Senior Obama administration officials praised and celebrated one another, as well as the White House’s negotiating team in Vienna, following the announcement Tuesday morning of a final deal meant to curb Iran’s contested nuclear program.

“I couldn’t be more proud of the team, … and I could not be more grateful to the courage the president of the United States has taken to give us a chance to do this deal,” said one senior Obama administration official during a conference call with reporters following the announcement of the deal, which has already been criticized for failing to adequately rein in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program…

Obama “told Secretary Kerry how proud he was of him,” the official said.

There will be significant sanctions relief for the leader of the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard accused of supplying militants with weapons to kill Americans during the Iraq war, under the new Iran nuclear deal.

Gen. Qasem Soleimani will have his travel ban lifted and foreign assets unfrozen — sanctions imposed by the UN — if the deal goes as planned…

A senior State Department official, who spoke to ABC News on the condition of anonymity, said the terms for Soleimani and the broader relief package agreed upon in November 2013 ultimately brought the Iranians to the negotiating table.

“Instead of making the world less dangerous, this ‘deal’ will only embolden Iran — the world’s largest sponsor of terror — by helping stabilize and legitimize its regime as it spreads even more violence and instability in the region,” Boehner said in his statement. “Instead of stopping the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, this deal is likely to fuel a nuclear arms race around the world.”…

“At the outset of these talks, the Obama administration said it would secure an agreement that affirmed Iran does not have a right to enrich and permanently dismantles the infrastructure of its nuclear programs,” the Speaker said. “It said that sanctions would not be lifted until Iran met concrete, verifiable standards. And if these terms were not met, the president promised he would walk away. 

“The American people and our allies were counting on President Obama to keep his word. Instead, the president has abandoned his own goals.”

The newly announced deal between Iran and six world powers is “akin to declaring war on Israel and the Sunni Arabs,” and will be a huge problem for Hillary Clinton, according to GOP presidential candidate and Senator Lindsey Graham, who promised to not uphold the deal if he is elected next year.

“My initial impression is that this deal is far worse than I ever dreamed it could be and will be a nightmare for the region, our national security and eventually the world at large,” Graham told me in an interview early Tuesday morning, just after Iran, China, France, Russia, Britain, the U.S. and Germany confirmed they had reached terms for a historic deal to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

“Iran is going to receive a sure path to nuclear weapons,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. “Many of the restrictions that were supposed to prevent it from getting there will be lifted.”

With the lifting of economic sanctions, Netanyahu warned, “Iran will get a jackpot, a cash bonanza of hundreds of billions of dollars, which will enable it to continue to pursue its aggression and terror.”

Netanyahu’s hard-line coalition partner, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, added: “Today a terrorist nuclear superpower is born, and it will go down as one of the darkest days in world history.”

Netanyahu’s fellow Likud member, Science Minister Danny Danon, said the Iran pact “is like providing a pyromaniac with matches.”

Kerry on Fordow just now: "We'll have daily access"

Mitchell: No you won't.

Kerry: Yeah, but we can file questions. pic.twitter.com/MMtlz91AZn

— Elliott Schwartz (@elliosch) July 14, 2015

This is a picture that we’ve all seen before. Back in 1994, American negotiators promised a “good deal” with North Korea. Its nuclear plants were supposed to be frozen and dismantled. International inspectors would “carefully monitor” North Korea’s compliance with the agreement and ensure the country’s return to the “community of nations.” The world, we were told, would be a safer place…

So why, then, are only Israelis united in opposing this deal? The answer is that we have the most to lose, at least in the short run. We know that the deal allows Iran to break out and create nuclear bombs in as little as three months, too quickly for the world to react. We know that the Ayatollahs, who have secretly constructed fortified nuclear facilities that have no peaceful purpose and have violated all of their international commitments, will break this deal in steps too small to precipitate a powerful global response. And we know that the sanctions, once lifted, cannot be swiftly revived, and that hundreds of billions of dollars Iran will soon receive will not be spent on better roads and schools. That treasure will fund the shedding of blood – of Israelis but also of many others.

