There has been much cautious crowing in Washington this week at the outcome of the Iranian elections. Moderates are seen to have triumphed both in parliament and the Assembly of Experts. This latter body will select the successor to the reportedly ailing Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran is being empowered and enriched by the deal to suspend its nuclear weapons program for just 15 years. There is not the slightest evidence that the so-called reformers oppose Iran’s drive to build a nuclear arsenal. But they are far better at concealing their xenophobia. In talks with the international community they have whispered what they know it wants to hear. The days of the hard-liners are numbered they say quietly. Give us time. Cut us more slack. You will see what a responsible country Iran will become.

Yet all the while, Iran continues to subvert its neighbors through evil designs. There have been the officially orchestrated assaults on the Saudi diplomatic missions in Tehran and Mashhad. There is the sponsorship of the Hezbollah terrorists which has paralyzed the Lebanese political process. There has been the financing and arming of Houthi terrorists in Yemen. There has been unwavering political, military and financial support for the Assad government’s brutal campaign to crush its people. Tehran remains in illegal possession of the UAE’s Abu Musa and Greater and Lesser Tunbs islands. These it seized 45 years ago and the international community has failed to force them out. And Iran has actively sponsored terrorism in both Bahrain and the Eastern Province.

Now the regime of the Ayatollahs has been caught out in two new crimes. Saudi intelligence has unmasked and rolled up a spy network based in Makkah. It has also uncovered a Philippines-based plot to hijack or blow up a Saudia airliner.

But the so-called Iranian reformers have not criticized any of these deplorable acts. They would tell their new-found American and European friends that it is unfortunate but now is not the right moment to move against the hard-liners. The horror of the situation is that Washington and Brussels believe this rubbish. In doing so, they are imperiling the entire Middle East. They are ignoring their long-time regional allies. They are dealing with a delinquent bully-boy Iran as if it were a reasonable state. They are treating a renegade regime as if it were a trustworthy ally.

The Kingdom has long warned against the machinations of the present Iranian government. Even as the nuclear deal in Geneva came close to inking, those warnings continued. Iran was simply not to be trusted. The removal of sanctions had to be linked to wider assurances of proper behavior. A unique opportunity to get the Iranians to fall into line with international norms was squandered. The Russians of course would have had none of it in Geneva. But then they had already been busy breaking UN sanctions for years. They had successfully defied Washington to take them on over this blatant illegality. And Obama did not have the stomach to do so.

Saudi Arabia warned that restoring sanctions would be so difficult as to be impossible. Too many Western companies would have struck profitable deals to rebuild Iran’s decayed and collapsing infrastructure. The one lever that the outside world had over Iran was thrown aside. That lever was the economic suffering that the sanctions produced among the mass of Iranians. They did not have privileged access to the luxury goods and services of the governing elite. This was a key issue. The one danger that the Ayatollahs feared most was popular unrest. They sought to head this off with foreign entanglements. They wrapped themselves in the Iranian flag. They used the Israeli trick. They invoked the spurious cry of a beleaguered Iran threatened by irreconcilable neighbors.

As its close ally Washington was in a position to know that the Kingdom threatened no one. As the leading Arab power, Saudi Arabia has nothing but good intentions toward the Iranian people. It is dedicated to regional peace and stability. Yet the Americans and their allies have bought in to Tehran’s distortion of reality. They have unleashed the malevolent Iranian genii. The price of that foolishness will not simply be paid in the region.