So, the unalterable deadline to conclude a nuclear agreement with Iran has come and gone, and Secretary of State John Kerry has voided yet another administration red line, hemorrhaging U.S. credibility in the process. The worse aspect of the extension, however, is the Obama administration’s agreement to pay Iran $700 million per month from frozen accounts holding oil revenue.

It’s hard to believe, but when it comes to negotiations with rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea, the State Department has never conducted a “lessons learned” exercise to consider after the fact why its negotiations failed with terror sponsors and aspiring nuclear powers. My book, Dancing With the Devil, examines the history of U.S. talks not only with Iran and North Korea, but also Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, the Taliban, Pakistan and, of course, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.

When looking at all these cases, one lesson becomes clear: offering money or goods as an incentive never works. Palestinian terror has grown proportional to Palestinian aid. In the years before 9/11, the State Department actually suggested providing aid to the Taliban to keep them at the table and to test their good will. The United States and its KEDO partners provided over a billion dollars in aid to North Korea in the wake of the 1994 Agreed Framework. North Korea diverted food and heavy fuel aid, and doubled down on its nuclear program.

The disputes with Iran are not simply some misunderstanding. Nor are they a matter of Iranian rights. After all, Iran enjoyed its rights fully until the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2005, after several sanctions-free years of trying to resolve problems relating to Iran’s behavior, finally found Iran in non-compliance with its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement. Iran made an agreement, it broke it, and ever since, it has been paying the consequences of its own decisions. The disputes with Iran are rooted in Iranian decision-making.

Now, rather than coming clean, they are playing Obama and the West. Iran’s internal situation suggests that the money Obama and his partners offer is more likely to undercut any agreement rather than enable it. In the year before negotiations began, the Iranian economy shrank 5.3 percent. It was desperate for cash, and the $7 billion in sanctions relief, not a desire for conflict resolution, was President Rouhani’s chief goal in talks. Despite this influx, the drop in the price of oil below the $90/barrel at which the Iranian government set its budget keeps the Iranian economy on thin ice.

Dragging out the talks with constant subsidy not only nets Iran the $700 million per month, but an exponentially higher amount that comes with the erosion of sanctions and the scramble of German and other European companies for a foothold in the Iranian market. Simply put, Obama is eating out of Khamenei’s palm.

So if offering money and incentives don’t work, what’s the alternative? There have been times when Iran has been forced to reverse course: Ayatollah Khomeini released the 52 American diplomats he seized not because of the persistence of diplomacy, but rather because Iraq’s invasion made Iran’s isolation too great to bear. Likewise, in 1982, Khomeini promised to engage in the Iran-Iraq War until Jerusalem (not Baghdad) was liberated. There followed six more years a stalemate that came at the cost of several hundred thousand Iranian lives. Finally, Khomeini got on the radio and said he would accept a ceasefire, although he likened it to drinking from a chalice of poison. Drinking from that chalice, however, was worth it if it meant the survival of his regime.

The question for Obama is this, if he is serious about denying Iran a nuclear-weapons capability: What in his strategy raised Iran’s isolation to the level it was in 1980, and what in his strategy forces Khamenei to drink from that proverbial chalice? Whatever that might be, giving Tehran a $700 million monthly subsidy with the only caveat that its diplomats must come and enjoy a few days each month of fruitless talks at a five-star hotel surely isn’t it.