Iranian leaders have been taking a victory lap in recent days after President Donald Trump caved to pressure from his top advisers and again waived key sanctions on Tehran in a bid to save the landmark nuclear agreement, according to regional reports and interviews with sources close to the White House.
After again extending waivers to provide Iran with sanctions relief, despite promises not to do so and opposition from Republican lawmakers in Congress, top leaders in the Islamic Republic have dubbed Trump as a weak president in a series of statements.
At the urging of top national security officials and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Trump took steps late last week to save the nuclear accord by again providing Iran with massive sanctions relief, a decision that must be renewed in four months. Trump has vowed that he will not waive these sanctions again.
Trump is hoping that, in the meantime, Congress can strike a deal to tighten restrictions on Iran's nuclear program so that the United States can present a new set of terms to the Europeans that would address gaps in the nuclear deal.
That legislation has thus far failed to garner Republican support due to what some feel is its failure to properly crackdown on Iran's repeated ballistic missile tests and other nuclear-related endeavors. GOP insiders also fear the legislation would lock in the nuclear deal so Trump and future presidents do not have an avenue to abandon it.
Trump's move to waive sanctions in the interim and preserve the deal despite his tough talk has energized Iran, which views Trump as all talk on the nuclear front.
"For a year since Mr. Trump came to power, he has extended the waivers and this shows his attempts have failed one after another," Seyed Abbas Araghchi, Iran's deputy foreign minister, said during the weekend in reports carried by Iran's state-controlled media.
"There has been a diplomatic battle between us [Iran] and the United States," Aragchi said, explaining that Tehran has been able to peel the Europeans away from the United States.
Similarly, Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, bragged that Trump's policies towards the Islamic Republic are failing and described the U.S. president as a "madman."
"The tactic of scaring the international community from the decisions of a madman is tired and ineffective and the U.S. ruling system has become internationally isolated due to unwise decisions and repeated mistakes," Shamkhani was quoted as saying on Monday.
In some Washington, D.C., foreign policy circles, Trump is receiving similar criticism for extending sanctions relief on Iran and enabling Democrats in Congress to lock in the nuclear deal for the foreseeable future.
One veteran Republican foreign policy adviser who has briefed the White House on Iran and remains close to the discussions told the Washington Free Beacon that senior Trump administration officials who sought to save the nuclear deal waged an "intimidation campaign" to silence criticism from top opponents of the accord.
"The White House staff knew they were pulling the wool over the president's eyes on this one and they didn't want any major negative blowback before they got sign off from the boss, so there was definitely an intimidation campaign aimed at outside opinion leaders and conservative reporters," said the source, who would only discuss the matter on background so as not to upset allies in the West Wing.
"The truth is they can try to silence right-wing critics in Washington all they want, someone just needs to show the president the Iranian state media reports from the weekend and he'll understand how embarrassingly weak his Iran policy has become," the source said.
While the Trump administration waived key sanctions related to the nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, it hit Tehran with several new measures focused on its ballistic missile program.
However, sanctions experts have called these measures weak and merely cosmetic in that they do not apply much pressure to the Islamic Republic's illicit networks.
Since Trump took office, there have been fewer than 100 new sanctions on Iranian companies and individuals, according to Saeed Ghasseminejad, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
And even those sanctions barely impacted Iran's illicit networks, Ghasseminejad said.
"Most of them [the sanctioned entities] were front companies and their managers involved in the proliferation network, many of them were non-Iranians and most of them can be replaced very quickly," Ghasseminejad said.
"In other words, the Treasury is not going after the large money making entities owned by the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps], for example the companies owned by the IRGC in the Tehran Stock Exchange, even though President Trump has demanded the U.S. to target the IRGC."
The sanctions are mostly ineffectual and do not truly disrupt Iran's illicit networks, including on the ballistic missile front, Ghasseminejad said.
"With the current strategy, we will not be able to put pressure on the IRGC in order to curb Iran's expansionary foreign policy, its missile program and its treatment of dissidents," he said. "Additionally, it is not clear why the Treasury refuses to sanction the vast $200 billion business empire controlled by the Supreme Leader, which based on a Reuters' investigation, has been one of the main beneficiaries of the JCPOA."
"The bottom line," he said, "is that the current sanctions strategy will have no significant effect on Iran, the IRGC, and its Supreme Leader."
While opponents of Trump's decision have been quietly expressing their grievances across D.C. foreign policy circles, some say Trump has actually placed himself in a position of power regarding the nuclear deal's future.
Omri Ceren, an opponent of the nuclear deal who serves as managing director at the Israel Project, an organization that works with journalists on Middle East issues, told the Free Beacon that Trump's desire to tighten the existing nuclear accord could bear fruit.
"Trump came out of Friday looking strong because he actually is in a strong position on this, diplomatically and politically," Ceren said. "He's the one dictating terms, and those terms are ambitious."
"On ballistic missiles, his advisers say they want it all: ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and so on," Ceren explained. "If Iran tests, the deal goes away. We'll see if Congress and the Europeans can get that. In the meantime the Iranians and their allies are just putting on a brave face. They know the president will walk away if he doesn't get the fixes."