The Washington Post: Where would U.S. democracy head in a second Trump term? Hungary and Poland show the answer.

Former Obama administration deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes clearly had this sentiment in mind last week when he tweeted, “If you want to know where Trump wants to take America in a second term, look at Russia, Hungary and Poland.” While comparing the United States’ potential future to Russia’s mafia-state was a stretch, Rhodes’s references to Hungary and Poland were not. [...]

Freedom House removed Hungary from its list of democracies last week, calling the country’s decline “the most precipitous ever tracked” by one of its flagship reports. Freedom House now labels the government led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban a “hybrid regime,” meaning that it marries some elements of democracy with those of an autocracy.

Under Orban, Hungary maintains some democratic traits; for example, it holds elections, albeit ones in which Orban’s government provides his party significant advantages. Yet Orban and his ruling coterie have neutered a once-vibrant media, politicized the administration of justice and promoted the interests of regime insiders such as the prime minister’s son-in-law, all while scapegoating migrants and asylum seekers. Orban recently dropped any semblance of adherence to democratic rule and used the fight against covid-19 to have Hungary’s parliament grant him indefinite rule by decree. [...]

There’s a reason all this may sound familiar. As multiple political scientists, intelligence officials and historians have documented, governments that turn away from democracy and the rule of law increasingly follow a consistent pattern. Summarized as a slow roll of subversion, elected autocrats chip away at democracy’s foundations in the courts, media and civil service with the grudging (or sometimes energetic) support of their political allies. As Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put it, “Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.” Yet that erosion is real, and the United States is experiencing it, too.

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The Washington Post: A blockbuster Polish movie about abusive priests triggers a new wave of accusations

Scenes from the film are based on Lisinski’s accounts of being abused and attempting to seek justice. “To survivors like me, watching this movie feels like watching a documentary, because it’s so accurate in showing the powerful mechanisms that protect the Church,” he said. “Their influence is finally eroding now, we hope.”

Lisinski’s organization, called Do Not Fear, has received thousands of calls and letters since “Kler” premiered in late September. The group said it has heard from more potential victims in that time than it had in the past five years combined. Of those people, about 200 have made accusations the group deems credible and sufficiently detailed.

The movie also struck a chord among Poles in general. “I watched it because the church keeps saying that it’s blasphemy, and I wanted to judge myself,” said Jorek Hornowski as he left a cinema in central Warsaw. The 32-year old goes to church every Sunday but said the movie had not surprised him. “After all, it’s based on facts,” he said. “All of those allegations were known before. But I think this movie is forcing us to finally talk about it in public.”[...]

One key question is whether the Catholic Church itself can be blamed for complicity in sexual abuse. Although church representatives have said no, a Polish appeals court upheld a landmark ruling this month that ordered the church to pay more than $250,000 in compensation for an abuse case, possibly paving the way for similar verdicts amid the wave of new accusations.

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The Washington Post: Why the Vatican continues to struggle with sex abuse scandals

The church has had more than three decades — since notable abuse cases first became public — to safeguard victims, and itself, against such system failures. And, in the past five years, many Catholics have looked to Francis as a figure who could modernize the church and help it regain its credibility.

But Francis’s track record in handling abuse is mixed, something some outsiders attribute to his learning curve or shortcomings and others chalk up to resistance from a notoriously change-averse institution. [...]

Whereas transparency is typically advised, the church remains quiet about its investigations and disciplinary procedures. It does not release any data on the inquiries it has carried out. A proposed tribunal for judging bishops accused of negligence or coverup was quashed by the Vatican department that was supposed to help implement it. And, rather than being fired and publicly admonished, offending church leaders are typically allowed to resign without explanation. [...]

“I think we have reached a point where bishops alone investigating bishops is not the answer,” said Bishop Edward Scharfenberger, of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany. “We bishops want to rise to this challenge, which may well be our last opportunity considering all that has happened.”

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The Washington Post: Long-lost Roman library reemerges in Germany after 2,000 years in darkness

But Germany posed a particular challenge. In the year 9 of our modern calendar system, the Romans suffered an embarrassing defeat in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest near the modern day city of Hanover. They never recovered from it and were permanently pushed back to the western side of the Rhine river, which separates Germany from south to north, 50 miles from Teutoburg. Centuries later, marauders from Germany finally brought an end to the western half of the Roman empire. [...]

