Better in their words…

Hook, line and sinker. Any guesses on what the Adminstration will do?
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The ruling clerics in Tehran haven’t survived in power for 34 years without cunning. Fresh from their ally Bashar Assad’s diplomatic victory in Damascus, they now see an opening to liberate themselves from Western pressure too. They’re hoping an eager President Obama will ease sanctions in return for another promise of WMD disarmament.

That’s the prudent way to read Iran’s recent interest in Mr. Obama’s entreaties after five years of rude dismissals. No doubt the mullahs are feeling international economic pressure, especially from financial sanctions through the world banking system. But they have shown for years that they don’t mind imposing pain on their own people.

New President Hassan Rouhani sounds less strident notes than his predecessor, but the regime has rolled out other presidents who turned out either to have no power or to be false fronts to beguile the West. The real power, as ever, resides with the clerics and especially Ayatollah Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard Corps. Mr. Rouhani was their nuclear envoy in the mid-2000s when Iran accelerated its nuclear-weapons program. It’s doubtful they’ve had a come-to-Allah moment on nukes.

The likely reason they’ve finally decided to answer Mr. Obama’s overtures is because they see an America in retreat and eager for a nuclear deal. In Syria, they saw Mr. Obama leap at Russia’s diplomatic offer rather than follow through on his threat of a U.S. military strike if Assad used chemical weapons. Assad is now safe from Western intervention and he can dissemble and delay on disarming his chemical stockpiles.

The mullahs can also see how eager Mr. Obama is for a second-term deal with Iran that validates his campaign claim that “the tide of war is receding.” The President has never taken no for an answer from Tehran. Despite being rebuffed for five years, he sent another entreaty after Mr. Rouhani’s election in June.

Mr. Obama’s letter invited Mr. Rouhani to “cooperate with the international community, keep your commitments and remove ambiguities” about the atomic program in exchange for sanctions relief, according to a senior Iranian official quoted in Thursday’s New York Times. The letter hasn’t been released, but Mr. Rouhani called it “positive and constructive” in an interview with NBC Wednesday.

The mullahs also learned from the Syrian fiasco that Mr. Obama wasn’t able to sway Americans to support even what John Kerry called an “unbelievable small” military strike. They can see as well that even many Republican leaders now want the U.S. to withdraw from world leadership. As in the 1920s and 1970s, most American elites are eager for a diplomatic deal of just about any kind rather than run the risk of a military strike.

The White House is already signaling its first concession by suggesting that Mr. Obama might meet Mr. Rouhani in New York at this week’s U.N. General Assembly. That would be the first such presidential meeting since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and it would give the dictatorship new international prestige at zero cost. Iran continues to support U.S. enemies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan, and it continues to crush its political opposition at home.

Iran’s diplomatic goals are obvious: Break its international isolation and lift the sanctions in exchange for a promise not to build a nuclear weapon even as it retains its ability to build one at a moment’s notice. The Rouhani aide said last week that Tehran was particularly eager to lift the ban on Iranian money transfers through the Swift interbank system, and it will press for that as an initial concession before it dismantles a single nuclear centrifuge.

The danger for world order is that Iran is already close to a nuclear breakout capacity when it will be able to finish a device in a matter of weeks, without technically testing or possessing a bomb. The mullahs could also easily pull the North Korean trick of dismantling one facility while secretly running another one. They have systematically lied about their nuclear program for years.

All of which bodes ill for any genuine nuclear breakthrough. If true global security is Mr. Obama’s goal, then at a bare minimum any deal would have to halt Iran’s enrichment of uranium, remove the already enriched uranium from the country, close all nuclear sites and provide for robust monitoring anytime and anywhere.

Anything less would be a mirage. Anything less would force Israel in particular to recalculate the risks of a pre-emptive attack compared to the risks of future nuclear destruction. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran’s other Middle East rivals will also be looking closely at the fine print of any deal. A negotiation that dismantles Iran’s nuclear program would be a great step forward, but a deal that promises peace while letting Iran stay poised on the edge of becoming a nuclear power would endanger the world.

A version of this article appeared September 23, 2013, on page A16 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: From Damascus to Tehran.

Review & Outlook: From Damascus to Tehran – WSJ.com.