I spent a couple days talking with veteran democracy-promotion strategists about what the Iran case might mean for future democracy-promotion approaches from the Obama administration. Short answer is that it’s too soon to tell and Iran is a unique case. But that doesn’t make for a good piece, dammit. Actually, the piece I ended up writing for the Washington Independent is about one hypothesis that does look like a likely scenario, which is to say a strategy of background support instead of active recruitment.

Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment doubted that unfolding events in Iran would prompt the administration to place democracy promotion at the center of its foreign policy. “I think they’ll continue to be cautious and pursue solutions to different security problems,” he said. “It’s not going to cause a fundamental change of U.S. democracy-promotion policy. But though it comes up at a time when the administration had not made [democracy promotion] a major emphasis of its diplomacy, that follows a pattern of U.S. presidents coming to power not planning on making a big emphasis on democracy and then there’s an event and a needs to respond.”

But a strategy for democracy promotion that relies on limited U.S. involvement does not mean indifference to democracy, Diamond said, even in countries with a tradition of anti-American sentiment. “There is a certain class of countries, closed in a similar way to Iran — Cuba is another — where politically, as in China, we can’t really do traditional-type democracy promotion,” he said. Such hard cases make prudent indirect strategies like “providing information and keeping open the flow of democratic ideas and techniques can make a very big difference,” he said. “The more that we can do to put out information about what’s happening right now at the moment, [like] techniques for democratic mobilization and struggle, information about lessons other from mass mobilizations for democracy. The more we can just put that out, on the internet, in indiginous languages, that’s at least a modestly facilitating thing. I think we could’ve done much more of that over the last few years.”

Everyone said to keep an eye on Michael McFaul, the NSC director for Russia, who’s another veteran democracy promotion fellow, very knowledgable about eastern European color-revolutions. I tried getting in touch with him but no go. MICHAEL MCFAIL.

I’m about to jump on a conference call to southern Afghanistan (woo) but for more on Obama, Iran and democracy, read Glenn Kessler and Laura Rozen and watch this diavlog between Reza Aslan and Eli Lake. And not to make this too link-roundup-y, but check out John Kerry telling everyone to think before they open their mouths on Iran and Jay Solomon promoting Dennis Ross.

Update: Conference call postponed. Shit is on.  @PersianKiwi tweets about today’s big Tehran demo:

Everybody is peaceful and quiet – everybody is wearing black – the number of people is unbelievable – SEA OF GREEN

S/he says s/he’s going to report back when the march ends. Please. Please. Listen to their demo.