Built about 150 years after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, its walls recently reemerged after centuries of darkness during the construction of a new community center next to the city of Cologne’s famous cathedral. At first, when the walls were discovered last year, researchers assumed they had come across a community hall dating to the Roman era. But this summer, a more extensive analysis found the building was most likely used to store up to 20,000 scrolls of parchment. (The estimate would put the Cologne library in the same category as the vast Library of Celsus, which was built in Turkey at about the same time.) [...]

So far, Roman libraries have mostly been found in Egypt or Italy. The Cologne find may be the first such discovery in the Roman Empire’s northwestern regions, which at its peak spanned France, Britain and western Germany.

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The Washington Post: The Crane Who Fell in Love with a Human

In past years, Crowe would have taken this opportunity to inject Walnut with a syringe of crane semen. Alas, a matchmaker in Memphis — the keeper of the white-naped crane studbook, whose job is to ensure a genetically diverse captive population — has decreed that they don’t need any more babies from Walnut, at least not this year. But that doesn’t stop Crowe and Walnut from going through the motions all summer long, five days a week, sometimes several times a day. “It’s not exactly fun for me, but it keeps Walnut happy,” Crowe says.

More to the point, this strange cross-species seduction has helped ensure that white-naped cranes continue to exist, at least in captivity, says Warren Lynch, a fellow zookeeper at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. “It’s amazing, what Chris has accomplished with Walnut,” Lynch says. “This isn’t something just anyone can do.” [...]

Though it would have been better to return the birds to the wild, international tensions in 1978 made that impossible, Putnam recalls. Plus, no one knew exactly where in China they had been captured, or what the birds might have been exposed to during transit. “We didn’t want to release birds that might carry diseases and put them back into the wild flock,” Putnam says. [...]

In addition to demanding vast areas of untrammeled wilderness, these difficult birds seem almost drawn to marginal places. For instance, one of the white-naped cranes’ most important wintering grounds is the 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea. There, in a strange, de facto nature preserve, white-naped cranes and their even-more endangered cousins, red-crowned cranes, root for tubers among the land mines they are too light to trigger. If tensions between the Koreas subside, however, the cranes will be in trouble. Farmers are already clamoring for access to the nutrient-rich land, and developers are planning for a reunification city and deepwater port. [...]

Standards for raising cranes have changed since then. Now, highly trained zookeepers take care of the birds, and chicks are either left with their parents or raised by foster parent cranes, if at all possible. That’s because the job of crane parent is more nuanced than we humans once realized. Cranes have elaborate body language and sophisticated hunting techniques — skills that chicks learn, at least in part, from observing their parents. In addition, if a captive-born chick is slated to be released into the wild, a fear of humans is crucial to their survival.

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The Washington Post: Toronto medical official calls for decriminalizing drugs as opioid overdoses skyrocket in Canada

In a report released Monday, Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s chief medical officer, urged the city’s board of health to pressure the federal government to eliminate legal penalties for the possession of drugs and to scale up “prevention, harm reduction and treatment services.”

The report also recommended assembling a task force “to explore options for the legal regulation of all drugs in Canada,” which she hopes would destroy an illegal drug market contaminated with fentanyl — a synthetic opioid 100 times more potent than morphine — and other drugs like it.

“When we criminalize people who take drugs, we inadvertently contribute to the overdose emergency,” de Villa said. “It pushes people into unsafe drug use practices and creates barriers for people to seek help.” [...]

In response, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has embraced a number of “harm reduction” measures, including supervised injection sites, prescription heroin programs for those with severe addictions and even vending machines that dispense prescription opioids. [...]

Canada’s New Democratic Party this year became the first major political party to endorse decriminalization. And at a Liberal Party convention in April, backbenchers and members of the party’s grass roots voted to make decriminalization a top policy priority during the 2019 federal election campaign. (Those votes are nonbinding.)

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The Washington Post: Trump’s ‘populism’ is just a search for scapegoats

In Venezuela, the Maduro regime has accused companies that refuse to sell things for less than they cost — the result of how high the government has pushed inflation and how low it has set price controls — of waging an “economic war” against the so-called Bolivarian revolution. The government has nationalized factories in response and then sold things at a loss itself, which, of course, has only added to its money-printing needs.

