“Our” policies? As in those nascent years when the US thought to blight and to weaken Iran’s revolution: through the assistance she gave to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein?
The ‘rule of law approach’ serves humankind well . . . only when these laws and rules are observed. At other times? What other option is there but to “turn the back” (in repudiation).
Khamenei’s Hezbollah analogy is I believe, sound. And Egypt’s present political travail? Presents as an obverse (for that ‘apparent terminal decline’ is for now, most evident. But eminently-reversible: only if and when there is return to some soundly based ‘rule of law process’).