It's difficult to imagine that when President Trump authorized the hit against General Qassem Soleimani, neither he nor his advisers anticipated that Iran would use the event as the official reason to withdraw from Obama's toothless Iran deal.  Nevertheless, progressives themselves seem surprised and panicked and are attributing those feelings to Trump.  As usual, they're probably wrong.

A brief history is in order.  From day one, President Obama was determined to have a deal with Iran.  To that end, for example, in 2009 he ignored the Green Revolution protests that might have overthrown the mullahs lest supporting the protesters interfere with his deal.  Likewise, in 2015 he tattled to Tehran when Israel had the chance to kill Soleimani.

And then there was the deal itself.  Obama didn't bother trying to stop Iran, the world's greatest terrorist nation, from becoming a nuclear power.  Instead, he considered nuclearization a fait accompli.  He decided, instead, to get the mullahs to agree to slow the program.  In return, Obama promised to lift the longstanding economic embargo on Iran and to give Iran massive amounts of money.  His theory was that if the mullahs were paid enough, once they went nuclear...maybe they would be less hostile.  That's it.

It was such an awful deal that Obama and his novel-writing foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes did not even try to submit the deal to Congress to get it formalized as a treaty.  Instead, Barack "I've got a pen and I've got a phone" Obama flew solo, making his one-sided deal with Iran and sealing it by secretly sending the mullahs $1.7 billion in cash.

To no one's surprise, when it came to the promised slowdown, Israel proved in 2018 that Iran almost immediately started cheating:

Tens of thousands of secret files and other evidence proves [sic] the 2015 Iran nuclear deal is "based on lies and Iranian deception" and should be thrown out, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday. 

Netanyahu, in an address televised across Israel, said Iran lied when it said it never sought to develop nuclear weapons, then cheated by failing to reveal all its weapons program information to an international watchdog group charged with monitoring the deal.

"Even after the deal was made, Iran continued to preserve and expand its nuclear know-how for use at a later date," Netanyahu said.

Not long after that revelation, Trump, with his own executive pen, threw out the deal and reimposed sanctions on Iran.  Since then, the sanctions have effectively weakened Iran's economy, a problem helped by America's new position as a net oil exporter.  Iranian citizens have responded to the economic freefall by rising in protest across the country, protests that the mullahs have tried quite ruthlessly to quash.  The mullahs are not in good shape.

To summarize, Obama gave the mullahs everything and got nothing in return.  Trump was able to undercut some of the mullahs' activities by weakening their economy.  At all times, the Iran deal benefited no one but Iran.

But that's not how the Democrats see it.  It took four New York Times journalists to put together an article saying Iran is now formally pulling out of a deal it had already ignored and that — oh, my gosh! — this is really bad:

"Iran's nuclear program will have no limitations in production, including enrichment capacity," the Iranian government said in an announcement Sunday that seemed to signal the de facto collapse of the 2015 agreement.

Apparently, the New York Times managed to miss entirely the announcement in 2018 about Iran's de facto cheating on the agreement.

The New York Times also assumes that Trump, just like the Times itself, had absolutely no idea that Iran would play the "Nuclear Deal" card:

But so far, it [Soleimani's death] has unleashed a host of unanticipated consequences that could dramatically alter where the United States operates. Increasingly, the killing appeared to be generating effects far beyond the United States' ability to control.

That may include Iran's nuclear future.

On Sunday, the Iranian government said it was abandoning its "final limitations in the nuclear deal," the international agreement intended to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. The decision leaves no restrictions on Iran's nuclear program, the statement said, including on uranium enrichment, production, research and expansion.

...except that the very next paragraph reveals a fact Trump may well have already anticipated, which is that Iran is hedging its bets when it comes to going off the nuclear reservation:

Iran will, however, continue its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency and return to the nuclear limits if the economic sanctions imposed on it are removed and Iran's interests guaranteed, the government said. American sanctions have hit Iran's oil-based economy particularly hard.

Meanwhile in Iraq, perhaps to placate any chance of Iranian retribution or perhaps as a protest against the U.S. conducting a significant anti-Iranian military action on its soil, Parliament asked the U.S. to leave. Again, from the Times:

Lawmakers in Iraq voted on Sunday to require the government to end the presence of American troops in the country after Mr. Trump ordered the killing on Iraqi soil.

But there a problem: In the shifting, chimerical world of Middle Eastern politics, even that vote isn't what it seems. In the very next paragraph, the New York Times admits that the vote is almost certainly symbolic:

The vote will not be final until it is signed by the prime minister, and it was unclear whether Iraq's current caretaker government had the authority to end the relationship with the United States military.

Few doubted, however, that the country would take whatever legal actions were necessary to compel a United States departure over the coming months. Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi drafted the language and submitted the bill approved by Parliament on Sunday, leaving little doubt about his support.

People with memories longer than last week will recall what happened the last time the United States military summarily left Iraq, per Obama's orders. (Hint: It's spelled I-S-I-S, or maybe J-V.)

It looks as if both the New York Times and Iran's mullahs are running scared. Trump is a different breed from anything seen in American politics in the last 50 years. He doesn't play by the ordinary rules and, unlike our last president, when he makes a threat, he means it.