Russian attempts to put a positive spin on their talks with Iran only underscore the dangers involved in Moscow’s talks with leaders of Hamas, set to begin today in the Russian capital. Just what would constitute a success?

Don’t underestimate the significance of Kremlin spin: on February 27, the Associated Press reported from Tehran that “Iran, Russia approve nuclear venture.”

By yesterday, the Washington Post ran a story under the headline, “Russia, Iran end talks without nuclear deal.”

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri correctly described the Russian invitation as “a declaration of the failure of pressures exerted by the United States on the world to besiege Hamas.” Hamas has also received official invitations from several left-leaning Latin American countries and from South Africa.

Officially, the difference between the Russian position and the American is that, while both adhere to the position that Hamas must meet the requirements set forth by the international community, President Putin wants to “engage” Hamas and tell them what he thinks in person. Russian diplomats tell me their bosses will tell Hamas that in order to play a role in any diplomatic process involving Israel, it must recognize the Jewish state, renounce violence and terrorism, and accept all previous agreements to which the PLO and the Palestinian Authority are bound. (The last demand is a bit dicey since most Israelis prefer not to be forced to reiterate support for the Oslo Accords.) But the Russians will want to claim some success in civilizing Hamas. President Putin didn’t invite Hamas for talks in order to exchange pleasantries.

The current moment evokes a sense of deja vu. Allowing for all the differences, the attempt to lure Hamas into respectability via a rhetorical gimmick is eerily reminiscent of the attempts in the late 1980s to open an American dialogue with the PLO.

The PLO was then, as Hamas is now, seen as a dangerous radical element without whose participation any solution of the Israel-Arab dispute would prove impossible. If Hamas is linked to the wider Islamist movement, the PLO was linked to the Third World revolutionary movements sponsored by, and with close links to, the Soviet Union and China.

Nevertheless, throughout the second Reagan administration, efforts were made to bring the PLO into a circle sufficiently respectable to engage it in a diplomatic process.

Trouble was that back in 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger pledged to Israeli Foreign Minister Yigal Alon in a memorandum of agreement to “not recognize or negotiate with the PLO as long as the PLO does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and does not accept Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.”

What to do? By 1986, it was clear that the Jordanian option preferred by Israel’s Labor Party – the attempt to engage Jordan as the interlocutor for a settlement with Israel, over the heads, as it were, of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza – had run its course.

At a meeting of the Palestine National Council in Algiers in November of 1988, the PLO adopted a policy that approached, but did not satisfy, the standard set by the Kissinger memo.

The following month, a delegation of five American Jewish doves flew to Stockholm for discussions with Arafat.

On December 14 in Geneva, Arafat told a press conference that “Our desire for peace is strategic and not a temporary tactic.” He said the PLO accepted 242, promised recognition of Israel and renounced terrorism. Although the Arafat statement progressed from the vague to the unclear to the imprecise, State Secretary Shultz announced that same day that “the United States is prepared for a substantive dialogue with PLO representatives.”

In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Shamir said, to no avail, that Arafat was engaging in “a monumental act of deception.” Nevertheless, an official U.S.-PLO dialogue was launched in Tunis.

There are many things that are different today. The PLO option looks to be going the way of its Jordanian predecessor. In any event, the PLO has been forced by an election to surrender its hard-won claim as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” There is a Palestinian Authority, a putative Palestinian state in the making; rather than contemplate an abortion, the world prefers to see the pregnancy through. The Soviets are gone, although the Russians are trying to reprise their role. In place of the hopes associated with the attempts to engage the PLO then, there is, and quite rightly so, widespread despair at the idea of engaging the Islamist Hamas now.

Still, beginning today in Moscow, we are re-living the events of 1988 as if nothing has changed. The international community, such as it is, suffers from its own Stockholm Syndrome. Named for a 1973 hostage incident in Sweden, the Syndrome describes the behavior of kidnap victims who evince sympathy for those who kidnapped them.

That’s why the desperate attempts to lure Hamas into the diplomatic realm are not only pathetic, but represent a giant step backwards. By 2002, it was clear that the Palestinians’ commitment to moderation was more honored in the breach than the observance, and the international community, led by President Bush, raised the bar for Palestinian performance.

Phase 1 of the Road Map launched in the spring of 2003 required the Palestinians to “immediately undertake an unconditional cessation of violence… issue [an] unequivocal statement reiterating Israel’s right to exist in peace and security …and undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt, and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere.”

Now the authors of the Road Map (including Russia) are demanding less of Hamas than they were of Fatah just a few months ago.

The point of pressuring Hamas to adopt language that appears to be consistent with the international community’s approach would be to engage Hamas as a partner in a peace process.

If so, Hamas must be held at least to the standard that applied to the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority; given Hamas’s uncompromising Islamic extremism and definition of the conflict in theological terms, it should be held to an even higher standard.