This Saturday will offer an indication of what the final months of the Bush administration are going to be like. August 2 will mark the two-week deadline that the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany have given Iran for its final response to a package of incentives on nuclear technology.

When Secretary Rice explained the decision to send the third highest-ranking American diplomat, William Burns, to Geneva earlier this month to hear out the Iranian response, she explained the decision as follows: “I signed the letter transmitting that package. And he will receive the Iranian answer.”

In other words, Mr. Burns did not jet out to Switzerland to begin a drawn out negotiation with the mullahs as they were perfecting the nuclear fuel cycle. “He will also make very clear that there will be no negotiation in which the United States is involved until there is a suspension of their enrichment and reprocessing,” Ms. Rice said.

As it stands, the Iranians at any moment can enter negotiations with America. All they have to do is suspend the process of enriching and reprocessing nuclear fuel. Many Democrats say this is asking too much. After all, isn’t the point of negotiations with Iran to get them to end the activity we say is a precondition for the talks in the first place?

This kind of talk reminds us of the Democrats in the first years of the Reagan presidency. They accused Richard Perle and the hardliners of sabotaging an intermediate range missile treaty with the Soviets because the Americans demanded what was known as “zero for zero.” The offer from Mr. Perle in 1981 was that America would not deploy nuclear tipped missiles in Western Europe if the Soviets dismantled the missiles they already deployed in Eastern Europe.

The Kremlin balked and there was no intermediate range missile treaty until Reagan’s Reykjavik summit with the Soviet party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1986, when the last Soviet premier agreed to Mr. Perle’s zero for zero. What had changed? Reagan, in 1983, deployed Pershing missiles to Western Germany over the protests of the same crowd that today demands unconditional talks with Iran.

The hard line, in other words, pays dividends down the road. Both hawks and, a generous soul can imagine, doves would prefer that Iran not obtain a nuclear weapon. But unless America holds the line and asks the Iranians at least to keep to their prior agreements, we end up increasing the chances of the mullahs mastering the powers of the atom.