Israelis know that, while the world might weather its deception by North Korea, they cannot afford to be duped by Iran. But neither, in fact, can the United States. Just last week, Iran’s President attended a rally in Tehran where tens of thousands of protesters chanted “Death to America.” The deal will better enable them to carry out that attack – if not today, then against future generations.

It would be a better world if anti-Semitic regimes put aside their hatreds to pursue their vital interests, but history militates against that illusion. You don’t need to invoke the famous and egregious example of Nazis diverting precious resources, trucks, and other war materials, in order to keep transporting Jews to the concentration camps. You don’t have to recall how some Nazis busily executed Jews even as they ran from the conquering allied troops. You can invoke Vichy, France, turning over the Jews who were its best and brightest, or the Soviet Union, which lost so much cultural and business acumen and capital through years of suppression. Anti-Semites cannot help themselves. To them, the injury is worthwhile if they can savage the Jews.

So without exploring the specifics of the deal, which are troubling, there is a ground-level assumption that Iran’s leaders share our fundamental interests in “having some semblance of legitimacy.” Granting that Iran is a sophisticated country, it’s also true that hatred of Israel and particularly, hatred of Jews, has proved a remarkably durable governing strategy in the modern world. How far will Iranians go, once some money is in hand, to pursue their destructive agenda? The belief that rational self-interest is a governing principle is a belief common to rational people.

In a world where countries are run by anti-Semites, being anti-Semitic is not necessarily less dangerous than misunderstanding anti-Semitism. We have just concluded a deal with people infected with the oldest and most virulent pathology of hatred the world has known. This is no time for celebration.

Isn’t it odd how every pundit and politician who’s been antagonistic towards Israel is also super excited about an Iranian deal that’s allegedly going to help protect the Jewish State from the threat of nuclear Iran?

All the peacemongers love it.

“We are satisfied that the solution found is based on the principle of phasing and mutuality which our country has been consistently supporting at every stage of these complicated negotiations,” says Vlad Putin, the leader of the country that made Iranian nuclear power a possibility. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad says he’s confident his ally in Iran will now step up its efforts to back his “just causes” after the nuclear deal is wrapped up. And really, why wouldn’t it?…

Obama is now locked in no matter how poorly implementation goes and no matter how uncooperative Iran will be. Otherwise, it is another political failure. And most Democrats are probably locked in to supporting the deal for a number of partisan and ideological reasons. Signing it, they will argue, proves that diplomacy, not war, can work. Liberals have been offering this false choice for so many years, so it’s doubtful they can back away from it now.

The first step for a newly inaugurated president would be to order a review of the accord, which will already have been in effect for roughly a year and a half.

It’s possible the Iranians will have been accused of violating the deal by the time a new president takes office, so a review could tally those transgressions to sow doubts in the minds of the American public about the soundness of the agreement. Depending on how major the violations are, the U.S. might also be able to convince other nations that the deal isn’t working.

Even if the Iranians haven’t committed any or many notable violations, there are other factors a president could point to.

Take the regional situation: If Iran, either directly or through proxies, has escalated its interference in other countries in the Middle East, a president could blame the nuclear deal by saying it has given Tehran economic leverage to pursue mischief outside its borders. America’s Arab allies, who have watched Iran make inroads everywhere from Syria to Lebanon to Iraq, have long argued that the Iranian government will take advantage of sanctions relief to funnel more money toward its regional aggression.

Let’s think for a moment about what it would mean if the next president abandoned this deal. Such an action would involve two parts: reimposing sanctions and walking away from inspections. But there’s no reason to think that the other world powers that agreed to this deal would go along with either one, particularly if the new arrangement is operating as it was intended. Don’t forget that this isn’t a deal between Iran and the United States, it’s a deal between Iran, the United States, Russia, China, and Europe. The reason the current sanctions regime has crippled the Iran’s economy is that it was imposed not just by the United States but also by the United Nations, the European Union, and many other individual countries. So if we reimposed sanctions but those other countries didn’t, Iran would be left with plenty of trading partners.

