With the nuclear deal done, it was no surprise that Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, everybody’s favorite uncle, has been smiling beneficently. What is astonishing is that Sir Christopher Meyer, British ambassador to the United States from 1997 until his retirement in 2003, has been smiling back. In fact, writing in the Telegraph, Meyer—playing Rick Blaine to Iran’s Captain Renault—thinks it could be the start of a beautiful friendship between the two countries. Astonishingly, Meyer urges the UK government to embrace Iran as nothing less than “our strategic ally in the region for the 21st century.”

Astonishing for four reasons.

First, Meyer is proposing that our response to the scourge of global terrorism should be to form a strategic alliance with the world’s largest state sponsor of terror. The regime in Tehran has armed its fascistic Lebanese proxy Hezbollah with more than 100,000 rockets aimed at Israel. It has a history of funding any group—Sunni or Shia—that it deems potentially useful to either its regional ambitions or its war on the West.

Second, despite Rouhani’s few friendly tweets on Jewish holidays, there is nothing to suggest the regime has changed its spots. Some 1,200 people have been executed during Rouhani’s tenure. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has noted that Rouhani’s pledges to “extend protection to all religious groups and to amend legislation that discriminates against minority groups … have not … been translated into results.” This is not out of character for a man who sits at the heart of the deep security state in Iran and who was involved in the violent suppression of student demonstrators in 1999.

Read the article in full at World Affairs.