Now here’s Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, to CBS, via ThinkProgress:

I think for the moment our position is to allow the Iranians to work out their situation. When popular revolutions occur, they come really from the people. They’re generated by people power within the country. For us to become heavily involved in the election at this point is to give the clergy an opportunity to have an enemy…and to use us, really, to retain their power.

To some degree, this is a reflection of the office of the president’s power to set the agenda. Much as people debated the merits of aggressive U.S. strategies for democracy promotion when George W. Bush was president — is that a sufficiently value-neutral way of putting it? — now people debate the merits of an approach that places the United States in a peripheral role relative to a nation’s internal dissenters. But I wonder if this might herald a broader reexamination of some of the democracy-promotion rhetoric that’s marked the past several years.

F’rinstance: I didn’t mean to suggest yesterday that George Packer was primarily interested in moral preening when he writes about Iran. But I do wonder why debates about how American foreign policy can and should promote openness and democracy don’t fundamentally proceed from the proposition that America play a supporting role — meaning we first consider what a given reform movement wants from the United States and then debate what we ought to do, whether support is in our interests, and so forth. So much of what’s been discussed, by George and by others, presumes a desire for American support before proceeding. If we’re to take to heart the proposition that the United States ought to actually play a supporting role in the spread of liberalism, then we have to take to heart the idea that sometimes the right strategy is one of quiet and caution and subtlety. We’re not locked in a choice between intervention and neglect.

Pentagon and State Department officials have been frantically calling the Kyrgyz government to get it to reverse the decision — and it appears the parliament is delaying a vote on kicking the United States out — but now a delegation led by Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs William J. Burns and the White House’s Russia specialist, Michael McFaul, are on their way to Moscow to deal with the patron as well as the client.

U.S. officials said they still hoped to persuade both Kyrgyzstan and Russia that, even though there are alternatives to the Manas base, its continued use would be most beneficial to Afghanistan’s stability. They also said they were open to Russian ideas about how cooperation in Central Asia can contribute to a better U.S.-Russia relationship.

Expect horsetrading, in other words.