A year later, is Iran deal a huge failure or stunning success?

One year later, the Iran deal is living up to its promises — sort of.

The central tenet of the agreement has been met, according to the White House: Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon and is not openly acquiring the means to do so.

{mosads}“Over the last year, the Iran deal has succeeded in rolling back Iran’s nuclear program, avoiding further conflict and making us safer,” President Obama trumpeted in a statement this week.

But in many other ways, the accord has failed to live up to the broader hopes of its supporters. Iran continues to be hostile towards it neighbors and aggressive with the rest of the world.

And on Capitol Hill, political divides are as stark as ever. Republicans used the one-year anniversary mark this week to advance a handful of largely-symbolic measures aimed at undermining the deal.

“We need to look no further than Iran’s dangerous and destabilizing activities to see the disaster that the Iran nuclear agreement has been over the last year,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a statement.

The agreement, announced in the early morning of July 14, placed specific limits on Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for easing a wide swath of global oil, trade and financial sanctions that had suffocated the Iranian economy. Despite the vigorous opposition of Republicans and some congressional Democrats, Capitol Hill failed to halt the deal from going into effect and sanctions were lifted earlier this year.

One key metric of “breakout time” — the time it would take for Iran to amass enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon if it decided to build a bomb — has expanded in the year since the deal was inked. According to the White House, Iran’s breakout time has ballooned from two or three months one year ago to “about a year” today.

But Iran has hardly become a model citizen in the year since the deal was inked.

Over the last year, Tehran has conducted three ballistic missile tests, each allegedly in violation of intentional prohibitions but not enough to scuttle the nuclear accord.

The country has also intensified its neighbor squabbling, squaring off against rival Saudi Arabia as part of an extended battle for regional supremacy.  

In a dramatic moment in January, Iran detained 10 U.S. Navy sailors believed to have accidentally wandered into its waters. The government filmed the sailors and released the tape for apparent propaganda purposes, in what critics called a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The standoff occurred as Obama was delivering his final State of the Union address, though the president declined to mention it in his speech.

Publicly, the Obama administration has maintained that the agreement was meant to tackle only Iran’s access to a nuclear weapon, and was not intended as a broader effort to reframe the U.S.’s posture with Iran.

“The idea that we were going to negotiate this agreement and get a better relationship with the Iranians was fanciful,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Agreements like the Iran Deal are intended to buy time for diplomats to do their job, he told The Hill — not act as a panacea for bilateral relations.

Yet Secretary of State John Kerry now meets regularly with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, and the administration appears eager to use the nuclear deal as a springboard to end the decades of diplomatic winter between the two countries.

“Nobody pretends that some of the challenges we have with Iran have somehow been wiped away,” Kerry said this week. “There are other real issues, and we will continue and are continuing to focus on those issues.”

“But we believe that the door that has been opened as a consequence of this dialogue gives us an opportunity to be able to do exactly that.”

To Republicans, that attitude reeks of desperation that has only emboldened Iran. And in return, Tehran has simply thumbed its nose at the Obama administration, they say.

The accord is likely to be a hot topic at this week’s GOP convention in Cleveland, typifying what Republicans claim is the weakness of the Obama administration’s foreign policy — and, by extension, his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has called the agreement “disastrous” and vowed to “renegotiate” if he wins the White House.

Leaders on Capitol Hill argue the deal has funneled billions of dollars to a country whose government actively supports terrorism.

And even worse, the United States has encouraged its behavior, critics allege, by promising to pay Iran $8.6 million for 32 tons of material known as heavy water, which can be used to produces weapons-grade plutonium, and by actively encouraging companies to invest in the country.  

“I think it amounts to more than appeasement,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said this week.

“They’re sending around the secretary of State basically like that of the Chamber of Commerce for Iran,” he added. “It seems quite ridiculous to me.”

The Ryan-led House this week passed a trio of bills aimed at penalizing Iran.

One measure would impose new sanctions on Iran over its ballistic missile program; another would reinstate a program denying Iranian financial institutions access to U.S. dollars; the third prohibits the U.S. from buying heavy water from Iran.

All three measures passed along largely party lines and leading Democrats have painted them as partisan theater.

The White House has pledged to veto all three, and it remains unclear whether any will be taken up in the Senate, especially now that Congress has recessed for the summer.

However, existing sanctions against Iran are set to expire at the end of the year, and lawmakers from both parties in the upper chamber have made moves to either extend or strengthen those.

Critics of the agreement aren’t likely to end there, however.

Like ObamaCare before it, the Iran deal is a cornerstone of Obama’s time in office pushed through entirely against the wishes of Republicans, and GOP lawmakers appear dead set on maintaining a concerted offensive against it.

As for whether the deal will spur Iran to grow closer with the U.S., only time will tell.

“It’s probably too soon yet to tell. It’s only been a year since that deal has been engaged,” Adm. Kurt Tidd, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, said during an event at the Atlantic Council this week.

“They were very aggressive in attempting to find diplomatic partnerships with countries in order to break out of the diplomatic isolation that the sanctions had placed them under,” he added.

“And so I think time will tell, as we see how their behavior changes over the coming years.”