President Barack Obama secretly wrote to Iran s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the middle of last month and described a shared interest in fighting Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, according to people briefed on the correspondence. The letter appeared aimed both at buttressing the campaign against Islamic State and nudging Iran s religious leader closer to a nuclear deal.

Tehran could outsource the completion of a bomb to its longtime ally, North Korea. As a venue for secretly completing and testing a nuclear bomb, North Korea would be ideal. North Korea is the only country known to have tested any nuclear bombs since India and Pakistan both performed underground tests in 1998. Despite wide condemnation, it has gotten away with three nuclear tests, in 2006, 2009 and 2013. Pyongyang threatened to carry out a fourth test in March, which it said would take an unspecified "new form."

As Iran approaches the anniversary of Hasan Rouhani's presidential victory, the Islamic Republic's human-rights record, particularly its treatment of religious minorities, remains abysmal. This is especially true for the Baha'is, Iran's largest non-Muslim religious minority. As with the cases of jailed Christian pastors, such as Saeed Abedini and Farshid Fathi, the Tehran regime shows no signs of wanting to free the so-called Baha'i seven - Baha'i leaders jailed on spurious charges, from espionage to "spreading corruption on the earth"- nor of stopping the persecution of its Baha'i population, which numbers more than 300,000.

Western governments have treated President Rouhani as the great moderate hope - an Iranian version of China's Deng Xiaoping. They forget that Mr. Rouhani has been a lifelong security apparatchik, having helped engineer the regime's bloody 1999 crackdown on Iran's student movement. His government also bans Twitter (except for public officials) and is setting modern records for the number of public executions. And unlike Deng, whom Mao purged, Mr. Rouhani has always been part of the regime's inner circle. Perhaps a regime, and a president, that can brutalize political dissidents as a matter of routine can prove reasonable at the nuclear negotiating table. We wouldn't count on it, and neither should the West.