ARTICLE: "Persian Shrug," by Edward N. Luttwak, Wall Street Journal, 27 February 2007, p. A16.

A simplistic argument based on a simplistic read of history. Luttwak claims detente with Sovs "propped up" the regime and Reagan puts a stop to that and kills USSR in short order. So he advocates skipping any opening up with Iran and simply pushing them hard for internal collapse. There is no soft-kill without some connectivity, in my mind. Without it, there is no way to prepare the follow-on regime, to let it develop and emerge. Reagan's challenging was well timed because detente had lured the Sovs well down the path of economic and social connectivity with the outside world (the whole infiltration of "hard currency," or dollars with actual monetary value that illuminated how worthless so much of the Sov economy was, plus the growing realization of how Moscow was being ripped off by energy subsidies to Eastern Europe (something Putin's still correcting to this day). We have some vulnerability on oil revenue with Iran today that Saudi Arabia seeks to exploit, but just causing pain there won't get us regime change. Instead we're likely to get more repression with some secretive temporizing on nukes (like NK). Luttwak's history is bad and dangerously misrepresentative. You have to set up the soft kill, otherwise one dictator's fall sets up the next.