RUTHFULLY YOURS

For past 38 years, Iran’s Islamist regime has demonstrated that it is neither able nor willing to reform.

The time for the U.S. jettisoning its toxic “nuclear deal”, and for regime change in Iran, is now.

The Trump Administration reluctantly certified to Congress on July 17 that Iran had continued to meet the “required conditions” for the 2015 “nuclear deal”, signed by six world powers. Despite the certification, US officials were quick to remind Iranian regime that it is not out of the woods yet. Senior administration officials made it clear that President Trump intends to impose new sanctions on Iran for ongoing “malign activities” in non-nuclear areas such as ballistic missile development and support for terrorism.

The Trump administration made good on its promise just a day later, by imposing new sanctions on five individuals and 14 entities related to violations of what “primary” sanctions.

“The United States remains deeply concerned about Iran’s malign activities across the Middle East which undermine regional stability, security and prosperity,” said State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert in a statement, adding that “Iran’s support for US-designated terrorist groups, militias and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as well as domestic human rights concerns,” remain unresolved in the eyes of US officials.

The mullahs in Tehran try hard to shift world’s focus from their unneighborly activities in all other areas, such as sponsoring terrorist groups in the region, including the Lebanese Hezbollah, and, with the help of North Koreans, manufacturing indigenous missiles that are gradually improving in accuracy and range, and last but not least, oppressing Iran’s population.

A range of US officials have made it clear to the regime in Tehran that, no matter how hard it tries to whitewash its image, such behavior is unacceptable.

US Defense Secretary James Mattis said in an interview that Iran is not trustworthy and by “far the biggest threat to peace and stability in the region,” and he gave credit again to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for effectively using economic sanctions, and “forcing the Iranian regime to the negotiating table.”

Army Gen. Joseph Votel, commander of the U.S. Central Command also emphasized again that the Iranian regime remains the main source of instability in the region. “The Iranian regime,” he said, “remains the most destabilizing influence in the CentCom region.”

Such sharp comments on Iran’s role in the region and beyond are not limited to that of Mattis or Votel. US officials are now openly calling for “regime change.” President Trump named the Iranian regime among the “rogue regimes like North Korea… and Syria and the governments that finance and support them.”

After Iran’s fake-democratic elections on May 19, in which the slate of possible candidates was cherry-picked by the regime, and the declared reelection of Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, US policy on Iran requires a major overhaul. The Obama Administration’s ostensible vain hope was that after the nuclear deal was struck with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in the summer of 2015, the mullah’s regime would suddenly transform and turn into a responsible first-class world player. Two years into the deal with the Iranian regime, as foretold, the world is not a better place.

Old habits die hard, particularly with the rulers in Tehran. Hostage-taking of foreign nationals, and especially US citizens, has been a habit of this regime since day one. On July 17, an announcement appeared that Xiyue Wang, 37, a Princeton University student pursuing a Ph.D. in Eurasian history, had been arrested in Iran and sentenced to 10 years in prison on dubious charges of espionage. He is accused of spying for the US and the UK.

During the eight years of the Obama administration, half a million Christians, Yazidis and Muslims were slaughtered in the Middle East by ISIS and other Islamic jihadists, in a genocidal campaign waged in the name of Islam and its God. Twenty million others were driven into exile by these same jihadist forces. Libya and Yemen became terrorist states. America – once the dominant foreign power and anti-jihadist presence in the region – was replaced by Russia, an ally of the monster regimes in Syria and Iran, and their terrorist proxies. Under the patronage of the Obama administration, Iran – the largest and most dangerous terrorist state, with the blood of thousands of Americans on its hands – emerged from its isolation as a pariah state to re-enter the community of nations and become the region’s dominant power, arming and directing its terrorist proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and Yemen.

These disasters are a direct consequence of the policies of appeasement and retreat of the Obama administration. Beyond that, they are a predictable result of the Democratic Party’s long-standing resistance to the so-called war on terror, and its sabotage of George Bush’s efforts to enforce 17 UN Security Council resolutions in Iraq, aimed at maintaining international order and peace in the Middle East.

