In a press conference on Monday, Donald Trump stated that he “would certainly meet with Iran if they wanted to meet,” adding: “No preconditions. If they want to meet, I’ll meet.” To do so, writes Eli Lake, would be a grave mistake:

There was a time in Washington when the establishments in both major parties believed that a meeting with a U.S. president was something a foreign adversary had to earn. Unless concessions are offered and conditions are met, the leader of the free world should avoid parleys with rogues. Think of George W. Bush’s refusal for America to enter nuclear talks with Iran until it stopped uranium enrichment. . . .

This was a hot-button issue back in 2007 and 2008 when an upstart Democratic senator named Barack Obama proposed that if elected president, he would meet with leaders of Iran, Cuba, and North Korea in his first year. In his recent memoir, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser and speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, described [the then-senator’s] reaction [when] Madeleine Albright, formerly Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, criticized his naïve offer. Obama responded, according to Rhodes, by pounding his open palm on a table to emphasize every syllable: “It is not a reward to talk to folks!” . . .

Now the president says he is open to talks with Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, without preconditions. . . . [While Obama] pressed Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, in 2013 for a face-to-face meeting at the United Nations, he had to settle for a phone call. Now Obama’s successor, who withdrew the U.S. from the nuclear deal, wants a meeting with the man who denied one to Obama.

Given the Tehran regime’s current legitimacy crisis, it’s a possibility. Rouhani is desperate. Even before severe sanctions on Iran’s oil exports and banking system formally kick in, the value of the rial is in free fall. The demonstrations and strikes that began late last year continue to roil Iran’s ruling class. A meeting with Trump could be a lifeline to an Iranian president who has failed to deliver the prosperity and reforms he promised in his campaigns in 2013 and 2017.

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.