Read critics of President Obama’s framework nuclear deal and you’ll find a lot of talk about Iran’s “revolutionary” foreign policy. Last Friday in The New York Times, David Brooks declared that, “President Obama’s deal with Iran is really a giant gamble on the nature of the Iranian regime. … Do they still fervently believe in their revolution and would they use their postsanctions wealth to export it and destabilize their region?” Last week in The Wall Street Journal, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz warned that, “Iran’s representatives (including its Supreme Leader) continue to profess a revolutionary anti-Western concept of international order.” Last month, in a column arguing for bombing Tehran, Joshua Muravchik warned that, “Iran aims to carry its Islamic revolution across the Middle East and beyond.”

The more you think about this, the less convincing it is. First, even if you assume that Iran’s foreign policy is “revolutionary,” that doesn’t tell you anything about the wisdom of the framework nuclear deal. The more revolutionary Iran’s foreign policy is, the less desirable it is for Iran to get a nuclear weapon. But both sides in the current debate want to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon; their argument is about whether the framework agreed to in Lausanne makes that prospect more or less likely. Stressing Iran’s revolutionary nature, in other words, doesn’t tell you whether to back the current negotiations. It just tells you the stakes are very high.

Second, there’s something odd about Brooks and Muravchik using “revolutionary” as an epithet. After all, it’s not Ayatollah Khamenei who sent hundreds of thousands of troops to overthrow an Arab regime in hopes of fomenting revolution across the Middle East. The world leader who did that was George W. Bush, with enthusiastic support from Brooks and Muravchik. Since then, neoconservatives have often criticized Obama for not pursuing revolution aggressively enough in Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Russia. Obviously, America’s revolutionary ideology is completely different from Iran’s. But that just underscores the point. Criticizing Iran for exporting tyranny or theocracy or terrorism makes sense. Criticizing it for exporting “revolution,” when you want America to export revolutions of its own, does not.