In fact, the primary cause of the disasters in the Middle East is the Democratic Party’s sabotage of the War in Iraq. Democrats first voted to authorize the armed overthrow of Iraq’s terror regime but within three months of its inception reversed their position 180 degrees and declared the war “immoral, illegal & unnecessary.” The reason for the Democrats’ reversal on the war had nothing to do with the war itself or the so-called absence of weapons of mass destruction, but was rather a political response to the fact that an anti-war Democrat, Howard Dean, was running away with their presidential nomination. It was this that caused John Kerry and his party to forget that the war was about Saddam’s defiance of 17 UN Security Council resolutions, and refusal to allow the UN inspectors to carry out their efforts to ascertain whether he had destroyed his nuclear and chemical arsenals.

Beginning in June 2003, Democrats began claiming – falsely – that Bush had lied to secure their support for the war. “Bush lied, people died,” became the left’s slogan to cripple the war effort. Bush couldn’t have lied because Democrats had access to every bit of intelligence information on Iraq that he did. But this false narrative began what became a five-year campaign to demonize America’s commander-in-chief and undermine his efforts to subdue the terrorists and pacify the region.

The Democrats’ anti-war crusade climaxed with the election of Barack Obama, a leftwing activist and vocal opponent of the war, and of the majority of Senate Democrats who voted for it. At the time of Obama’s election, America and its allies had won the war and subdued the terrorists by turning the Sunnis in Anbar province against them. But the new commander-in-chief refused to use American forces to secure the peace, and instead set out to withdraw all American military personnel from Iraq. This was a fatal step that created a power vacuum, which was quickly filled by Iran and ISIS.

Obama’s generals had advised him to maintain a post-war force of 20,000 troops in country along with the military base America had built in Baghdad. But Obama had made military withdrawal the centerpiece of his foreign policy and ignored his national security team’s advice. Had he not done so, American forces would have been able to effectively destroy ISIS at its birth, saving more than 500,000 lives and avoiding the creation of nearly 20 million refugees in Syria and Iraq.

Instead of protecting Iraq and the region from the Islamic terrorists, Obama surrendered the peace, turning Iraq over to Iran and the terrorists, and betraying every American and Iraqi who had given their lives to keep them out. The message of the Obama White House – to be repeated through all eight years of his tenure – was that America was the disturber of the peace, and not “radical Islamic terrorism” – words he refused to utter. Instead he even removed the phrase “war on terror” from all official statements and replaced it with “overseas contingency operations.”

Second among the causes of the Middle East’s human tragedy was Obama’s support for the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad whom his secretaries of state, Clinton and Kerry both endorsed as a democratic reformer on the very eve of his savage war against his own people. This was followed by Obama’s refusal to enforce the red line he drew to prevent Assad from using chemical weapons on the Syrian population. When Assad did use them, Obama averted his eyes and papered over his culpability by arranging a phony deal with Russia to remove Assad’s chemical arsenal. Six years later, Assad was again using chemical weapons on Syrian civilians, the exposing Obama’s ruse.

Since Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, a constant drumbeat of Russophobia has resounded throughout the halls of power. Today, the drumbeat has become so deafening that Congress’s already self-imposed inability to legislate has been made even worse, if you can believe it. In turn, this clamorous Russophobia has needlessly blunted the president’s ability to “make America Great again.”https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/27/americas-newest-epidemic-toxic-russophobia/

America’s current Russophobia epidemic is not based on anything substantive. Rather, our Ruling Class are still sick about their preferred candidate losing the November election. How pathetic.
For all the talk of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous tyranny (and, yes, he is an autocrat who intimidates, jails, and likely even kills his opponents), our Russophobes usually miss something crucial: Putin’s grip on power is tenuous at best (which is why he is fighting so hard to keep hold onto it) and Russia’s social and economic standing in the world is precarious. In fact, Russia is in outright decline. If the West is not careful, we may end up sending Russia over-the-cliff and into collapse. Be assured, no matter how terrible Putin’s regime may be, what comes afterward can be much, much worse for the United States.

Fact is, like the Ottoman Empire of yesteryear, the Russian Federation is the “sick man” of Eurasia. Rather than formulating doctrines and programs for speeding up the Russian Federation’s demise (as the United States did to the Soviet Union during the Cold War), the American government should be doing what the British and French Empires did to the Ottoman Empire throughout the last part of its existence: figuring out how to guide the flailing empire to a proverbial soft landing.

Remember, the great European empires (other than Czarist Russia) fought hard to ensure the Ottoman Empire did not collapse, lest the “Sick Man of Europe” ultimately spread his contagion. World War I represented the collapse of this policy, as the Ottomans aligned with the Central Powers to fight the Allies, and made British and French attempts at preserving it impossible.

