On Oct. 1, William Burns, the American under secretary of state, will join diplomats from Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China for talks with Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator to see whether any deal is possible.

Image Thomas L. Friedman Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

While real sanctions are necessary to exploit this moment, they are not sufficient. We also need to keep alive the prospect that Israel could do something crazy. I don’t favor Israeli military action against Iran and hope we’re telling Israel that privately. But I do believe that U.S. officials, particularly the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, need to stop saying that publicly. Gates is a smart power player. He knows better. If any U.S. official is asked for an opinion on whether Israel should be allowed to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, there is only one right answer: Refer them to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s 2005 comment that Israel “might well decide to act first” to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, and say nothing else. Why should we reassure Iran?

I would hope by now that the murderous crackdown on Iran’s mass democracy movement by the country’s oil-funded ruling cartel would have removed the last scales from the eyes of those Iran watchers who think this is simply a poor, misunderstood regime that really wants to repair its relations with the West, and we just have to learn how to speak to it properly. This is a brutal, cynical, corrupt, anti-Semitic regime that exploits the Palestinian cause and deliberately maintains a hostile posture to the West to justify its grip on power. A regime that relates to its own people with such coercive force is not going to be sweet-talked out of its nuclear program. Negotiating with such a regime without the reality of sanctions and the possibility of force is like playing baseball without a bat.

The U.S. is being advised to explore a variety of sanctions, including encouraging capital flight from Iran, thereby creating a run on the Iranian currency. It is also considering a global ban on companies doing business with Iran’s oil industry, which would be a big blow to the regime, because its oil industry  which provides the vast majority of government revenues  needs modernizing and that requires foreign technological help and financing.