In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has lashed out at what he calls the “interest-rate lobby” for trying to force the “mother and father of all evil”— higher interest rates — onto the country as a supposedly quack cure for Turkey's sagging currency and growing inflation. Erdogan, you see, believes against all evidence that lower rates actually cause lower inflation, rather than the other way around, and he has said central bankers would be guilty of “treason” if they didn't go along with that. [...]

But that's almost beside the point. The real story is that, like President Nicolás Maduro's inability to understand that price controls cause shortages or Erdogan's ignorance about the fact that lower interest rates actually lead to higher inflation, the Trump team seems actually shocked to find out that taxing imports so that they cost more makes things, yes, cost more.  

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The Washington Post: 5 big consequences of Trump’s Iran blunder

Ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said in a written statement, “While I strongly opposed the JCPOA, it is a grave mistake to walk away from this deal without a plan for ensuring that Iran does not restart its nuclear weapon program, without a strategy for countering Iran’s dangerous non-nuclear activities, and without our allies and partners.” He added, “The governments of Iran, Russia, and China will seize this opportunity of self-imposed U.S. isolation to continue major weapons sales, deepen economic ties, and further challenge the United States and Europe not only in the Middle East but in other areas like North Korea.”  [...]

Second, whether our allies will now cooperate with this on nonnuclear matters including sanctions for Iran’s ballistic missile program and its support for terrorism is an open question. The European Union has every reason to be wary of U.S. promises. In making it harder to deal with issues that were outside of the JCPOA, Trump makes our overall policy to Iran weaker and less coherent. 

Third, the administration’s total inability to plan ahead is on full display. Will we exempt allies from newly imposed sanctions? Do we have a military plan if Iran does make a race for the bomb — and if so, will allies join with us after we have backed out of the deal? How will we enforce sanctions? The plethora of questions belie anti-JCPOA hawks’ assurances that the administration had figured out all the post-deal angles. Hardly. The Treasury Department advises, “Sanctions will be reimposed subject to certain 90 day and 180 day wind-down periods. At the conclusion of the wind-down periods, the applicable sanctions will come back into full effect.” It’s unclear if Trump and his negotiators intend to use this time to extract more concessions from our allies. For now, we lack a clear path forward.

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The Washington Post: Trump is manufacturing an immigration crisis. Here’s why that helps him

President Trump has said that the group of migrants that recently made its way from Central America to the United States symbolizes out-of-control immigration, lawlessness and violence besetting the country. “Getting more dangerous. ‘Caravans’ coming,” he tweeted last month . This week , he added : “The migrant ‘caravan’ that is openly defying our border shows how weak & ineffective U.S. immigration laws are.”

The facts suggest the opposite. Last year, according to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection report, illegal cross-border migration was at its lowest level on record . [...]

The decline in illegal immigration has been a two-decade trend. Over that time, the number of Border Patrol apprehensions along the southern border has dropped by about 80 percent, from 1.6 million in 2000 to 300,000 in 2017. [...]

Focus on the cultural anxieties of the American public. Nothing embodies these fears as much as immigration. It has become a catch-all, particularly among non-college-educated whites, Trump’s core supporters. The president has often noted how crucial the border wall is to his base, declaring that “the thing they want more than anything is the wall.” Indeed, a recent poll indicated that 81 percent of Republicans want the wall to be built.

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The Washington Post: Pope Francis does something impossible for Trump

So it might be Providential that Pope Francis chose to make news last week in two ways. First, he did something that comes very hard to most public figures, and particularly to the current occupant of the White House: He apologized fervently for “grave errors.”

He also issued a remarkable document on holiness that seemed made for the moment — and, by the way, noted that we can “waste precious time” by being caught up in “superficial information” and “instant communication.” [...]

Francis responded with a letter to Chile’s bishops. “As far as my role, I acknowledge, and ask you to convey faithfully, that I have made grave errors in assessment and perception of the situation, especially as a result of lack of information that was truthful and balanced,” he wrote. “From this time I ask forgiveness to all those that I offended and I hope to do so personally, in the following weeks, in meetings that I will hold with representatives” of those affected.  