That means that if President Walker/Bush/Rubio/Trump walked away from the deal, it wouldn’t actually hurt Iran that much. But it would mean saying that America is no longer interested in keeping tabs on Iran’s nuclear program — we’re going to pull out our inspectors, and as far as we’re concerned they can do what they like…

For now, there are two questions that every Republican who opposes this deal must be asked: First, what’s your alternative? And second, can you explain exactly how your alternative would prevent Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon? Policy choices don’t exist in a vacuum. Whenever we say that one course of action is problematic, we’re saying that another course would be better. As far as I can tell (though it isn’t easy to figure out since they’re so vague on this question), the Republican position is that we should have walked away from these negotiations and just…wait. Then after some undetermined period, Iran would come crawling back and give us everything we could ever want, without the need for any negotiations at all.

When critics focus incessantly on the gap between the present deal and a perfect one, what they’re really doing is blaming Obama for the fact that the United States is not omnipotent. This isn’t surprising given that American omnipotence is the guiding assumption behind contemporary Republican foreign policy. Ask any GOP presidential candidate except Rand Paul what they propose doing about any global hotspot and their answer is the same: be tougher. America must take a harder line against Iran’s nuclear program, against ISIS, against Bashar al-Assad, against Russian intervention in Ukraine and against Chinese ambitions in the South China Sea…

If you believe American power is limited, this agenda is absurd. America needs Russian and Chinese support for an Iranian nuclear deal. U.S. officials can’t simultaneously put maximum pressure on both Assad and ISIS, the two main rivals for power in Syria today. They must decide who is the lesser evil. Accepting that American power is limited means prioritizing. It means making concessions to regimes and organizations you don’t like in order to put more pressure on the ones you fear most. That’s what Franklin Roosevelt did when allying with Stalin against Hitler. It’s what Richard Nixon did when he reached out to communist China in order to increase America’s leverage over the U.S.S.R…

Obama has certainly made mistakes in the Middle East. But behind his drive for an Iranian nuclear deal is the effort to make American foreign policy “solvent” again by bringing America’s ends into alignment with its means. That means recognizing that the United States cannot bludgeon Iran into total submission, either economically or militarily. The U.S. tried that in Iraq.

Mr. Obama will be long out of office before any reasonable assessment can be made as to whether that roll of the dice paid off. The best guess today, even among the most passionate supporters of the president’s Iran project, is that the judgment will be mixed…

Mr. Obama is essentially betting that once sanctions have been lifted, Iran’s leaders will have no choice but to use much of the new money to better the lives of their long-suffering citizens. He has told his aides that he expects relatively little to be spent to finance terrorism or the emerging corps of Iranian cyberwarriors, a group now as elite as Iran’s nuclear scientists.

Ayatollah Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards generals, dedicated to preserving the principles of the 1979 revolution, are taking the other side of that bet: that they can use the money and legitimacy of the accord to advance their interests and to keep in check a young Iranian population that is clearly a lot less interested in next-generation centrifuges than it is in getting visas to visit and study in the West…

“Four decades ago, it was clear that Mao had made a fundamental decision about his strategic shift, and he opened relations with the United States after concluding that the Soviet Union was a fundamental challenge to both of them,” said Karim Sadjadpour, who examines Iran policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “In Iran, there is hope for a strategic shift, but it will take years to know.” And it may take a new supreme leader.

Even if Tehran tries to cheat or just puts off its nuclear ambitions until the deal expires, the president and his top aides see the decade or more they’ve now bought as a decade or more in which a lot of things could happen in Iran, according to several sources who’ve had conversations with high-ranking people in the West Wing.

That could mean regime change. Maybe moderates and the democratic opposition will strengthen enough as more time passes for the Supreme Leader, who’s already 76 and has had prostate cancer (though that kind of bet hasn’t paid off well for the United States elsewhere around the world of late). Or perhaps Iranians will get used to having more of a place in the international community and the global economy, with the country’s young and secular population given time to gain more influence…

He used a word from his campaign posters, a word that captured the idealism that got him elected in 2008 and the evoked the bitterness about his failed promises: “Our differences are real and the difficult history between our nations cannot be ignored. But it is possible to change,” he said, hitting the end of the sentence.

