Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, left, walks behind President Donald Trump after answering questions from the media following a meeting at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., on Aug. 11, 2017.

Donald Trump’s presidency has given new meaning to the phrase “team of rivals.”

Under President Abraham Lincoln, it meant bringing former political foes from his own party into the cabinet. Under President Franklin Roosevelt, it meant forming a diverse, bipartisan cabinet that would present conflicting points of view, allowing the president to draw his own informed conclusions on policy.

For President Trump, it has meant – at least on international relations – cabinet and other top advisers at odds with the boss, pitting a more stay-the-course foreign policy against some of the president’s more dramatic, and often nationalist, impulses. It is a conflict that has increasingly burst into the open.

Trump’s decision Friday to “decertify” the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal presents a stark example. His advisers wanted him to declare that Iran is still in compliance with the accord, which aims to limit Iran’s nuclear program to civilian purposes, and that the deal is in America's national interest. But Trump rejected that advice, forcing his advisers to find a compromise.

“There are some issues that unite these advisers, and one is not blowing up the Iran deal altogether,” says Elizabeth Saunders, an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. “It’s Trump versus everybody on his team.”

Trump did not quit the Iran deal outright, but instead said Iran is not complying, and sent the matter to Congress, which will have 60 days to set up new conditions for US participation in the deal. During that period, it can decide whether to introduce or restore sanctions on Iran. Decertification is allowed under the multinational accord, but imposing sanctions is not.

“We will not continue down a path whose predictable conclusion is more violence, more terror, and the very real threat of Iran’s nuclear breakout,” Trump said.

This victory for the “mainstreamers” who dominate Trump’s national security team was not a foregone conclusion. When Trump took office, his original team included the controversial national security adviser Michael Flynn, as well as nationalist firebrands Stephen Bannon and Sebastian Gorka. All three are now gone, with Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster taking over as national security adviser and John Kelly, a Marine Corps general, as chief of staff.

“The mainstreamers now control the bureaucratic process,” says Thomas Wright, a senior fellow on foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. “It doesn’t mean they can get everything they want, but they can block things that they don’t particularly want.”

That has meant preventing outreach to Russian President Vladimir Putin, preventing a trade war with China, and reaffirming support for the mutual defense principles of NATO, Mr. Wright notes.

The administration is working hard to present a united front, telling reporters the entire national security team is behind Trump's Iran decision. But that image of unity has been undercut by the recent slew of stories about Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly calling Trump a “moron” – the issue was US nuclear weapons – and threatening to resign. Secretary Tillerson has denied the threat, but pointedly did not deny the slur on Trump’s intelligence (although his State Department spokeswoman did deny it).

And Trump has very publicly undercut top members of his foreign policy team, particularly Tillerson. Trump’s tweets this month on North Korea, saying that Tillerson was “wasting his time” trying to negotiate with the North Korean leader, struck a jarring tone. “Save your energy Rex,” Trump continued.

Trump’s feud with Sen. Bob Corker (R) of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has also fed the narrative of a mercurial president at odds with his top advisers. Once considered a prospect for Trump's running mate and then secretary of State, Senator Corker told reporters that a handful of top Trump advisers were keeping the country from “chaos,” warned that the president could trigger “World War III,” and called the White House an “adult day care.” Trump blamed Corker for the Iran deal (though the senator did not support its original passage), and mocked his slight stature.

Fissures in the GOP

Trump’s unorthodox style, combined with his newness to foreign policy and to government in general, has made for an unsettling stew to some observers. But behind all the palace intrigue there sit more fundamental questions: Where, in fact, is Trump going with a foreign policy predicated on a campaign slogan of “America First,” and what, if anything, do the tensions over his foreign policy direction say about the Republican Party?

The answers, analysts say, begin not with Trump but with the sweep of Republican history going back decades.

“If there is a division between Trump and his cabinet on foreign policy, it only reflects longstanding fissures within the GOP on the general subject,” says historian David Pietrusza. “It goes beyond the Iran deal or Korea. It goes beyond neocons and Iraq.”

The division also extends beyond the great 1952 presidential rivalry between isolationist Robert Taft and internationalist Dwight Eisenhower, back to the “America First” debates preceding Pearl Harbor, and even to hashing out whether the US should join the League of Nations, Mr. Pietrusza says.

In the modern era, however, the America First ethos has not resided in the White House – until Trump. And so for the nation, this is a signal moment.

Some describe the tension between Trump and his cabinet as “anti-establishment” vs. “establishment.” Tillerson, perhaps, belongs in a third category – like Trump, an outsider, as one new to government after a career in business, but also with an “establishment” seal of approval. Tillerson came to Trump recommended by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former national security adviser Stephen Hadley.

