But Mr Ahmadinejad is not rolling over. Iran has pointedly failed to issue visas to an American women’s badminton team this month. The president still enjoys strong backing from the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And his hardline allies, who have kept the reformist opposition in check since ousting it in 2005, may well now fix the June poll. In any event, they are hardly likely to allow the election of either a liberalising Gorbachev or a pragmatic Deng Xiaoping. But faced with the temptation of a more welcoming outside world, and the danger of economic paralysis at home, whoever it is that runs the Islamic republic may be obliged to opt for one of those models. After all, even the revolutionary imam himself, Ayatollah Khomeini, after eight years of war with Iraq, chose to “drink the cup of poison” and make peace with Iran’s most loathed neighbour, Saddam Hussein.
