The way we look at Secretary of State Kerry’s negotiations with the Iranians in Geneva is through the prism of Vietnam. What Mr. Kerrry did — in 1970, as a young officer in the U.S. Navy reserves — was go to Paris, meet with our enemies, and then come back to America and spout their talking points. He testified against our own GIs before the Senate in 1971. Eventually the peace movement with which he was allied and which the communist side boasted would achieve their aims, eventually the peace movement convinced the United States Congress to retreat. And so the freedom of Indochina, with a population on the scale of Eastern Europe, was lost.

What Mr. Kerry is doing today in Geneva is not exactly the same as what he did back then. Back then he was but a summer soldier falling away from his comrades in the darkest hours of a difficult war. His visit to Paris was “private,” so to speak, and he was in no way representing our government, which he detested. Today Mr. Kerry is traveling in the garb of state secretary, an office once held by Madison and Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. But in broad outlines, what Mr. Kerry is doing is startlingly similar — he’s meeting with our enemy in hopes of a deal that the enemy wants and will benefit from. He will then come home and try to defend it.

Even without having inked a deal, the Obama administration has been quietly softening sanctions and lifting some of the financial pressure on the mullahs, according a dispatch just put up on the Daily Beast by two of the keenest reporters on the national security beat, Eli Lake and Joshua Rogin. They quote President Obama insisting to NBC News that the negotiations “are not about easing sanctions.” But they report that their own review of Treasury Department notices discloses that since the election of President Rouhani in June the Obama administration has “all but stopped the financial blacklisting of entities and people that help Iran evade international sanctions.”

The truth is that President Obama wants this deal so bad he can taste it. That instinct itself is a part of appeasement. The only world leader who seems to understand what is happening right now is Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is being quoted in the Times newspaper in Washignton as warning that a pact easing sanctions “would be a mistake of historic proportions.” He comprehends that the deal being hatched in Geneva is precisely an effort to short-circuit Israel’s own options. He is the only leader who seems to be aware of history, no doubt because he is the son of a renowned historian. If history has taught us anything at all it is that peace cannot be bought with the kind of appeasement Messrs. Kerry and Obama are pursuing in Geneva.