Policy tensions are also visible over international trade, most urgently on the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, the free trade pact among the US, Canada, and Mexico. Trump made clear during the campaign he wanted to rip up NAFTA, but then as president he backed off, after his secretaries of Agriculture and Commerce showed him a US map indicating areas where jobs would be lost if NAFTA ended – many of them populated by Trump voters.

This week, during an Oval Office visit with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump again suggested NAFTA might be on the chopping block. If Mexico, Canada, and the US can’t make a deal, he said, the pact “will be terminated and that will be fine.”

'Pretty conventional'

Still, the earlier NAFTA decision and others – such as Trump’s decision in August to boost US troop levels in Afghanistan, despite his skepticism – demonstrate a willingness to hear out his advisers and change course.

James Carafano, a Heritage Foundation foreign policy expert who served on Trump’s transition team, calls the president’s foreign policy “pretty conventional,” and cites Trump’s decision to put the Iran nuclear deal in Congress’s lap as one example.

“Europe ought to be pleased that the White House is listening to them,” says Mr. Carafano.

“The core of his foreign policy is peace and stability in Western Europe, Asia, and the Middle East,” he adds, citing Trump’s continuing commitment to NATO as one example. “We’re not going to withdraw from the world. I don’t think anyone believes he’s an isolationist.”

Carafano points to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and his handling of the Iran deal as instructive. Neither are formal treaties, and President Obama could not have gotten either through Congress if he had tried, he notes: “So in pulling out, it’s difficult to say he’s way out of the mainstream.”

As for the future of Trump’s national security team, questions abound. The predominance of “mainstreamers” on his team came in part from his love of military generals and because there wasn’t much of a “bench,” says Wright of the Brookings Institution.

But “in time, he will find kindred spirits or people who will be more aligned with what he wants to do,” says Wright. “Some of those will be opportunists, others may be true believers. But I think as he finds people, he may very well try to change the script and remove some of the mainstream elements.”

Wildfires. Floods. Hurricanes. Earthquakes.

In a disaster-filled fall, it’s no wonder some people are feeling like Mother Nature is in an all-out assault against humanity.

Predictably – and perhaps, rightly – it’s led to renewed outrage about the dangers of climate change and the need for better disaster planning. But is this really a sign of what we can expect going forward? Yes, and no.

Most climate scientists say the warming climate has affected conditions such that we can expect more extremes of certain sorts: heat waves, heavy rainfall, droughts. Sea-level rise has worsened storm surge and sunny-day flooding. And significant, but still controversial, research has started to tease out climate change’s role in contributing to more severe storms and hurricanes as well as lengthening the wildfire season and creating hotter, drier conditions in which fires can flourish.

But there’s also no solid research at this point linking any of this fall’s specific prominent disasters to climate change (such studies will surely come, but it’s too soon to know what their conclusions will be), and experts caution that all of these disasters are also relatively “normal” events that have occurred throughout history. Trying to see patterns or apocalyptic trends in such events is a human impulse, but not a very scientific one.

“The Earth is a dangerous place, and there are extremes of all sorts that happen all the time,” says Roger Pielke Jr., a University of Colorado political scientist, author of “The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change,” and a tempering voice when it comes to attributing weather events to climate change. “One of the challenges that everyone faces in understanding disaster is that you’re not paying attention to disasters when you’re taking the kids to school, so it’s very easy to not get a sense of the patterns in history.”

Asking the right questions

The disasters this fall have been severe and prominent, and have caused widespread damage. As those in California’s Wine Country are still battling fires and assessing the extent of both lives and buildings lost, Puerto Rico is only beginning to restore power and water to its residents, and Houston is still cleaning up and facing a daunting rebuilding project from the floods from hurricane Harvey.

Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that through September, the number of US disasters costing at least $1 billion in damages had hit 15, tying with 2011 for the most billion-dollar disasters since 1980 for the first nine months of the year – and that was before the wildfires hit Northern California.

“It is possible that 2017 will tie or surpass 2011 in terms of the number of billion-dollar events, and either closely match or exceed 2005 in terms of total cost,” says NOAA scientist Adam Smith in an email, noting that the incredible hurricane impacts of 2005 and 2017 put those years in a class of their own (at least since 1980) in terms of total costs.

Such measures, of course, are also influenced by where people choose to build and the amount of wealth concentrated on coastlines, along with the severity of disasters, and critics like Professor Pielke have questioned how much they really tell us about disaster trends.

