by edith bruce

Created on: June 18, 2009   Last Updated: June 28, 2009

"Death to the Dictator!" "Where is our Vote?" shout thousands of protesters in the heart of Tehran and across the globe in pockets of Iranian communities, marking Ahmedinejad's election win against his reformist counterparts. Some compare the massive protest, against an indisputably and crudely managed election fraud, to the 1979 Iranian revolution and, more troublingly, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Whether these unprecedented peaceful protests will be violently crushed or signify a major change in the incumbent's theo-fascist control of the state, the U.S. should tread prudently in redefining U.S.-Iran relations. A "full engagement with pressure" policy that addresses Iran's legitimate grievances while reconciling the state's iron-clad theocratic rule with a politically active and technology-savvy youthful population is the way to go.

First and foremost. The U.S. should somehow look like it is "troubled" by the violent crackdown and brutal state control over the demonstrators but not give the clerical elite and Ahmedinejad's supporters any crumbs to rally against an intolerable American meddling-in-its-affairs or, more crucially, undermine the pro-reform supporters of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the leading moderate opposition, as pro-Western bandits. In simple terms, the U.S. should do nothing but stand back until the smoke dies down and a clear winner (legitimate or not) emerges. This would prevent a rerun of the failed 1953 CIA-backed post-election coup against former Iranian president Mohammad Mosaddeq.

How can the U.S. engage Iran's ruling elite and its increasingly active youthful population?

American foreign policy towards Iran that does not address the evident regional powers' ambitions and grievances is useless in the face of a transformative period in Iranian politics. The roots of the ruling government's anti-American foreign policy are based on two things: the survival of the Islamic Respublic and the perception of the U.S. as an "existential threat" to its national interest.

The second Bush administration's containment policies marked by sanctions and stubborn conditional style of negotiations have only invigorated anti-West nationalist sentiments and even partly legitimized Ahmedinejad's vision of Iran as a model of defiance against Western invasion. Therefore, scholars and expert policy-makers of leading publications and institutions have come up with a broad foreign policy framework that combines the two countries' national interests.

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