The next shoe to drop in the Iran appeasement is reportedly going to be an announcement in respect of the dollar. This is set for Friday, according to the latest cable from Omri Ceren, the prodigy who covers this beat for an organization called the Israel Project. He reports that Mr. Kerry suggested, after meeting with Foreign Minister Zarif, that he would facilitate Iran’s access to America’s currency. He thinks Mr. Kerry will suggest that Iran is entitled to such relief under last summer’s nuclear deal.

This a moment of truth for Mr. Kerry’s whole legacy, going back to the assurances he made to the Senate when he was trying to get it to agree to terms with the North Vietnamese communists. The communists broke the pact into which they entered at Paris before the ink was dry. In respect of Mr. Kerry, the most charitable view would be that people are entitled to mistakes. What exposes them to ridicule is when they fail to learn from their mistakes. Fool me twice, shame on me, etc.

If Mr. Kerry does what Mr. Ceren predicts, it would be a breath-taking betrayal. “The nuclear deal didn’t — and couldn’t coherently — include dollar access, because those prohibitions weren’t imposed because of Iran’s nuclear program,” Mr. Ceren writes. “They were imposed first for terrorism, and then for the full range of Iran’s illicit financial activities: money laundering, terrorism, ballistic missile development, and nuclear activities.”

This, Mr. Ceren writes, “wasn’t even a debate until some U.S. officials started searching for a pretext to grant Iran dollar access. Obama administration officials had always been clear that the financial prohibitions had been imposed for non-nuclear reasons and so would stay in place after the nuclear deal.” He then quotes testimony before Congress by the Treasury undersecretary for terrorism, Adam Szrubin, Undersecretary Szubin, claiming in respect of the appeasement:

“Iran will not be able to open bank accounts with U.S. banks, nor will Iran be able to access the U.S. banking sector, even for that momentary transaction to, what we call, dollarize a foreign payment… That is not in the cards. That is not part of the relief offered under the JCPOA. So, the U.S. sanctions on Iran, which, of course, had their origins long before Iran had a nuclear program, will remain in place.”

Mr. Ceren lists a long string of Treasury Department actions that took place prior to the pact with Iran that underscore this point. “Iran,” he writes, “was cut off from the U.S. financial system for the full range of its illicit financial activities. That was uncontroversial, which is why dollar access was not included in the nuclear deal.” Yet it turns out that Mr. Kerry is going to try to palm off on the long-suffering Congress the idea that dollar access is allowed under the articles of appeasement.

The main point to be made here that this sort of backsliding, dissembling, self-deception, and rationalizing is in the nature of appeasement itself. One one begins down this road, it becomes as automatic as rain in the tropics. This is why these columns have opposed any outreach to Iran. We opposed it as far back as the general election of 2008, when Senator Obama was vowing to write to the Ayatollah. It’s why we’ve said so many times, the appeasement is not the deal but the talking.