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The Washington Post: Decoding dreams: 6 answers to what goes on inside the sleeping mind

Another part of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which controls our powers of both logical reasoning and decision-making, is also shut down. I don’t stop to question why the floodwater is rising so fast, or why I’m back in my childhood home, or even why flying to safety is an option.   [...]

Incidentally, many people have wondered if in REM sleep our eyes are moving to “look” at dream images. Some evidence suggests that this is indeed the case. [...]

Some analyses of dream content suggest that women dream equally about men and women, while men are more likely to dream about other men. Michael Schredl, of the Central Institute of Mental Health, in Mannheim, Germany, has documented dream reports showing that men often dream about fighting other men, while women will dream more often of friendly interactions with people. A couple years ago, Christina Wong and colleagues at the University of Ottawa, wrote a computer program to differentiate between the dreams of men and women. The program correctly predicted the gender of the dreamer about 75 percent of the time. This suggests there may be gender differences in dreaming — but for now it’s too soon to say why.

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The Washington Post: For Israel, there’s little political cost to killing Palestinians

Israeli authorities claimed they opened fire in response to some protesters who had encroached near the fence, burning tires and hurling stones or molotov cocktails. Footage that emerged from the chaotic scene suggested Israeli soldiers targeted unarmed protesters, including some who were running away and were shot from a distance by snipers. [...]

The killings marked the worst day of violence in Gaza since the 2014 war between the Islamist group Hamas and the Israeli military, in which the United Nations said at least 1,462 Palestinian civilians died. And the aftermath of the protests underscored both the desperate futility of the Palestinian struggle and the relative impunity with which Israel can snuff out Palestinian lives. [...]

“These are the predictable outcomes of a manifestly illegal command: Israeli soldiers shooting live ammunition at unarmed Palestinian protesters,” said Amit Gilutz, a spokesman for B’Tselem, a Jerusalem-based leftist organization that monitors human rights abuses in the occupied territories. “What is predictable, too, is that no one — from the snipers on the ground to top officials whose policies have turned Gaza into a giant prison — is likely to be ever held accountable.” [...]

Nor can the Palestinians look for much help from their neighbors. As we’ve discussed in this space, some of the region’s key powers — most notably Egypt and Saudi Arabia — have moved closer to Israel in recent years. It has become clear that while the stateless Palestinians garner tremendous sympathy from citizens across the Arab world, their plight is a tiresome nuisance for some Arab leaders, who are more keen to crack down on Islamist parties at home or confront Iranian influence abroad.

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The Washington Post: Sweden is taking on Russian meddling ahead of fall elections. The White House might take note

Russia has a big stake in Sweden’s political affairs: Sweden is a rare outlier in Europe, because it is not a member of the NATO military alliance, which the Kremlin sees as a strategic threat. But attitudes toward NATO started to shift here after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and now Sweden’s center-right political opposition says it wants to join the alliance if it comes to power. About 47 percent of Swedes support joining NATO, a Pew survey found last year. 

Separately, Sweden is embroiled in a debate about how widely to open its doors to immigrants, a split that Russian state media have played up. [...]

Before the presentation, Bay said Swedish authorities are not trying to predict exactly what Russia might do as they figure out ways to thwart such moves. Instead, he said, they want to improve the political system’s overall readiness. [...]

The project by Swedish public television, Swedish public radio and two major newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, will seek to combat misinformation from both domestic and foreign sources, proponents said.

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The Washington Post: Putin’s Silk Road gamble

Another blow was the loss of Ukraine as a potential participant in Russian-led integration arrangements. Without Ukraine, the second-largest post-Soviet economy and a market of about 44 million people, Moscow’s hopes to create an integrated bloc that would be on par with the European Union and other centers of global economic power were essentially dashed. Lacking a market of sufficient size to create its own viable geo-economic area, Russia was left with the only option of moving into another nation’s economic orbit. [...]

Still, while praising the Belt and Road plan, Moscow is keen to prevent Beijing’s geopolitical domination of continental Eurasia. Instead of wholeheartedly subscribing to China’s scheme, the Kremlin promotes its own vision of “a larger Eurasian partnership” or “Greater Eurasia,” a network of existing and emerging “integration formats.” Beijing’s Belt and Road would be just one element, alongside the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and potentially even the European Union. [...]

