Ironically, Khamenei demands expansion to Iran’s current uranium enrichment capabilities. He is also seeking preservation of nuclear sites that are fortified against attack, as well as significant limits on the International Atomic Energy Agency inspections regime.

To sum up Khamenei’s position: Iran’s nuclear research and development will not be restrained in any way, shape, or form. This obviously contravenes the entire purpose of the negotiations and the optimistic Western assumptions about why Iran, under its new presidency, came to the table in the first place.

Over the past nine months of negotiating, Iran has shown no willingness to make compromises in order to achieve a deal. To the contrary, Tehran is actually more intransigent and more demanding, apparently believing that the crisis in Iraq and the economic effects of limited sanctions relief have given it enough leverage to insist upon significant concessions from the U.S.

Shockingly, the Obama administration has responded by keeping the doors open to several of those concessions. Last month, a proposal was introduced to allow Iran to keep most of its enrichment infrastructure but merely remove the piping connecting the machines. Tehran’s initial lukewarm response later turned into Khamenei’s outright rejection. Last week, the U.S. reportedly proposed that Iran could keep its nuclear infrastructure only if it cut down stock of low-enriched uranium. Tehran, on the other hand, is proposing to replace its centrifuges with a more advanced version.

Even more shocking, a number of commentators in the U.S. seem to be responding to the lack of progress by pushing for an agreement at any cost, on the assumption that a bad deal is better than no deal at all.

The main argument in favor of signing such a deal is that it will at least preserve some IAEA access. But a bad deal doesn’t impede nuclear weapons work; it enables it. It may limit that work to secretive sites, such as SPND, as well as the Parchin military base, into which the IAEA has been repeatedly denied access. By rolling back sanctions and promoting European-Iranian relations, a bad deal will make it easier for Iran to obtain the financial resources and equipment needed to vigorously pursue that secretive research.

Earlier this month, the main Iranian opposition coalition, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, revealed that a Tehran facility that it first exposed in July 2011, and the West suspects is being used for nuclear weapons research has been moved by the regime to a new location. The research center, SPND, was referenced in a 2011 IAEA report and was placed under sanctions in August this year. The secretive relocation means that the nerve center of Tehran’s weaponization research is still fully operational, and that Tehran is intent on hiding and continuing this work.

Tehran’s troubling track record proves that if the Iranian regime and the United States are to reach a compromise before the Nov. 24 deadline, it must be a genuine compromise, and not simply the acceptance of Iran’s terms for a deal.

So the question remains: what would a workable compromise look like? First and foremost, it must allow unhindered IAEA access to the country, not the “conventional” relationship with the U.N. agency, which Iran has always counted on as it pursued secret nuclear research and development.

Self-delusion will not salvage that deal. If Tehran’s ruling mullahs aren’t willing to abandon their nuclear weapons program, then that is simply the reality on which the West must base its Iran policy, going forward.