A look back at ... 2009

The same was true of Obama’s decision to fly to Tehran in June – a decision that did more than anything else to sour relations with Hillary Clinton, whose supporters never quite recovered from the sight of the former presidential candidate shrouded in a veil. Not that the so-called “opening to Iran” produced a dramatic improvement in the Middle East region. Nobody had expected that either. It was more that, like Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, it symbolised a readiness on Obama’s part to rethink the very fundamentals of American grand strategy. And the downfall of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad – followed soon after by the abandonment of the country’s nuclear weapons programme – was a significant prize in its own right. With their economy prostrate, the pragmatists in Tehran were finally ready to make their peace with “the Great Satan”, in return for desperately needed investment.