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Editor's note: Michael Rubin is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of "Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes." The views expressed are his own.

(CNN) -- A quip often attributed to Albert Einstein defines insanity as conducting the same actions repeatedly but expecting different results each time. By that characterization, insanity has been running rampant in Vienna, where diplomats from Iran and the P5+1, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany, have extended the deadline for talks aimed at resolving concerns over Iran's nuclear program.

The problem is not the attempt to resolve the crisis through diplomacy, but rather that the current diplomacy neither takes into account past Iranian behavior nor the lessons from similar diplomacy two decades ago to resolve North Korea's clandestine nuclear work.

Michael Rubin

First, it's important to remember the root of distrust regarding Iran's nuclear program.

Iran has, for several decades, declared nuclear enrichment and experimentation to be its unalienable right. It signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, membership of which includes technology sharing and enrichment. Every signatory, however, must negotiate a Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nation's nuclear watchdog, an agreement the IAEA concluded in 2005 that Iran violated.

Efforts to resolve suspicion about Iran's nuclear ambitions are based on two pillars: Logic and behavior.

Iranian authorities repeatedly say they want an indigenous nuclear program to power their country and they seek energy security. The problem is that Iran only appears to have enough uranium reserves to provide fuel for eight reactors -- the number Iranian authorities seek -- for 15 years. Conversely, for a fraction of the cost of its nuclear program, Iranian authorities could refurbish and expand its oil and gas refinery and pipeline network and power itself for more than a century.

Then, of course, there's Iran's past behavior.

Excerpt from:
No deal with Iran is better than a bad one (Opinion) - CNN.com