Russia aspires to be the main security and diplomatic broker in Eurasia while leaving China with the role of the economic leader. As one observer put it, “China would be the bank, and Russia would be the big gun.” Such an arrangement might harken back to the history of the European Community, when France acted as the political leader while West Germany was the economic engine. Moscow’s preference for a new Eurasian order is reflected in its diplomatic activism, such as its leading role in securing the admission of India and Pakistan into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and in advocacy for the future membership of Iran.

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The Washington Post: Long, uneasy love affair of Israel and U.S. evangelicals may have peaked

The idea of a Palestinian state conflicts with the belief of some evangelicals that the entire territory — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, including the West Bank — was promised by God to the Jewish people.

And those voices are becoming louder. Evangelical lobbying groups such as Christians United for Israel, advocating views that align more tightly with the Israeli right, now rival the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in their influence on behalf of Israel. While AIPAC backs a two-state solution, CUFI does not.  [...]

Over the past half-century, many American evangelicals came to support Israel through an end-of-days theology. The idea — popularized in the 1970 book “The Late Great Planet Earth,” which later became a movie with Orson Welles, and the Left Behind series, which began in the 1990s — is that the establishment of Israel was part of a preordained divine plan preparing for the return of the Messiah. [...]

A poll released last month by the evangelical firm LifeWay Research asked American evangelicals about their overall perception of Israel. Among people over 65, 76 percent said it was positive, compared with 58 percent among those ages 18 to 34. About 30 percent of the people in the younger group said they were “not sure,” nearly double the figure for the older group.

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The Washington Post: Beirut civil war museum is haunting, but few Lebanese want to disturb the ghosts

Funded with an $18 million grant from Lebanese and French authorities, Beit Beirut was envisioned by its architects as the first memorial of its kind: a museum, archive and visitor center to commemorate the country’s civil war. The renovation has merged the building’s skeleton into a light-filled glass one, adding archive space for a raft of documents and pods in which research staff could examine them.  

Inside the old apartment building, ceilings are scorched black and a barrier of sandbags divides a room on the second floor. In makeshift bunkers — one them formerly a blind woman’s bedroom that had been reinforced with concrete — slits have been gouged into the stonework, offering killers a view of the surrounding streets. They left graffiti, too. One just reads: “Hell.” [...]

It is not taught in history books. There is no official death toll, and thousands of families remain without answers over the fate of disappeared husbands, brothers or daughters.  [...]

For the project’s supporters, the delays reflect the unwillingness of the political establishment to interrogate painful memories. The municipality’s cultural office says the building is in a “transitional period” while officials establish a legal framework for its operations.

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The Washington Post: The dam of denial has broken

The most astonishing aspect of the response to Michael Wolff’s book is that anyone is surprised. President Trump’s unfitness for office was obvious long before he was elected. Once he moved into the White House, the destructive chaos of his administration was there for all to see. Future historians will scratch their heads to figure out why it took this particular book to break the dam of denial. [...]

Fortunately, this will not derail special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe, but the episode was one of many signs that Republican leaders in Congress are sticking with Trump in the face of the damage the president’s increasingly obvious and glaring shortcomings are doing to our country. Over the weekend, Republican leaders trooped up to Camp David to meet with Trump and pledge their allegiance to a common agenda. [...]

On the other hand, the more Trump proves his populism to be phony and behaves like a traditional Republican, the more the congressional GOP will want to prop him up. Trump’s break with Stephen K. Bannon, the nemesis of the Capitol Hill crowd, will bring the president and the elected conservative establishment closer, and Bannon’s statement on Sunday attempting to soften his comments to Wolff without retracting them is unlikely to change this.

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The Washington Post: Yes, the Kremlin is worried — about Russia’s own presidential elections

Putin’s regime represents what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way term “competitive authoritarianism.” Elections in hybrid systems like Russia are not designed to determine who rules, but rather to signal the regime’s power and resilience to potential challengers. [...]

In his book “Patronal Politics,” Henry Hale points out that authoritarian regimes deploy every available resource to dominate elections, even when opposition candidates would not win a free and fair contest. Competitive, if unfair, elections send a potent message about the power of incumbent regimes. [...]

