The New York Times has apparently taken great encouragement from last week’s news from Lausanne. “The preliminary agreement between Iran and the major powers is a significant achievement that makes it more likely Iran will never be a nuclear threat,” wrote the newspaper’s editorial board last week after the protracted negotiations ended. “President Obama said it would ‘cut off every pathway that Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon.’ ” Whether true or not, the world will have to live with the consequences.

That the Times should take such an unskeptical view of a deal that by most accounts will leave Iran free to develop nuclear weapons is hardly surprising. In the early 1930s, the newspaper was famously duped by the outwardly avuncular Stalin, who was about to murder more than 30 million Russians. The Times’ man on the scene back then, Walter Duranty, won a Pulitzer for his glowing dispatches from Mother Russia just as Papa Joe was beginning to systematically starve a million kulaks to death. Of course, Iran’s mullah’s are plotting genocide on a vastly larger scale. As we know, it is an explicit goal of radical Islam to kill or convert every infidel on Earth — about six billion of us. Unlike Stalin, however, the jihadists could conceivably have the means to accomplish this if they should come to possess a nuclear bomb. Are you concerned about this? Or do you instead side with the the Times?