Many incoming members of the Trump administration felt strongly that the Obama administration—and perhaps even the Bush administration before it—dropped the ball on meeting the challenges posed by Iran. They have half a point. Iran has posed three undeniable challenges to the United States and its partners since the September 11th attacks, and those challenges include its nuclear program, its conventional arms build-up, and its asymmetric activities supporting proxy groups and partners from Yemen to Lebanon.

From the perspective of many regional partners, including many Israelis and some key Gulf partners, the only solution to the threats posed by Iran is a change in the Iranian regime. The Obama administration, looking back on the regime change wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan as less than glittering successes, tried to break the problem down, though, and focus first on the nuclear program. Through painstaking diplomacy, the Obama administration and its international partners negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to halt the Iranian nuclear program.

It was a monumental achievement—albeit one greeted with fury by those same regional partners who played no role in its negotiation. I accompanied the Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter, to some decidedly frosty meetings with Israeli and Saudi leaders once we finalized the deal, and I then watched the Saudis and Israelis unsuccessfully lobby the Congress over the summer to reject the deal.

If those regional partners had no success on Capitol Hill, though, they have had success in the Trump White House. And they were helped by the fact that many of the men who are working on the Middle East within the White House have as their frame of reference for Iran the war in Iraq between 2006 and 2008. U.S. Army veterans like Derek Harvey and Joel Rayburn—both mentioned in the report as staffers working on the Iran deal—are not specialists on Iran but sure remember Iran and its proxies lobbing mortars into the Green Zone in Baghdad during the darkest days of 2007. It’s not hard to understand why they might not have warm feelings toward the Iranians.

And it’s also understandable why they might criticize our efforts in the Obama administration. We addressed the Iranian nuclear program, sure, but we never curbed Iran’s asymmetric activities, which only got worse in Yemen and Syria in particular. Worse, some members of the Obama administration held out some hope that the nuclear deal might bring Iran in from the cold or moderate its behavior in other arenas. Needless to say, that did not happen.

Those of us who work on Middle East policy, though, often fail to remember there’s a world beyond our particular region of focus. And I’m struck by the words of one of our most senior military commanders in the waning days of the Obama administration: “The more I look at North Korea, the more thankful I am for the Iran deal.”