The “great power of expectations,” as Hale labels this phenomenon, drives Russian politics — and the Putin regime has set a high bar for itself. Last year, the Kremlin’s top political technologists established a “70 at 70” objective for Putin’s reelection in March 2018 — 70 percent of the vote with 70 percent turnout. In a recent interview, Russian political expert Tatyana Stanovaya remarked, “Putin just needs to be elected quietly and quickly, without fuss, with good turnout, and a good result.” [...]

A Reuters report, meanwhile, suggests the Kremlin ordered major energy and utility companies to supply the Presidential Administration with news items that cast Russia’s leadership in a positive light. A memo to industry leaders requested stories “where it’s possible to say that state support helped lift the economy out of crisis” and benefited local residents. State-run media outlets are supposed to disseminate the stories to the public. [...]

According to a Levada Center poll from late November, 67 percent of likely voters would vote for Putin, with anticipated turnout between 53 and 55 percent — not the 70 percent figure the Kremlin hopes to see. Trailing far behind are the nationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the Russian Communist Party’s Gennady Zyuganov, each with just four percent.

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The Washington Post: American Jews vs. Israel

The Israeli government proceeds as if none of this matters. Its preoccupation, naturally enough, is with its domestic constituency — the voters of the upper Galilee and not the donors of the Upper West Side. Not only don’t American Jews vote in Israel, but as Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely dismissively put it, they don’t serve in the army, either. Just as important, the vast majority of American Jews are not Orthodox, and they resent the hold that the very religious have over Israeli political life. As we see with Sunni and Shiite Muslims, interreligious fights are the most ugly.

For moderate or liberal Jews — in other words, for the 76 percent who did not vote for Donald Trump — Israel has become like a relative who always has to be explained. While religious restrictions matter a great deal, the overriding issue is the future of the West Bank — whether, along with the Gaza Strip, it will comprise a future Palestinian state or whether Israel will simply swallow it. This is usually called a one-state or a two-state solution. Another way of putting it is whether Israel will remain a Jewish democracy or will need to repress a Palestinian majority far into the future. [...]

But he is also somewhat typical. He is one of many retired generals or intelligence chiefs who favor a two-state solution. These are men who would not trifle with Israel’s security, and so when Netanyahu argues, as he has, that a Palestinian state would become a terrorist enclave, Barak and others insist otherwise. They can handle the situation.

In the meantime, Israel is increasingly criticized. On American campuses, it is routinely accused of being a racist and colonial power. Not so. But American Jews on those very campuses find it harder and harder to mount a defense. The continuing occupation of the West Bank and the Trumpian persona of Netanyahu leave them mute. Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street and a frequent campus speaker, finds that many college students feel a contradiction between what they believe are Jewish values and the policies of the Netanyahu government.

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The Washington Post: Trump is about to make the defining mistake of his foreign policy

Why do it? It seems clear that Trump disdains the Iran nuclear deal, at least in part, because it is a signature accomplishment of the Obama presidency — a legacy perhaps second only to the Affordable Care Act in its symbolic significance. That helps explain why the president has described the deal as an “embarrassment” and “the worst deal ever,” hyperbole that has only made it more difficult for him to regularly report to Congress that Iran is actually doing its part.

The president prefers to wash his hands of the deal and let Congress decide its fate. Refusing to confirm Iran’s compliance while laying out a broad case against Iran will, in effect, invite Congress to impose new sanctions. But if other signatories to the deal side with Iran in declaring the United States in violation and resist U.S. pressure to curtail their business dealings with Iran, all that “decertification” will achieve will be to open a rift between the United States and its European allies, Russia and China. On the other hand, if the United States wins over its allies, the deal will be dead — and everyone can go back to worrying about war with a nuclear-armed Iran. [...]

That constituency gave President Hassan Rouhani a resounding victory and a clear mandate in the presidential election in May. Rouhani ran a campaign built on the success of the nuclear deal and the promise of the opening to the West. In August, an overwhelming majority in the Iranian parliament — cutting across reformist and conservative party lines — voted to reconfirm Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, the chief negotiator of the nuclear deal on the Iranian side. The deal has increasingly redrawn political battle lines in Iran along whether to invest the country’s future in engagement with the United States.  

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