President Barack Obama didn’t leave much wiggle room — not for himself, and not for his critics.

Getting a deal on Iran’s nuclear program is more than a win for 2015, or a legacy achievement for the fourth quarter of his presidency. It’s a validation of Obama’s whole foreign policy philosophy — a theory of the world today, and America’s role in it, that he’s been mocked for since he was that first-term senator running for president, insisting that he’d already figured out a better way.


The Iran negotiations have “succeeded exactly as intended,” Obama said at the White House as soon as the broad terms were released. “It is a good deal.”

That is, if he actually gets a deal by June 30 — the deadline for all of the technical details to be finished off.

And if he can convince Congress that it’s not just a license for Tehran to build a bomb while no one’s looking.

And if the Iranians stick to the deal.

And if the rest of the world is willing to stick to the promised “snapbacks” — the restoration of sanctions — and other repercussions if they don’t.

And if the deal doesn’t cause long-term damage to relationships with allies who have been skeptical from the start, or sacrifice action on other crises and entanglements in the Middle East and beyond.

To his critics, Obama has been hopelessly naive, leading from behind, minimizing America on the global stage, making the world a less safe place from his fecklessness and reluctance to brandish American military strength.

He’s resisted anything that might be mistaken for an Obama doctrine, other than an insistent pursuit of the kind of transformational, generational change in thinking that he believes the country was demanding when it elected a 47-year-old man named Barack Hussein Obama in the despair of a world gone wrong and America feeling exiled.

Most of the past 6½ years have been more transactional than transformational. Best case, usually, has been that they’re succeeding in their effort, as he put it, of “don’t do stupid shit.” Worst case, the stupid shit’s been happening despite what they see as their best efforts.

Starting to reopen Cuba was nice. Realigning the relationship with India could be huge. But with Iran, Obama finally feels like he’s got something that’s both big and tangible.

On Thursday, Obama said he was confident enough in the surprisingly detailed terms — released just hours after everyone was preparing for a frustrated exit from Lausanne, Switzerland — that he was going full force. He’d already been on the phone with Saudi King Salman and was about to call Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he was calling a summit of Gulf allies to Camp David in the spring, and he was getting on the phone with leaders of the House and Senate whom he already knows are going to be an almost impossible sell.

He’d already been on the phone with the leaders of Britain, Germany and France after the deal was laid out to him during his presidential daily briefing Thursday morning, with the final research and development element nailed down by Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz with his counterpart at 6 a.m. Switzerland time.

There are three options, Obama said: either get a good deal, go to war or pull out of the negotiations — and really, options two and three were the same, since pulling out of the negotiations was as good as announcing we’re eventually going to war.

Go his way, Obama said, or answer not just for an Iranian nuclear program that’s only temporarily set back, but an America that’s back on the outs with the rest of the world — and not just the negotiating partners that joined Secretary of State John Kerry in Switzerland to stand smiling in front of their flags.

“If Congress kills this deal not based on expert analysis and without offering any reasonable alternative, then it’s the United States that will be blamed for the failure of diplomacy. International unity will collapse and the path to conflict will widen,” Obama said.

Polls show that the American people want the negotiations, Obama said. Polls also show that they don’t really trust him to be the one doing the negotiating, though he didn’t say anything about that.

Obama is so often the professor — lecturing about what should happen, and what people would do if they’d only sat down and analyzed things like he has. On Thursday, he had the strut of a man whose theory has finally been proved right.

“I am convinced that if this framework leads to a final comprehensive deal, it will make our country, our allies and the entire world safer,” he said.

Then he offered some advice for the critics whom he predicted are about to “sound off.”

Americans should ask them, he said: “Do you really think that this verifiable deal, if fully implemented, backed by the world’s major powers, is a worse option than the risk of another war in the Middle East.”

Of course, calling what was produced the start of a verifiable deal is itself hoping for the best.

Speaking at his own news conference in Lausanne, Kerry described the agreement as “a consensus on the key parameters of an arrangement that, once implemented, will give the international community confidence that Iran’s nuclear program will remain exclusively peaceful.”

But Obama was already feeling good enough about things that he started reading off the terms from the Rose Garden, even as an ambulance siren whined in the background: what would happen to the raw nuclear materials, the kind of limitations that will be put on Iran’s stockpile, the duration of the terms and inspections that would keep the agreement in place for 15 years at least, and in some cases even longer.

Sanctions relief would come, Obama promised, though nothing is set.

That, Kerry said, is one of the biggest unresolved policy issues, especially as Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif himself announced more boldly, “When we implement our measures, there will be no sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

In reality, Kerry said, the timing of sanctions relief “remains one of those issues that is going to be negotiated over the course of the next three months.”

Iran’s got to produce, Kerry said, to prove to international inspectors that it’s met the conditions before they start going too crazy buying up stock futures.

“Iran has the responsibility to get the breakout time to one year,” Kerry said.

Meanwhile, it took all of about 90 minutes for the negotiators to start fighting about what happened Thursday, with the Iranians taking aim at the fact sheet that the State Department put out after the broad statements from Zarif and the European Union representative who announced the framework in Switzerland.

“The solutions are good for all, as they stand. There is no need to spin using ‘fact sheets’ so early on,” Zarif tweeted.

A senior administration official dismissed the complaint, saying there’s nothing in what’s on the sheet that contradicts the basics Zarif already spoke to.

“What our fact sheet does is provide a number of the details that underpin those elements,” the official said.