Now, as the United States prepares for its first face-to-face meeting with Iranian officials since Mr. Obama took office, analysts said the administration will have to recalibrate its notion of engagement to take account of the country’s simmering antigovernment movement.
“The Obama administration doesn’t have the luxury of shunning contact with Iran,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Yet at the same time they don’t want to do anything that could demoralize a popularly driven opposition movement whose success could help change the Middle East.”
Mr. Obama’s conviction that events in the Middle East are linked helps explain his determination to rekindle peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Settling that conflict, administration officials say, would hinder Iran’s campaign to project its influence through the region.
But the White House’s approach to restarting talks — obtaining a settlement freeze from Israel and a series of reciprocal, confidence-building gestures by its Arab neighbors — bogged down when neither the Arabs nor the Israelis appeared willing to move far enough.
On Tuesday, Mr. Obama urged the two sides to proceed swiftly to talks over the core issues that divide them, implicitly acknowledging a failure to achieve the reciprocal moves he sought in advance.
Some analysts criticized the administration for pushing such a demand on the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, saying he was never in a position to accept it. Others say the critical failure was failing to obtain commitments from influential Arab players, chiefly Saudi Arabia.
“The leverage we thought we could get by jump-starting the Israeli-Palestinian talks turned out to be a mirage,” said Martin S. Indyk, the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.
Mr. Indyk, a Middle East peace negotiator in the Clinton administration, said the lesson of this bumpy period was to keep trying. “It’s not as though he came in with real possibilities and squandered them,” Mr. Indyk said of Mr. Obama. “He found a barren landscape and tried to water it.”
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