Most of the headlines generated by President Obama’s interview with NPR this week focused on his threat to veto bills passed by the new Republican Congress. But the president’s comments about Iran in the same piece deserve just as much scrutiny. When asked if he was considering opening an embassy in Tehran as he is planning to do in Havana, the president spoke of his commitment to engagement and diplomacy with Iran and of giving it an opportunity to “get right with the world” and become “a very successful regional power.” Anyone seeking to understand why Iran has been able to force the West to back down from its original positions in the talks making it likely that any deal will allow it to become a threshold nuclear power need only listen to Obama’s hopes. In speaking in this manner, once again the president demonstrated why he is Tehran’s best diplomatic asset.

To be fair, President Obama did not pretend as if his diplomatic dancing partners are boy scouts. He acknowledged Iran’s record of support for terrorism, its threats to the region and its work toward a nuclear weapon He insisted that the goal of diplomacy with that rogue nation was to ensure that it does not get a nuclear weapon or have a breakout capacity to get one. The problem with American policy toward Iran has never been Obama’s rhetoric. Rather, it has been the huge gap between his stated goals and the points that Iran has won throughout the negotiations.

Even President Obama’s current assurances do not measure up to his original positions. In his foreign policy debate with Mitt Romney in 2012, he promised that any deal would result in eliminating Iran’s nuclear program. Now he speaks of accommodating its desire for a modest nuclear program for its energy needs and even of respecting its “legitimate defense concerns.” But as a major oil producer, Iran has no need for small nuclear power. As an aggressive and dangerous power in the region that has sought to dominate Iraq, Syria and the Palestinian territories with its terrorist auxiliaries and intimidate other moderate Arab countries, any talk of its “defense concerns” is equally absurd.

Iran’s leaders have made it clear that what they want is American acknowledgement of its hegemony in the region, not a chance to get right with the world. That Obama still refuses to see this has enabled Iran to expand its influence throughout the region with little fear of the consequences of what even the president acknowledged was its “adventurism.”

By insisting on forcing the U.S. to acknowledge its “right” to enrich uranium and to allow it to keep its nuclear infrastructure and its stockpile of fuel that could be re-activated to make a bomb, Iran has retained the ability to build a weapon. By keeping United Nations inspectors out of facilities where military research has gone on, it has also ensured that a breakout would be possible and not likely to be detected in time even assuming the West had the will to respond.

So long as Iran thinks Obama’s goal in these talks is détente rather than eliminating the nuclear threat it will continue, as it has throughout the process, to stand its ground and defend its ability to eventually build a bomb while Western sanctions are removed. It is Obama’s zeal for a deal that won Tehran limited sanctions relief last year and may cause the entire collapse of economic restrictions on doing business with the Islamist regime in 2015.

The president’s blind belief in diplomacy and engagement with a bad actor may be predicated on a belief that Iran wants to change. But no serious person can look at the nature of that regime or its policies and goals and believe that what Iran wants is to be a responsible player in a peaceful Middle East. The U.S. had an opportunity to ensure that the Iranian threat could be eliminated by economic sanctions. But Obama threw that leverage away last year in the interim nuclear deal and there appears little hope that it can be resurrected. The more Obama talks about a rosy future of U.S.-Iran relations, the less likely it will be that the Islamists will ever take America’s vows about stopping their nuclear ambitions seriously.