What followed, of course, was the creation of the modern Middle East by the British and French (as well as the Russians and other European colonial powers). And as you know from recent events, the modern Middle East is a disaster zone. What happened in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire is likely to happen in modern Russia, should the United States keep pushing hard against the enfeebled regime, as we have since 2014. Only imagine the collapse of the Ottoman Empire with scores of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons being loosed from its bases. Does that sound like a good future for the world?

Of course, our elite—the “wise” graybeards of American foreign policy—don’t pay much mind to that scenario. They laugh at such suggestions. But bear in mind that since the United States imposed harsh economic sanctions on Moscow following its unlawful annexation of Crimea, Russia’s economy has collapsed. As a result, the internal security situation in Russia is precarious. In response, the Putin regime has imposed greater restrictions on what little democracy exists in Russia. Meanwhile, our European friends—who are entirely dependent on Russian energy sources and trade—are made weaker, not stronger, by the lack of access to Russian goods. Plus, the sanctions have inspired the kind of political extremism in Europe that our Europhilic elite claim to abhor.

The Russophobia has become so toxic that Russia is looking to China for a new alliance. In other words, our ruling elite’s excessive animus toward Moscow risks harming American grand strategy for at least a generation. After all, it was the great British geostrategist, Sir Halford Mackinder, who warned the West of the grave danger that would exist should a power (or group of powers) come to dominate the immense natural resources of the “world island” that is Eurasia. And as we saw during the early Cold War, a Sino-Russian alliance is terrible for U.S. foreign policy.

The State Department’s own “deep state” is trying to sabotage President Trump’s foreign policy agenda. From the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Iran, Qatar and climate change, the State Department, under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, is reported to be in “open war” with the White House. Key high level positions remain vacant as Obama holdovers “continue running the show and formulating policy, where they have increasingly clashed with the White House’s own agenda,” according to the Free Beacon. Secretary Tillerson has reportedly run interference to protect the Obama holdovers from being removed, allowing resistance to President Trump’s foreign policy agenda to flourish within the State Department.

The first casualty of this internal coup by the State Department’s deep state is Israel. The shadow of the Obama administration’s anti-Israel bias was reflected in a report the State Department released on July 17, 2017 entitled Country Reports on Terrorism 2016. It praised Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for reiterating “his commitment to nonviolence, recognition of the State of Israel, and pursuit of an independent Palestinian state through peaceful means.” The report referred to what it called “significant steps during President Abbas’ tenure (2005 to date) to ensure that official institutions in the West Bank under its control do not create or disseminate content that incites violence.”

The State Department report brushed aside clear evidence of a continuing barrage of incendiary rhetoric appearing on official Palestinian Authority and Fatah social media outlets and of inflammatory statements by Palestinian officials, including Abbas himself. Instead, it claimed that the Palestinian Authority “has made progress in reducing official rhetoric that could be considered incitement to violence.”

The State Department report conveniently skipped over the fact that Abbas remains committed to paying regular salaries to Palestinian terrorists imprisoned for killing Jews and to terrorists’ families. Their perfidiously named “Martyrs Fund” has a treasure chest of about $300 million dollars. That blood money comes in part from foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority, some of which is contributed by American taxpayers. President Trump has spoken out against the ‘pay to slay Jews’ terrorist payments, but the State Department has turned a blind eye. Obama holdover Stuart Jones, the Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, is reported to have steered Secretary Tillerson into making the erroneous claim that the Palestinian Authority had ceased spending U.S. taxpayer funds to pay terrorists, according to the Free Beacon’s sources.

After reciting the litany of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis, the State Department report held Israel largely responsible:

“Continued drivers of violence included a lack of hope in achieving Palestinian statehood, Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the perception that the Israeli government was changing the status quo on the Haram Al Sharif/Temple Mount, and IDF tactics that the Palestinians considered overly aggressive.”

Just a few hours after three members of an Israeli family were massacred by a Palestinian terrorist, a State Department official tried to defend the report’s conclusions on the drivers of Palestinian violence. The official sounded like a clinical psychologist or a social worker, declaring that there is “no one single pathway to violence—each individual’s path to terrorism is personalized, with certain commonalities.” This is the same type of irresponsible rhetoric used by the Obama administration in discussing the supposed root causes of what it called “violent extremism.”

