In the March issue of Commentary, Nathan Thrall wrote a splendid review of Treacherous Alliance by Trita Parsi, an absurdly over-praised book that purports to explain the “secret dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States” but which actually only succeeds in trying to explain away various excrescences on the face of the Islamic Republic of Iran.   

Thrall is back in today’s New York Times with an equally splendid op-ed (coauthored with Jesse James Wilkins) that explains, by means of a vivid historical example, exactly what is wrong with the idea of negotiating with ones enemies without preconditions–precisely the kind of negotiations that Barack Obama has promised to hold with the leaders of Iran.

Kennedy’s one presidential meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, suggests that there are legitimate reasons to fear negotiating with one’s adversaries. Although Kennedy was keenly aware of some of the risks of such meetings – his Harvard thesis was titled “Appeasement at Munich” – he embarked on a summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, a move that would be recorded as one of the more self-destructive American actions of the cold war, and one that contributed to the most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age.

What happened in that summit? The title of Thrall and Wilkins’ piece, Kennedy Talked, Khrushchev Triumphed, says it all.