In accordance with legislation that accompanied the 2015 agreement, the U.S. president must decide every 90 days whether to “recertify” that the Islamic Republic is complying with its terms or to declare it in violation. After reportedly vigorous debate among his senior advisers, President Trump opted on Monday to recertify for the second time in his term. The White House argues that more time is needed to study the question and formulate new policy before blowing up the entire deal by declaring Iran in violation. But the editors of the Weekly Standard argue that time is short:

Iran is not, in fact, complying with the agreement. As Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, David Perdue, and Marco Rubio pointed out in a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last week, the Iranian regime has exceeded the number of uranium-enrichment centrifuges and levels of heavy-water production it’s permitted under the agreement; it’s aggressively trying to attain nuclear and missile technology outside the terms of the deal; and it’s refusing to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect its nuclear operations. . . .

Administration officials tell us that this recertification is pro forma, a congressionally mandated box-checking that buys the White House time to complete a comprehensive policy review. The real debate about Iran policy continues. Fair enough, but we strongly suspect the same reasons for keeping up the conceit will exist 90 days from now, when the next recertification is due.

Secretary Tillerson has said his goal is a new deal, or at least significant provisions to strengthen the existing one. But it’s unclear how the Trump administration, having paraded its “America First” foreign policy throughout Europe in recent weeks, will convince other parties to the Iran deal—some of whom have strong economic [and, in Russia’s case, military] ties to Tehran—to sign up for an Iran deal, Part Two.

Donald Trump was engaging in a bit of campaign hyperbole when he promised to make dismantling the Iran deal his first order of business as president. The longer he waits to formulate a comprehensive Iran policy, the more likely it is that Iran will become that top priority on its own.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.