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That way!

The situation in Iran is one of a number of issues that I’m vaguely ignoring in the hope it will go away. A new article in Prospect suggests that this might actually be the best strategy for the West as a whole.

According to Ali Ansari, one of the world’s leading experts on Iran, the Ahmadinejad regime’s entire foreign policy is based on a single question: will this annoy the Americans? If it will, they reason, it must be right. That’s why they do things like threaten to ban oil exports to the European Union (as they did today), even though experts agree it will probably make no difference to Europe and will almost certainly be counter-productive.

If Iran keeps on this way, Ansari says, they may end up bankrupting themselves, and all they’ll have to show for it is a lot of rocks that glow in the dark.

The best thing for us to do is to sit back and watch it happen:

The regime is doing an excellent job of isolating itself. The best thing the west can do at the moment is to recognise this, monitor it, contain it, and let it run its course.

Read the whole thing. As comment pieces go, it’s actually quite uplifting.