The State Department has also carried over the Obama administration’s soft pedaling on Iran. Instead of presenting options to President Trump supporting a refusal to re-certify that Iran has complied with all of its obligations under the disastrous Obama nuclear deal with Iran, the State Department took Iran’s side. It recommended twice that President Trump sign certifications of Iran’s compliance. Deprived by the State Department of any analysis to the contrary, as he had requested, the president reluctantly signed the certifications in April and July. However, he has reportedly decided to sidestep the State Department going forward and rely instead on a White House team to prepare the way for refusing to sign the certification the next time it is presented to him. CIA Director Mike Pompeo, senior strategist Steve Bannon, and deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka opposed the State Department’s recommendation.

“The president assigned White House staffers with the task of preparing for the possibility of decertification for the 90-day review period that ends in October — a task he had previously given to Secretary Tillerson and the State Department,” a source close to the White House told Foreign Policy.

President Donald Trump has reportedly sidelined the State Department and entrusted White House staffers with making the potential case for withholding certification of Iran at the next 90-day review of the nuclear deal, Foreign Policy reported.

According to the report, the president made the decision after his “contentious meeting” with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last week.

Via Newsmax:

“The president assigned White House staffers with the task of preparing for the possibility of decertification for the 90-day review period that ends in October — a task he had previously given to Secretary Tillerson and the State Department,” an unnamed source told FP.

FP explained that Trump relayed the new assignment last Tuesday to a group of White House staffers after he reluctantly signed certification.

“This is the president telling the White House that he wants to be in a place to decertify 90 days from now and it’s their job to put him there,” the source told FP.

According to FP, three unnamed sources described the new process as a way to work around the State Department, which the president felt had given him no other options but to sign certification.

“This is about the president asking Tillerson at the last certification meeting 90 days earlier to lay the groundwork so Trump could consider his options,” one of the sources said.

“Tillerson did not do this, and Trump is infuriated. He can’t trust his secretary of state to do his job, so he is turning to the few White House staffers he trusts the most,” the source added.

According to FP, there’s been friction for “months” between the White House and State Department over how to handle the Iran nuclear pact — something Trump had vowed to tear up during his presidential campaign.

Last Monday, as the administration was set to certify that Iran was meeting the necessary conditions, “the president expressed second thoughts around midday” and a meeting between Trump and Tillerson that afternoon “quickly turned into a meltdown,” FP reported.

Steve Bannon, the White House chief strategist, and Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president, repeatedly asked Tillerson to explain the U.S. national security benefits of certification, FP reported.

“The president kept demanding why he should certify, and the answers Tillerson gave him infuriated him,” one source told FP.

Tillerson is “trying to be a counterweight against the hard-liners, trying to save the [nuclear deal], but how long can that last?” one unnamed senior State Department official told FP. “The White House, they see the State Department as ‘the swamp.'”

Tillerson’s communications adviser, R.C. Hammond, disputed the account of the meeting between Trump and Tillerson, however.

“Not everybody in the room agreed with what the secretary was saying,” Hammond said. “But the president is certainly appreciative that someone is giving him clear, coherent information.”

Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton advocated for the United States to withdraw from the Iran Deal last week in an opinion piece at The Hill, calling recertification “an unforced error.”

Certification is an unforced error because the applicable statute (the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, or “INARA”) requires neither certifying Iranian compliance nor certifying Iranian noncompliance. Paula DeSutter and I previously explained that INARA requires merely that the Secretary of State (to whom President Obama delegated the task) “determine… whether [he] is able to certify” compliance (emphasis added). The secretary can satisfy the statute simply by “determining” that he is not prepared for now to certify compliance and that U.S. policy is under review.

During President Trump’s campaign he said that Mr. Obama’s 2015 nuclear weapons deal with Iran was the “worst deal ever.” Although there are many diplomatic deals vying for that title, the deal engineered by Mr. Obama is at least one of the worst ever for two reasons.

First, it essentially guarantees that the world’s principal terrorist nation will obtain nuclear weapons either during the fifteen-year term of the deal (stealthily) or openly soon after it ends. Second, because it does precisely nothing to limitIran’s development and production of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.

The Trump administration has certified to Congress that Iran is in compliance with the deal (the “Joint Cooperative Plan of Action”) twice, first in April and again last week. Those certifications are required every 90 days by the “Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act” (INARA), the anti-constitutional law that permitted Mr. Obama the ability to claim Senate approval of the deal without senate ratification.

Mr. Trump reportedly considered telling Secretary of State Tillerson to not make the July certification but decided not to. It would have been far better if the president had blocked both certifications.

