WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Here is a piece of advice for Barack Obama for dealing with Iran, one of the countries that will loom large in his presidency. Forget the way five of your predecessors dealt with the place. Take your cue from Richard Nixon and his 1972 breakthrough with China.

Just as Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, realized that a quarter of a century of isolating and weakening China had not served America's interests, so Obama should acknowledge that 30 years of U.S. policy since the 1979 Iranian (Islamic) revolution has failed and that what is needed is a grand bargain, a shift as fundamental as the one Nixon achieved with China.
Those suggestions come from Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, a husband-and-wife team of independent experts who worked on Middle East policy on the National Security Council during George W. Bush's first term in the White House.
A grand bargain would involve putting all the differences between the two countries on the table at the same time and resolve them as a package.
The list of differences is long.
How likely is it that Obama will make a dramatic Nixon-in-China overture? Not very. For one, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is no Kissinger. And while Obama ran on a platform of change in the presidential election campaign, the man tipped to take charge of dealings with Iran, Dennis Ross, is an old-established Clinton-era Middle East negotiator with a widespread reputation in the area as a man with a pronounced pro-Israeli bias.
On Obama's first working day, the White House reissued his campaign pledge of “tough and direct diplomacy without preconditions” -- a break from the Bush administration's insistence that there could be no talks unless Iran first suspended its uranium enrichment program.
But according to a brief policy outline on the White House website, Washington will push the same carrot-and-stick package Iran has rejected for the past four years. Old wine in new bottles?
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