Iran’s ordeal shattered the Carter presidency, reminds Fouad Ajami writing in today’s Wall Street Journal. And President Obama’s tutorial has just begun. A leading observer of the Islamic world and professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins, Ajami writes that Obama’s statements last week (”the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as had been advertised”) put on “cruel display the administration’s incoherence.”

But the foreign-policy education of America’s 44th president has just begun. Hitherto, he had been cavalier about other lands, he had trusted in his own biography as a bridge to distant peoples, he had believed he could talk rogues and ideologues out of deeply held beliefs. His predecessor had drawn lines in the sand. He would look past them.

Like multiple U.S presidents before him, Obama has presumed that a softer U.S. policy toward the Muslim world can somehow be shape-shifting in the war within Islam itself. For all the Iranians yearning for liberty, says Ajami, we should not underestimate “the power and the determination of those moved by the yearning for piety.”

Obama’s belated effort to sound hawkish over the weekend, as Iranians began dying in the streets, looks anemic beside the determination of the ayatollahs to maintain their theocratic regime.