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With the clear crushing of his dreams about winning a Nobel Prize for ending the war in Ukraine, President Donald Trump is now setting his sights on equally grand history by making a deal that halts Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon. He is likely to find this reverie equally fantastical.

First, there is the awkward fact that in his first term, Trump scuttled an accord that struck just such a deal, for the sole reason that the deal had been negotiated by his predecessor and object of loathing, Barack Obama. In the seven years since the sabotage, Tehran’s leaders have revived their nuclear program and are now closer than ever to building an actual bomb. Among other things, this makes it unlikely that they would agree to a deal more restrictive than Obama’s—or that Trump and entourage would swallow a deal that puts lighter clamps on the Islamic Republic’s aims and capabilities.

Second, even leaving history aside, the conditions that Trump and his entourage say they would place on a new nuclear deal make it all but impossible for the mullahs of Tehran to agree. The main obstacle is Trump’s insistence on Iran’s “total dismantlement” of every aspect of its nuclear program, including its uranium enrichment facilities. It is hard to imagine any reward that would lure the Iranians to go that far.

In the first phase of the original Iran nuclear talks, Obama and his P5 1 negotiating partners (China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom)........

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