Obama's Foreign Policy Options

But the US government does not need to buy into the claim that Iran will end up the loser of the Arab Spring in order to recognize that its current policy towards the region, especially with regard to the popular uprising in Bahrain, is untenable. The US policy towards Bahrain is unjustified for the simple but more fundamental reason that it does not need to define its national interests in opposition to Iran under all circumstances and in all contexts.
Defining Iran-US relations as a zero-sum game in all issue areas and in all situations would afflict the US foreign policy with a sort of rigidity that would limit its room for manoeuvre. The fact that every gain for Iran in its foreign policy does not necessarily translate into a loss for the US seems to not factor prominently into the calculations of US foreign policy makers with regard to the recent political developments in the Arab world of the Middle East. It would of course be brazenly naïve to deny the fact that the US and Iran are currently serious rivals in the region and have conflicts of interests in a number of important issue areas, most important of which is Iran’s nuclear program, and that it would take extreme compromise by both parties to reconcile these differences under present conditions. But this does not mean that they cannot be tacit partners and have convergent interests in a number of other issue areas. More.