Netanyahu, of course, doesn’t see this agreement as a victory for Israel; he sees it as a victory for evil, and as a bitter defeat for the once-great United States of America. The reason Netanyahu believes this agreement represents a defeat for the U.S., and an existential threat to Israel, is not because of weaknesses in any of its specific provisions, singly or in combination. The deal is far from perfect. All arms-control agreements are the products of sometimes discomfiting compromises, and this one has its fair share of problems, not least of which is that it comes with an end date.

Netanyahu’s complaint is not with the Iran deal. It is with the notion that one can deal with Iran. Like many of his Republican allies on Capitol Hill, he sees this deal as a defeat because it brought about neither complete capitulation by Iran at the negotiating table nor the demise of the Iranian regime. Netanyahu’s worldview is Manichaean; there is good, there is evil, and good people don’t do business with evil. I have sympathy for this view; I am a Reform Manichaean myself, and I think I understand the perfidious nature of the Iranian regime. But the total defeat of Iran was not a credible option, especially in the post-Iraq War American political reality, and it was Netanyahu’s mistake—one of several mistakes—to believe a) in the lethality of sanctions that turned out to be merely crippling, and b) that the United States, in the absence of sanctions-induced regime change, would choose confrontation over diplomatic compromise.

I framed the first paragraph of this post in a way meant to highlight a public path Netanyahu could have chosen in the months before the nuclear agreement was finalized. Imagine, for a moment, if, instead of committing to a public fight with the chief executive of the nation that is Israel’s benefactor—a fight, for reasons I will soon explain, Netanyahu was never going to win—he had instead done the following: claimed victory in his struggle to keep Iran away from the nuclear threshold, and then announced that he would be working with Obama and his European allies (and with Vladimir Putin as well) to ensure that the deal was as tough as possible. Would he have gotten all, or even much, of what he wanted? Probably not. But would the deal be somewhat stronger today if Netanyahu hadn’t made the perfect the enemy of the good? Yes, most likely.

It was not only Netanyahu’s Manichaean worldview that placed him on the path toward a fruitless, even self-destructive, confrontation with Obama (and the rest of the world); it was his faulty understanding of American politics. Specifically, he made three basic mistakes of analysis:

1. He overestimated the power of AIPAC, the main pro-Israel lobbying group, to fight a president deeply committed to the idea of a deal;