This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 17, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The next president will inherit an Iran that has had no diplomatic dealings with the United States for some time.

How should he react?

None of the options are good ones, but some are better than others.

Justin Logan, Associate Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, comments.

I hear people say, and it has confused me somewhat, Iran is a natural ally to the U.S.

And I've never been completely comfortable with that statement

because it can mean, I think, one of two things.

One, we should engage them.

We should talk to them, and maybe the political pressure will move

upward and the leadership there will have to pay some sort of price because they do

have a history of representative democracy. And the other is Iran is a natural ally of the U.S.

So we need to go and get rid of the leadership

and we will, as the story goes, be welcome to liberators,

all these wonderful things, a thousand flowers will bloom right I'm that's a pretty

sweeping statement the business about Iran being sort of a natural ally and I'm

cynical enough that I'm not particularly inclined toward the idea that there are sort of

of natural allies or natural adversaries. A lot of people make that argument based on historical

considerations and based on certainly the current objective of

doing things like combating al-Qaeda which recently has been issuing statements

critical of Iran and there's sort of that natural

...