The problems that should have blocked the certifications are found within INARA’s terms or are directly derivative of them.

INARA required that within five days of reaching an agreement with Iran, the president shall send Congress, “the full details of the agreement, including all supporting materials and any classified annexes to the agreement.”

That was never done. The Senate’s duty to object to that failure, thereby killing the deal, was ignored.

Because of the Senate’s failure we don’t know what the so-called agreement actually provides. For almost two years it has been entirely clear that secret side agreements were made with Iran that the U.S. wasn’t allowed to see. At least one of them provides that Iran can self-inspect the Parchin nuclear site which is believed to be the center of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. (Unsurprisingly, the self-inspections tell the IAEA that all is just peachy at Parchin.)

When he was 17, five years ago, Mujtaba al-Sweikat committed the “crime” of participating in a pro-democracy rally in Saudi Arabia. Instead of attending Western Michigan University, as he had planned to do that fall, he was put in prison. Reports are now leaking out of Saudi Arabia that al-Sweikat will soon be beheaded for his transgression. It’s just the latest reminder that Saudi Arabia is America’s worst best friend.

The U.S. does get something out of its relationship with Saudi Arabia; there is real intelligence sharing, and the Kingdom has used its power over OPEC to drive oil prices down when we want to humiliate Russia or accomplish some other goal. That’s not nothing. Nor will I pretend that a global superpower can do the business of horse-trading only with saints and scholars. But there are real costs to our relationship with the Saudis, and I’m not sure that our policy elites are reckoning with them at all.

A day will come when we need friends with whom we share a real civilizational affinity, and our relationship with the Saudis will hurt us on that day. Saudi-funded mosques and preachers flow into the nations of our friends and allies, preaching hatred and occasionally terror. We often talk about how nationalism is a response to the globalization of commerce. But it’s also a response to the globalization of Saudi Arabia’s favorite forms of Islam. Syrian refugees come to Germany and find Saudi-funded mosques that are far more extreme than anything they knew at home. Saudi-funded clerics are a major engine of extremism, and of the nationalist backlash it produces, from France to India.

Saudi actions in this regard are so embarrassing and brazen that Western nations won’t even let themselves be heard discussing them intelligibly. Last Week, U.K. home secretary Amber Rudd refused to publish her own government’s delayed report on the funding of extremist groups. Even in the press releases, the government was too ashamed to admit the fact that everyone knew to be in them: Saudi Arabia funnels money to the extremist groups that threaten Europe with terrorism.

There is a major strategic cost to our alliance with the Saudis, whether anyone cares to admit it or not. The U.S.–Saudi preference for regime change and demotic movements (no matter how loathsome) has been a gift to extremists everywhere. It’s destabilized several Middle Eastern countries and contributed to a refugee crisis that is reordering the politics and society of Europe, while also visiting terrorism on our historic allies. By contrast, the Russian and Iranian strategy of siding with sovereign states (no matter how loathsome) so long as they represent predictable national interests seems rational.

What is needed now is a push for regime change, a watering of the seeds of popular resistance that are again budding — after Obama abandoned the Iranian people in 2009, when they took to the streets to protest the stranglehold of the ayatollahs.

American leadership expert John C. Maxwell defines a leader as “one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” During his two terms in the highest office in the world, former U.S. President Barack Obama failed at all three, with disastrous consequences.

There is no realm in which Obama’s lack of leadership was more glaring than that of foreign policy, particularly in relation to the Middle East. His combination of action and inaction — pushing through the nuclear deal with Iran at all costs, while simultaneously adopting a stance of “patience” with and indifference to Tehran’s sponsorship of global terrorism and foothold in Syria — served no purpose other than to destabilize the region and weaken America’s position.

While hotly pursuing the nuclear accord — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed between Iran and U.S.-led world powers in July 2015 — Obama enabled the regime in Tehran to assist Syrian President Bashar Assad in starving and slaughtering his people (with chemical weapons, among others) into submission. Meanwhile, thanks to Obama’s passivity, and the $1.7 billion his administration transferred to Tehran upon the inking of the JCPOA, the Islamic Republic was able to dispatch its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to recruit and train Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon and Syria, as well as militias in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan.

