A year after completion of the agreement in Geneva, Raymond Tanter considers its faults, the White House’s failure to enforce it, and what a new president can do. In particular, he notes that the UN resolution designed to ratify the nuclear deal replaced an earlier resolution firmly prohibiting Iran’s ballistic-missile program with a polite request. And that’s only for starters:

The Obama administration failed to hold Tehran accountable for nuclear violations [prior to the deal or since]. But the appeasement of Iran is also tied to state sponsorship of terrorism. In selling the nuclear deal, the administration expressed a hope and implied an expectation that Tehran would moderate its participation in terrorism, for which it has quite a history. . . . [Subsequent] interviews with President Obama [made clear] his faith that Iran’s terrorism can be moderated, which has not been borne out by the facts. . . .

Even more troubling is the Obama administration’s continued support for sanctions relief, irrespective of Iran’s behavior. . . .

Regardless of who is in the Oval Office [come 2017], he or she could work with our partners to counter Tehran’s provocations. Such actions might include the interdiction of illicit arms shipments and sanctioning terrorism financing by the Iranian regime. There also is a need to fix the gap in the nuclear deal—which offers no agreed-upon penalties for Iranian violations of the deal’s terms, short of the last-resort punishment of a “snapback” of UN sanctions against Iran.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.