Iranian democracy “within a decade”
To continue where I left off with Larry Diamond in my last post, I also chatted with him about Iran. Diamond is under no illusions about what the Iranian regime is up to, describing their current activities as an “obvious, frenetic pursuit of nuclear weapons.” But he is surprisingly optimistic about the prospects for reform ...
To continue where I left off with Larry Diamond in my last post, I also chatted with him about Iran. Diamond is under no illusions about what the Iranian regime is up to, describing their current activities as an “obvious, frenetic pursuit of nuclear weapons.” But he is surprisingly optimistic about the prospects for reform in Iran; arguing that there’s a “good probability” that we might see a democratic Iran within the next ten years or so.
To continue where I left off with Larry Diamond in my last post, I also chatted with him about Iran. Diamond is under no illusions about what the Iranian regime is up to, describing their current activities as an “obvious, frenetic pursuit of nuclear weapons.” But he is surprisingly optimistic about the prospects for reform in Iran; arguing that there’s a “good probability” that we might see a democratic Iran within the next ten years or so.
The first step, to his mind, should be “direct, comprehensive negotiations with the Iranians in which everything is on the table.” He doesn’t think that the regime would bite but that this approach would “put the regime back up against the wall with its own people” in explaining why they were rejecting the opportunities that the lifting off economic sanctions and the like would bring.
But our track record on Iran, Diamond says, has been terribly weak. For the last 25 years, he observes, U.S. policy toward Iran has been characterized by a “shocking failure of imagination.”
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