A history lesson for the Bush administration.

Are the Iranians looking for a face-saving way out of their nuclear confrontation with the United States? If I had to bet, I'd guess they're not—that their occasional diplomatic ventures are ploys to divide the West and delay U.N. sanctions so they can amble along their merry way toward building an atomic bomb.

But my bet—which is the same as most analysts'—might be wrong. In any case, according to U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies, the Iranians won't have the capability to build a bomb for at least a few years. There's not much that we can do right now to force a halt to the program. And some recent remarks by Iranian officials are a little too intriguing to ignore.

So, what's the harm in taking their declarations a bit seriously, in calling their bluff (if that's what it is), and seeing where things lead? If they lead nowhere, at least we'll have demonstrated the sincerity of our intentions and the mendacity of theirs—an important step in rallying allies, whose support will be crucial if sanctions (or other sorts of threats) become necessary.

Over the weekend, European and Iranian diplomats held talks about Tehran's nuclear program, and several officials emerged from the session declaring progress. It wouldn't be the first time optimism turned sour, but there was one interesting comment. A diplomat told the Associated Press that Ali Larijani, Iran's chief negotiator, floated the possibility of stopping their uranium enrichment for one or two months, as long as it seemed that they were doing so "voluntarily" and "without pressure."

Again, this could be—probably is—a ruse, devised to disrupt Western unity and thus keep economic sanctions at bay. If so, it's working. Last spring, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice persuaded President Bush to join the European Union's negotiations with Iran—but only on the condition that the European Union would join the United States in imposing sanctions if Iran refused to suspend enriching uranium. At the end of August, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran was still enriching. By the terms of not only Bush's informal agreement but also a U.N. Security Council resolution, this report should have triggered sanctions. But it didn't, or hasn't yet, because Russia, China, and a few Western European powers object that sanctions would wreck recent progress in diplomacy.

But the interesting thing about Larijani's proposal is its emphasis on suspending enrichment in a way that seems voluntary—"without pressure." Repeatedly, these past few months, Iranian officials, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have loudly (if somewhat misleadingly) proclaimed their "inalienable right" to enrich uranium. (They say they have no intention of using it to build nuclear weapons.) Several times, most notably in Ahmadinejad's loopy letter to President Bush, they have touted their history and standing as a great power.

All of which raises the question: Would a little respect go a long way toward settling this face-off? Do the Iranians want, or feel they need, an atomic arsenal—or would the recognition of their sovereignty and standing, without the accompanying nukes, be sufficient? One of the diplomats who attended the talks this weekend told the AP that the Iranians "are essentially seeking assurances that they will not be bombed while they are talking."

There are historical precedents for this notion of offering concessions without sacrificing interests. On the third day of the 13-day-long Cuban missile crisis of 1962, President John F. Kennedy came under growing pressure, even from some of his previously dovish advisers, to bomb the nuclear missiles that the Soviets were starting to install on Castro's island just 90 miles off American shores. On the tape recordings that JFK secretly made during the crisis, we hear him talking in terms eerily reminiscent of today's confrontation with Iran:

Many of our allies regard [Cuba] as a fixation of the United States. … Whatever action we take against Cuba, no matter how good our [intelligence] … a lot of people will regard it as a mad act by the United States.

At this point, a few of Kennedy's advisers argue about whether they should attack the Soviet missiles with or without prior warning. Kennedy interrupts to wonder out loud about Premier Nikita Khrushchev's motives and to muse about an alternative option—that the United States will withdraw its missiles from the Soviet Union's southern border in Turkey if Khrushchev withdraws his missiles from our southern border in Cuba. "If we had any sense of giving him some out," Kennedy says, "it would be Turkey, the missiles." (At the time, we had 15 intermediate-range missiles in Turkey, which were scheduled to be supplanted in six months anyway with a Polaris submarine, carrying 16 nuclear missiles, in the Mediterranean.)