tougher sanctions against the regime are on the table now than was the case two weeks ago.

And Kevin Drum agrees.

I agree with my friend Robert Farley that more and tougher sanctions are probably going to be the kneejerk result of American foreign policy thinking after these Iran elections - but I disagree that sanctions can be described as "non-interventionist" when they invariably impact the poorest and disenfranchised, not the rich elite. Especially when US foreign policy interventionists from both left and right always see more and tougher sanctions as merely a necessary step along the path to military action.

And I definitely disagree with Yglesias's implication that more and harsher sanctions would be a good idea. Ygelsias, who originally supported the invasion of Iraq and now broadly supports Obama's benchmarkless, Bush retread of a plan for the Af/Pak theatre, is almost certainly echoing the listserve-discussed views of others he shares a generally interventionist view with at think-tanks like the Center for American Progress, Center for a New American Security and the National Security Network - all of whom have provided key national security or foreign policy staff and policy planning to the Obama administration.

In arguing against the incrementalist interventionism implicit in saying before the fact that "American engagement may well wind up being moot", I'd cite - as many already have, including Obama - the simple truth that whether a regime is repressive or not it's still better to talk than not. Indeed, over the years America has negotiated with many other nations, including both the Soviet Union and China, when they were at their most repressive, totalitarian and recalcitrant.

Moreover, I'd argue that engagement is exactly the strategy needed. In 2006, Robert Wright set out the beginnings of what has become to be known as "progressive realism" in a seminal piece for the NY Times entitled "An American Foreign Policy That Both Realists and Idealists Should Fall in Love With" in which he wrote that "It’s now possible to build a foreign policy paradigm that comes close to squaring the circle — reconciling the humanitarian aims of idealists with the powerful logic of realists." Shortly thereafter, he sent an email to Kevin Drum in which he outlined a progressive realist stance that's very applicable to Iran now. In that email Wright acknowledges that there's going to be a lot of anti-American sentiment fuelling geopolitics for decades to come, no matter how much America changes now. That's something that short-term thinkers like Thomas Jocelyn use to argue for more interventionist policies - if we’re going to get blamed for it anyway, we might as well do some stuff in support of the opposition - but Wright correctly characterises a longer term solution.

    America's security will best be served if all nations are by then free-market democracies, because ... the entanglement of such nations in the global economy strengthens their incentive to preserve world order and their inclination toward international cooperation — including, crucially, highly intrusive arms control.

    ...Making free-market democracy pervasive is only crucial to America's interest in the long run, over decades. Hence: no need to rush into, say, the Iraq war.

    ...Progressive realists (unlike neocons) believe that economic liberty strongly encourages political liberty. So (a) America should economically engage, rather than isolate, countries like Iran and North Korea, and (b) more generally, economic engagement offers a path to peacefully fostering the free-market democracy that neocons are inclined to implant via invasion.

In other words, the correct answer is less sanctions and more engagement, not the obverse. Wright ended his email to Drum:

    I reject the "premise common in Democratic policy circles lately: that the key to a winning foreign policy is to recalibrate the party’s manhood — just take boilerplate liberal foreign policy and add a testosterone patch." The problem is more subtle than that, and Democrats aren’t doing America a service when they fuel a Democratic-Republican arms race on the macho front.

Now that Democrats hold power, that macho race has become even more of a problem instead of less - perhaps a measure of the perennial fear Democratic leaders have of losing the next election because they've been painted as "weak", perhaps simply a reflection of their belief that they don't have to pander to their "peacenik" base any more. Whatever the reason, kneejerk incrementalist interventionism has always been the order of the day among the VSPs and the wannabe-VSPs are now following suit.

Obama's statement today is a careful bit of fence-sitting that could be used to justify either engagement as planned or a turn towards a more hostile policy towards Iran. I'm not optimistic that, given the pressures for hostility, we'll see a progressive realist strategy as the outcome. But we should.