5 Takes on the Iran Nuclear Deal

Assuming it clears Congress, it won't be possible to truly assess whether the Iran nuclear deal was a smart move by President Obama until after he's out of office, observes David Sanger in the New York Times. "The best guess today, even among the most passionate supporters of the president’s Iran project, is that the judgment will be mixed." Still, here's a sample of what's out there:

• Effect on election: Foreign policy could matter, writes Greg Sargent at the Washington Post. The deal "makes it more likely that the 2016 election will be fought, at least partly, around a broad argument over the proper extent of U.S. international engagement as a means to solve the biggest future challenges we face."
• Legacy changer? "If it succeeds, the agreement could upgrade Obama’s checkered foreign policy legacy, as well provide a crowning achievement for (John) Kerry’s 30-year political career," observes Politico. "Analysts call it one of the modern era’s most important arms control agreements, in a league with the 1970 international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the 1994 START nuclear missile treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union."

• Tough sell with GOP: This quote from Lindsey Graham to Bloomberg about the deal is a familiar sentiment: "It’s incredibly dangerous for our national security, and it’s akin to declaring war on Sunni Arabs and Israel ... because it ensures their primary antagonist Iran will become a nuclear power and allows them to rearm conventionally."
• From the left: This could end "36 years of ferocious antagonism and a 12-year stand-off over Iran's nuclear program," says a post at Daily Kos. "That stand-off was punctuated by repeated right-wing calls for air attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities. Any attacks, in addition to killing large numbers of Iranian civilians, would certainly have produced a strong military response from Iran, something the proponents chose to ignore the way they always ignore blowback and the other consequences of such actions."
• From the right: "All you need to do to make sense of this deal is believe, as the White House obviously does, that attacking Iran’s enrichment facilities would be a worse outcome than Iran building a bomb," writes Allahpundit at Hot Air. "That’s it. The great shining 'achievement' of the deal isn’t that it eliminates Iran’s program—it doesn’t—but that it removes any remaining domestic pressure on Obama to further escalate with Iran, either by sanctions or military strike, to stop it."

(More President Obama stories.)