Mark down the Iranian people as an inconvenient truth.

Those who have become close followers of the Iranian nuclear-weapon program -- now approaching its fifth anniversary of Western wheel-spinning in the Persian sand -- know that the menu of options on the table has been limited.

One was bomb Iran. No need to rehearse the reasons given for not doing that, other than the clear understanding that the West simply won't do it.

Two was sanctions, mainly a gasoline embargo. Again, the main show-stopper is that the Western powers won't do it.

Thus, the default option -- talks. The talks began in September 2003, with the U.S. assenting to a "EU-3" negotiating team of Britain, France and Germany. These all-stars gave Iran until the end of the following month to tell all. Nearly five years later it's still just blah, blah, blah.

Bereft of ideas or will, the great powers have spent four years letting the world slide toward some sort of Armageddon in the Middle East -- either an Iranian nuclear launch or a pre-emptive strike by the Israelis.

Oh, and there was always a fourth option: Support the internal Iranian opposition. The argument against was: It's too small, unreachable, unknowable, will backfire.

Wonder Land columnist Daniel Henninger says the Internet is a threat to dictators everywhere -- and a challenge for American presidents.

As always, history has outmaneuvered the smart alecks in the world's foreign ministries. The Iranian opposition -- large, reachable, knowable, fired up -- has forced itself to the top of a reluctant president's to-do list.

What's really ironic about this is how history in the form of Iran's people got so far out ahead of Barack Obama, the most leading-edge figure in modern politics. A week into images of streets filled with people, blood and democratic aspiration, the world's man of the moment became a trailing indicator, only two days ago getting well behind the Iranian opposition movement. During last fall's campaign, he led a movement that swept all before it on a wave of what is known as Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 has become a metaphor. The communications technologies are important -- cell phones, social networks, messaging protocols -- but its more interesting attribute is that it enhances the role, and power, of individuals.

In the 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama brought onboard tech-savvy aides to build out his Web presence, among them Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Essentially what they did was to create innumerable electronic gateways for Obama supporters and volunteers. For example, they assembled 35,000 affinity groups linked by geography or cultural interests.

The people protesting Iran's election results have deployed many of the same tools. Much astonishing footage of the marches and pitched battles has been recorded as cellphone video and uploaded to sites like YouTube and then to cable TV.

However dramatic, all of this is quite normal. Web 2.0's individualizing power is being adopted as a competitive tool by every serious commercial enterprise in the world trading system. Why should we not expect the same tools to be used in a competition between upward-striving peoples and suppressive regimes?

Fighting back, Iran's authorities have jammed, blocked or shut down YouTube, text-messaging traffic, Twitter, cellphones, satellites and Web sites. In turn, supporters of the protests have attempted counter-strikes called "distributed denial-of-service attacks" against the government's Web sites.

This isn't just some fascinating sci-fi techie battle. Technology is unavoidably a major element now in the world of geopolitics. Iran can't grow economically, can't become "normal," without letting its people use Web 2.0. The same goes for Egypt, Syria and other politically significant players. Absent liberal use of Web 2.0, they will drop faster toward failure, which in our time infers a default to acquiring nuclear capability as a crude equalizer and then striking out at the winners.

This is a puzzle. Mr. Obama should task his smarter people -- for instance at the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment -- to find a path out of the State Department's standard model of our diplomats talking to their fake diplomats. That model made him look foolish this week. Nuance needs an upgrade. He should seek a new model that incorporates the wired dissidents not only because it is the right thing to do. But because it is unavoidable. Intelligent meddling.

Tehran the past week is not a one-off. The world of wired dissidents will grow at the same rate as communications technology. These dissidents and their overlords in Tehran and Beijing are the ones now shaping the rules and boundaries of the information-technology future -- what's allowable and what isn't.

A West led by passive leadership will find its commercial protocols written by mullahs and Chinese bureaucrats. (Though where centralizing Western governments think their interests lie in this competition between Web 2.0 and public authority is an interesting question.)

Some media has been spinning criticism of Mr. Obama's early passivity as "neoconservative opportunism." This is nonsense. The technology of Web 2.0 and beyond means no major power can hide from the forces in motion in Iran's streets today, and somewhere else tomorrow. Those who want to hide are the statist Left and the isolationist Right. This is old America. A new American foreign policy has to deal with the world as it exists. You have been watching it on screens large and small since last week.

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