The “loss of moral self-confidence” exemplified by the United States in its nuclear negotiations with Iran “threatens not only the United States and Israel but also the people of Iran and a growing number of others living under Tehran’s increasingly emboldened rule,” former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky wrote Friday in The Washington Post.

Drawing on his experience as a political prisoner in a totalitarian state, Sharansky, now the chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, noted a crucial difference between the Soviet Union of thirty years ago and Iran of today: The Soviet Union had made a decision to coexist with the West, but Iran has made no similar concession. Instead of pressuring Iran to behave so that it may “be treated like a normal state,” Sharansky wrote that the “Obama administration apparently believes that only after a nuclear agreement is signed can the free world expect Iran to stop” destabilizing the Middle East and violating the rights of its citizens. Without pressure, “Iran feels no need to tone down its rhetoric calling for the death of America and wiping Israel off the map,” or otherwise change its behavior.

Of course, changes in rhetoric did not change the Soviet Union’s policy, which included sending missiles to Cuba, tanks to Prague and armies to Afghanistan. But each time, such aggression caused a serious crisis in relations between Moscow and Washington, influencing the atmosphere and results of negotiations between them. So, for example, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan shortly after the SALT II agreement had been signed, the United States quickly abandoned the deal and accompanying discussions.

Today, by contrast, apparently no amount of belligerence on Iran’s part can convince the free world that Tehran has disqualified itself from the negotiations or the benefits being offered therein. Over the past month alone, as nuclear discussions continued apace, we watched Iran’s proxy terror group, Hezbollah, transform into a full-blown army on Israel’s northern border, and we saw Tehran continue to impose its rule on other countries, adding Yemen to the list of those under its control.

Then there is the question of human rights. When American negotiations with the Soviets reached the issue of trade, and in particular the lifting of sanctions and the conferring of most-favored-nation status on the Soviet Union, the Senate, led by Democrat Henry Jackson, insisted on linking economic normalization to Moscow’s allowing freedom of emigration. By the next year, when the Helsinki agreement was signed, the White House had joined Congress in making the Soviets’ treatment of dissidents a central issue in nearly every negotiation.

Sharansky also attributed the American failure to pressure Iran to the result of a mindset that “asserting the superiority of liberal democracy over other regimes seems like the quaint relic of a colonialist past,” leading the United States to appear “to have lost the courage of its convictions.”

Sharansky’s thesis that Iran should change its behavior before negotiations and concessions are made echoed an argument made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his historic speech before Congress last month, where he listed three conditions that would confirm that Iran had indeed changed its behavior and deserved favorable consideration for its nuclear program—that Iran stop destabilizing the region, stop supporting global terror groups and stop threatening to annihilate Israel. Netanyahu repeated this a few weeks later when he told NBC News, “The important thing is that the lifting of restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program would depend on Iran’s change of behavior, that it would stop supporting terrorism, stop its aggression against just about every country in the region and stop calling, stop threatening the annihilation of Israel.”

As former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz similarly argued, “For Iran to be a valuable member of the international community, the prerequisite is that it accepts restraint on its ability to destabilize the Middle East and challenge the broader international order.”

[Photo: The Jewish Agency for Israel / YouTube ]