But according to top administration officials, Mr. Obama has always been after something much bigger than capping Iran’s nuclear program, and he got it—the strategic opportunity to begin converting Iran from foe to “friend.”

Iranian negotiators understood well what’s been driving the U.S. president, and they have used the prospect of becoming “a friend” as their best bargaining card. For over a year now in small private conversations and strolls, they have been painting rosy pictures of Iranian-American cooperation.

The Iranian list of possibilities goes to most of Washington’s principal worries about the broad Middle East. They would step up their fighting alongside Iraqi troops to combat the so-called Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) in central Iraq. And they would do much more in Syria to go after the headquarters and main forces that ISIS has there. They spoke of finding “solutions” to the civil war in Yemen between Sunnis and Iran-backed Shiites. They raised hopes of forging better relations with America’s “partners” in the Gulf. They pressed the idea of  renewing the cooperation they once had with the U.S. fighting the Taliban at the beginning of the Afghan war.

[H]ere is the most important question to ask going forward: Does this deal significantly reduce the chance that Iran could, in the foreseeable future (20 years is the time period Obama mentioned in an interview with me in May), continue its nefarious activities under the protection of a nuclear umbrella? If the answer to this question is yes, then a deal, in theory, is worth supporting…

I mentioned Syria earlier as an example of a country that could suffer under this agreement. Other Arab states are, of course, under threat from an empowered, better-funded Iran. One country that I think could conceivably—conceivably—benefit from this deal is Israel. It will face acute conventional challenges from Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese proxy, but Hezbollah will be operating, for the time being at least, without the protection of an Iranian nuclear umbrella. If the plausible case can be made that this deal actually pushes Iran further away from the nuclear threshold—and we’ll have time, over the next 60 days, to test this case—then Israel will be better off with this deal than it would be without it. Unlike many proponents of this deal, I take the Iranian regime’s threats to exterminate Israel seriously. (I’m not sure, based on my last conversation with Obama, that he fully understands the depth of the regime’s anti-Semitism, in part because the regime’s anti-Semitism is so absurdly offensive and illogical that the hyper-rational Obama might not believe that serious people actually think the way certain Iranians think.)…

I worry that Obama’s negotiators might have given away too much to the Iranians. On the other hand, Netanyahu’s dream—of total Iranian capitulation—was never going to become a reality. The dirty little secret of this whole story is that it is very difficult to stop a large nation that possesses both natural resources and human talent, and a deep desire for power, from getting the bomb. We’ll see, in the coming days, if Obama and Kerry have devised an effective mechanism to keep Iran far away from the nuclear threshold.

“You know, I have a lot of differences with Ronald Reagan, but where I completely admire him was his recognition that if you were able to verify an agreement that [was negotiated] with the evil empire that was hellbent on our destruction and was a far greater existential threat to us than Iran will ever be,” then it would be worth doing, Mr. Obama said. “I had a lot of disagreements with Richard Nixon, but he understood there was the prospect, the possibility, that China could take a different path. You test these things, and as long as we are preserving our security capacity — as long as we are not giving away our ability to respond forcefully, militarily, where necessary to protect our friends and our allies — that is a risk we have to take. It is a practical, common-sense position. It’s not naïve; it’s a recognition that if we can in fact resolve some of these differences, without resort to force, that will be a lot better for us and the people of that region.”…

“What I’d say to them is this offers a historic opportunity,” the president said. “Their economy has been cratering as a consequence of the sanctions. They have the ability now to take some decisive steps to move toward a more constructive relationship with the world community. … They need to seize that opportunity, their leaders need to seize that opportunity. And the truth of the matter is that Iran will be and should be a regional power. They are a big country and a sophisticated country in the region. They don’t need to invite the hostility and the opposition of their neighbors by their behavior. It’s not necessary for them to be great to denigrate Israel or threaten Israel or engage in Holocaust denial or anti-Semitic activity. Now that’s what I would say to the Iranian people. Whether the Iranian people have sufficient influence to fundamentally shift how their leaders think about these issues, time will tell.”