Because the Obama administration is not willing to marry the credible threat of military force with diplomacy, the choice facing policy makers is not one portrayed by Secretary of State John Kerry as between war and peace. With no nuclear pact, Iran eventually will be armed with nuclear weapons, but it would be a severely weakened and pariah state like North Korea. With the nuclear pact, Iran would eventually be armed with nuclear weapons as well as fully integrated into the international political, diplomatic, economic system and flush with ballistic missiles and modern conventional arms from China and Russia.

It is too easy to envision Iran slipping out from under the pact’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, much like Iraq and North Korea have done in the past. The Iranians would go through the motions of nominal cooperation and stonewall IAEA efforts towards more intrusive and challenge inspections at suspect nuclear-activity sites. The Iranians have proven themselves expert in the art of diplomatic stonewalling as they stretched out negotiations on the nuclear pact to get international recognition for their once-clandestine nuclear program of hundreds of uranium centrifuges and now-opaque program of thousands of centrifuges. The Iranians successfully obtained an accord without accounting for their past suspected nuclear weapons–related tests as the IAEA and the West had long demanded as a precondition for any nuclear agreement. The Iranians would rightly calculate that the international community, with newly vested economic and military interests—especially with the United Nations Security Council members of China and Russia—would have no stomach for “snapping back” economic sanctions on Iran.

The bottom line is that President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran is going to reward, embolden and empower Tehran to continue its belligerent and malign policies and give Tehran a potent and dominant position in the Middle East, to the detriment of American national security and regional interests. Come September, Congress needs to vote to derail Obama’s nuclear deal train and deny Tehran a masterstroke in statecraft.

Richard L. Russell is Non-Resident Senior Fellow for Strategic Studies at the Center for the National Interest.