I fear Bolton, as usual, is correct. Based on what we know so far from press accounts, the results from Geneva seem utterly predictable and largely drawn from Iran’s playbook: Agree to another meeting with the U.S. and other world powers that buys time and boosts the regime’s prestige and legitimacy, and agree (in principle) to allow the IAEA (eventually) to inspect the covert enrichment facility that Iran was forced to declare last week.

One wonders what became of the administration’s tough talk about using today’s meeting to demand “immediate” access not only to the Qom facility itself, but to the scientists, engineers, computer records, and documents related to its construction. Were those demands put to Iran’s negotiators? How did they respond? And quite apart from the more recent problems related to the Qom site, was any progress made on the longstanding international demands for access to the scientists involved in Iran’s covert programs to weaponize enriched uranium and design a nuclear warhead that can be put atop a ballistic missile — the programs that U.S. intelligence insists Iran suspended in 2003?

I’m at a conference in Europe where one of the Iranian participants commented that if we’re to have any hope of stopping the Ahmadinejad regime from getting a major political boost out of these negotiations, the United States and its partners must: 1) make very clear demands, e.g., suspend uranium enrichment; 2) set hard deadlines to perform, e.g., four weeks; and 3) be very explicit about the consequences that will follow if the regime fails to perform, e.g., rapid imposition of crippling sanctions. Short of that, the regime will likely be strengthened, having shown its own people and the rest of the world that it is again succeeding in its old strategy of using long, useless talks to toy with and humiliate the West by highlighting the international community’s impotence.

An ultimatum-based approach with clear deadlines and real consequences is not a negotiating strategy that comes naturally to the State Department, especially in an initial meeting at which “confidence building” is the chief goal. But it’s a strategy entirely appropriate to the urgency of the issue — a nearly nuclear Iran — and the deceptive, hostile nature of our adversary. Not knowing everything that happened behind the scenes in Geneva today, I’d love to give the administration the benefit of the doubt and believe that this is the sort of playbook that in fact dominated the private discussions. But in my gut, I’d also fear I was wrong.

— John P. Hannah, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, served as national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2005 to 2009.