It's an excellent question. That is what I try to allude to in my statement about post-apartheid South Africa, about a negotiated peaceful transition. I think I was asked whether the regime is on the brink of collapse. You never know: it's very difficult, and collapses don't come all at once. Certainly, based on your experience with communist Poland, you would know that the rotting away of communism was a long time in the making. Even if it was consummated dramatically, it didn't happen overnight.
I think there are deep divisions within the regime, and there are fundamental problems. I have little doubt that sooner or later we will see an Iran that is very different from the one we see today.
The question is: how do we go from here to there while avoiding some sort of cataclysm that could result in massive suffering, not just for the Iranian people, but for the entire region? Iran itself is a very diverse community of different political, ethnic, and religious persuasions. Within Iranian civil society, there is a substantial number of Iranian political activists, and there is now a move to create dialogue so we can have a democratic constituency that can sustain democratic institutions once that change comes about.
Essentially, Iran is far ahead of Egypt and the other countries in the Middle East because it is in a post-ideological, post-utopian state. When I was in Tahrir Square in Cairo, people were praising Ahmadinejad. They still had this romance about an Islamic state, and that's because they hadn't lived under one.
It's like the story of the man who sent his son to study in the Soviet Union rather than Paris to make sure he never becomes a communist. People in Iran have no illusions about that sort of state. That's why I've been talking about the surveys showing that among the population there are many liberal values, like skepticism about power. But at the level of the international community, I think policy-makers also need to think about what people throughout the world can do to encourage some sort of negotiated peaceful transition.
Rather than focusing on the nuclear issue and ever harsher sanctions and threats of war, I think we need to be a bit more—if I may say—intelligent and not so short-sighted. We must understand that Iran has immense potential, but we need to go beyond short-term narrow calculations and invest in a long-term democratic transition.