It's a great time to be an Iranian theocrat. American military power has removed your most dangerous foreign enemy, Saddam Hussein. American diplomatic strategy has delivered the lion's share of Iraqi political power and oil wealth to the Shiite religious parties you've financed and armed for years and which are now your grateful dependents. Russia, China and the nonaligned movement have been blocking any strong international action to slow down your rush to develop nuclear weapons technology. What's more, you've finally worn down and outmaneuvered those pesky reformist clerics who kept arguing for overtures to the Great Satan in Washington.
It's much less comfortable to be the United States, however, and find yourself on the receiving end of all these adverse trends. Halting the spread of nuclear weapons, improving America's energy security and advancing the cause of democracy in the Middle East are supposed to be three central planks of the Bush administration's foreign policy. All three goals are now endangered by the rising fortunes of Iran's hard-line ayatollahs. The urgent challenge now facing Washington is to find ways to stop enhancing Iran's power and start subjecting it to effective international constraints.
Doing so will not be quick or easy. But it should be possible. One crucial element is to salvage whatever can still be salvaged from the Iraqi constitutional debacle. Washington must keep pressing its Shiite and Kurdish allies to subordinate their federalist and separatist desires to the need to build a strong and unified Iraq capable of standing up to Iranian pressures. The administration should bluntly inform its Iraqi partners that they cannot keep ganging up against legitimate Sunni Arab concerns while expecting American forces to fight the Sunni insurgency on their behalf.
Another requirement is to reinforce the authority of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the global nuclear watchdog the Bush administration spent much of its first term disparaging and undercutting. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has already begun moving strongly in that direction, working closely this weekend with Britain, France and Germany to have Iran's nuclear duplicity referred to the United Nations Security Council.
It was important that India supported the referral of Iran yesterday, but any real action on the Security Council also will require Russia, which has veto power, to take a more cooperative attitude than it is now doing.
What may be most difficult for the administration is also the most critical requirement. Like it or not, Washington needs to start building up its own direct relationship with Iran, a country it has diplomatically shunned since the hostage crisis. The covert and indirect approaches Washington has relied on ever since then have succeeded only in diluting American influence and leaving American governments more ignorant about Iranian affairs than they can now afford to be.
The best argument for a change in approach is the total failure of the current strategy. A generation of demonizing and shunning Iran has left that country's most dangerous elements more powerful, domestically and regionally, than ever before.