Well, that did not take long. A day after the first one-on-one talks between America and Iran since the 1979 hostage crisis, we Americans finds ourselves in the same sort of mess that has marked our nearly 30-year history with the Islamic Republic. On Tuesday, Iran’s judiciary ministry announced that three Iranian Americans — Kian Tajbakhsh, Haleh Esfandiari, and Parnaz Azima — were charged with espionage and endangering Iran’s national security.

It should be noted that the most famous of these prisoners, Ms. Esfandiari, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, has herself been an advocate within Washington of the very sort of dialogue the Iranians are flouting with these arrests and charges. The individual who heads the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, Lee Hamilton, is the former chairman of the House International Relations Committee and co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group with James Baker. Mr. Hamilton only six months ago was all over Congress and the airwaves calling for the dialogue that Ms. Esfandiari advocated in her scholarship as well.

Mr. Tajbakhsh, an urban planner, works for George Soros’ open Society Institute and is affiliated with New York’s own New School for Social Research. Mr. Soros has also been a strident critic of President Bush for failing to embrace dialogue with the Iranians. But as a State Department spokesman yesterday told our Eli Lake in Washington in respect of these detainees, “Their unjust treatment by the Iranian regime undercuts Iran’s rhetoric about wanting a serious dialogue with the West.” That’s putting it mildly. Iran’s support of both Sunni and Shia terrorists in Iraq, its support for jihad parties in Gaza and Lebanon, its flouting of Security Council Resolutions in Natanz, all also “undercut Iran’s rhetoric about wanting a serious dialogue with the West.”

What Iran wants is war with the West. The way to understand the latest show trials, which are about to commence in Iran, is through this prism. Close watchers of the mullahs can not be surprised. In December 2002, when an Iranian named Abbas Abdi was arrested for espionage, many of us knew that the chances for dialogue had passed. Mr. Abdi worked closely with our State Department at the direction of President Khatemi to gauge Iranian attitudes towards America. When he found that most Iranians wanted better relations with the “great Satan,” he was put before television cameras in the first of many show trials for pro-Western academics there.

It was but part of a pattern. In 2004, almost all of Mr. Khatemi’s fellow reformers in parliament were told they could not stand again for office. Last year, Ramin Jahanbegloo, the author of Mr. Khatemi’s “dialogue of civilizations” speech at the United Nations in 2000, was arrested on spy charges. He was released, but only after confessing on state television that he was working against the interests of the state. As it turns out, the interests of the state for Iran have nothing to do with dialogue.