Today, two years after the signing of the JCPOA, and six months into the presidency of Donald Trump, there is a growing rift between America and Europe over implementation of the deal, which officially went into effect in January 2016. Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has been wavering on whether to remain committed to the deal, which his administration and members of Congress claim has been violated repeatedly by Iran. The U.S. also has maintained certain sanctions, over Iran’s ballistic-missile tests, human-rights abuses and sponsorship of global terrorism.

European countries, however, have taken a very different approach, pointing to International Atomic Energy Organization reports confirming Iran’s compliance, and rushing to do business in and with Tehran.

At a ceremony on July 14, 2017 to mark the anniversary of the deal, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini called the JCPOA a “success for multilateral diplomacy that has proven to work and deliver,” adding, “This deal belongs to the international community, having been endorsed by the United Nations Security Council, that expects all sides to keep the commitments they took two years ago”

Meanwhile, when reports emerged about Trump being “likely” to confirm on July 17 that Iran has been complying with the deal — and because the law requires that both the president and secretary of state re-certify the deal every three months — four Republican senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, with a copy to Trump, urging him not to do so.

Two years on, the Iranian nuclear deal is a failure.

Some will surely protest that this cannot be; on Monday, the Trump administration just indicated that it plans to certify Iranian compliance to Congress. But that certification does not mean what it may seem to.

It certainly does not indicate that Iran has been in perfect compliance with the deal. Iran has already exceeded its limits on uranium enrichment and production of heavy water on several occasions. Furthermore, a series of recent German intelligence reports discovered Iranian efforts to procure technology that “can be used to develop plutonium for nuclear weapons.” One report concluded there was “no evidence” of the “complete about-face in Iran’s atomic policies” that had been hoped for.

But of course there’s no evidence of that. This was the central flaw of the Iran deal: There was never any reason to suspect that the nature or aims of the Iranian regime had changed. Iran of course has scaled back its nuclear advances, but the Supreme Leader and his cronies still seek to obtain a nuclear weapon to fortify their regime, advance Iranian regional hegemony, and threaten Israel. Until this changes, the Iranians can safely be expected to use any deal to better pursue those aims. This is why it matters when H. R. McMaster, director of the National Security Council, explains that Iran has violated the spirit of the agreement.

So why does Trump plan to certify compliance? One debilitating weakness of the Iran deal is that there are no punishment mechanisms short of re-imposing sanctions, at which point Iran can reasonably argue that the deal is dead and it is free to pursue whatever nuclear advances it wants.

The deal provides a process whereby America can allege misconduct and force the U.N. Security Council to vote on a resolution. This resolution would maintain the deal’s suspension of sanctions, so any veto — including the U.S.’s own — would trigger the reestablishment of the legal basis for sanctions. But there are several hurdles to getting the sanctions to “snap back” as promised.

As Eric Lorber and Peter Feaver wrote in Foreign Policy, “An effective sanctions regime consists of a legal basis, the institutional capacity to implement the sanctions, and the political will to carry it through. This course of action only provides for the first.” Indeed, if the sanctions are rejected by Russia or opposed by European allies eager to continue trading with Iran, both of which are likely in the absence of truly flagrant Iranian violations, the sanctions regime will not be effective. It might not even get off the ground and certainly will fail to pressure Iran the way our previous sanctions regime, which took a decade to ratchet up, did. That’s why formally alleging Iranian misconduct is extremely risky: It would unleash Iran and offer only weak and disunited sanctions.

This means that incremental Iranian cheating will likely continue to go unpunished. The best we can do is remain neutral, neither certifying compliance nor alleging noncompliance. But even with this meek third route, declined by the Trump administration this time, the deal leaves us helpless to stop Iran from slowly — never radically — preparing itself to push for a nuclear weapon once the deal’s restrictions wear off in ten and 15 years.

That’s why the deal will be certified. But why is it a failure? Some might say that pushing back a confrontation with Iran by ten or 15 years is a major accomplishment. We’ve bought ourselves time, claimed the deal’s advocates, over and over again.

Philip Gordon and Richard Nephew, two of the Obama-administration officials who negotiated the Iran deal, now repeat this mantra in The Atlantic. The deal was supposed to “buy time for potential changes in Iranian politics and foreign policy,” they write. But have we actually bought ourselves time?

What if it is Iran that has been buying time, using the sanctions relief to put itself in a stronger position for an eventual confrontation? What if, at the end of the Iran deal, Iran is stronger economically, geopolitically, and domestically, while we find ourselves with less power in the region and bereft of an international sanctions coalition?

Then, you might say, we got swindled.