Dr. Smith agrees that increases in population and material wealth are an important factor in the trends, as well as the fact that building codes are often insufficient for reducing damages in the vulnerable areas – like coasts or floodplains – where population centers are. But he adds that “climate change is playing a role in amplifying the frequency and intensity of some types of extreme weather that lead to billion-dollar disasters.”

Increasingly, the rapidly developing field of “attribution” research – the science of teasing out the role played by climate change in certain types of weather events and, in some cases, in individual ones – bears that out.

But those scientists are generally the first to caution that asking “Did climate change cause X event?” is entirely the wrong question.

“The question is, ‘Are we seeing more or less frequency? Greater or less severity?’ ” says David Titley, a meteorology professor and the director of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at Penn State University. “Attribution of a single event turns out to be pretty hard.”

Professor Titley likes to compare weather events to waves at a beach and climate to the rising tide, so that waves are coming in from an ever higher baseline.

Titley, who chaired the US National Academies committee that produced “Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change” a year ago, is far from certain there will be a clear role for climate change in some of the most prominent individual events from this fall. Global warming has a very direct link to extreme precipitation, for instance, but the biblical amounts of rainfall that submerged Houston are primarily due to the storm stalling out over the city – something that is harder to explain with climate models.

“So the question is, are the weather patterns changing so that the chances of a hurricane stalling along the coast have become greater?” says Titley. “Are the wind patterns impacted, is the jet stream being changed? That’s probably the most interesting, but it’s also the most tenuous, at the edge of where the science is right now.”

But he also thinks people tend to be too caught up in that question of individual events. “I tell people we’re down looking at the twigs on individual trees, and ... we need to back up and look at the forest again.”

The research that has been done on the links between climate change and extreme weather shows the clearest role in certain types of events: heat waves, extreme precipitation events, and droughts. It’s much harder, say Titley and others, to tease out the role of climate change in individual storms, tornadoes, hurricane, or wildfires, in part because they’re so complex.

Finding opportunity in disaster

That said, many fire experts also say there is also clear connection between wildfire trends and climate change, as well as other human-caused factors, like management plans that favor fire suppression.

“We’ve known about the link between climate change – a warmer, drier climate – and wildfires for over a decade,” says University of Colorado Prof. Tania Schoennagel, citing a 2006 study that showed that temperatures have increased about 2 degrees F in the Western United States since the 1970s, and that fire season has increased by almost 3 months in most places.

“As a consequence, the number of large fires burning in the West was about 20 in the 1970s, and now is well over 100 large fires per year,” says Professor Schoennagel. The 10 largest fire years – in terms of acres burned – since the National Interagency Fire Center began collecting data in 1960 have all occurred since 2000, she adds. (The data prior to 1983 is considered less reliable.) About 8.5 million acres have burned in the US this year, mostly in Montana, Nevada, California, Idaho, and Oregon. “The climate is changing, and it is making wildfires more common and frankly inevitable in the West,” Schoennagel says.

John Abatzoglou, a geography professor at the University of Idaho, agrees, though he adds that the changing climate conditions play out against a legacy of fire suppression and land management decisions which have allowed fuel in many areas to both build up and dry out.

“There’s a really interesting interaction here whereby the legacy of fire management has made our landscape more susceptible to climate variability and climate change,” he says.

It’s also notable that people – rather than lightning – started 84 percent of fires over the last two decades.

Professor Abatzoglou helped author a National Academy of Sciences study that found that human-caused warming caused about half of the increase in dryer fuel, and suggested that about twice as many acres burned between 1984 and 2015 as would have been expected to burn without that warming.

“Regardless of whether people’s beliefs are that climate change is behind this, or not being allowed to log, or the legacy of forest management, some of the solutions are the same,” says Abatzoglou. Among those: more prescribed burns, education about the dangers of reckless activities in causing fires, and better decisions about where, how, and whether to build in the wildland-urban interface – the areas where people and houses abut up against forests and grasslands.

Looking to those lessons, as opposed to feeling a sense of apocalyptic doom or arguing about the role of climate change, is where a lot of agreement can be found.

“The scary thing is, none of these [disasters this fall] are really the worst-case scenarios. There are worse scenarios for earthquakes. Miami could have had a direct hit [from hurricane Irma], but didn’t. These should be wake-up calls: No, the world is not ending, but this is how the world operates,” Pielke says.

Titley, from Penn State, agrees.

“There is no evidence I’ve seen from any climate scientist that says hurricanes are going to get weaker, or seas will come down, or air is going to get drier,” he says. “And a lesson from the past eight weeks is, we are not ready for today’s weather, let alone tomorrow’s weather.”

Pielke suggests that we should have the same sort of post-mortem on disasters, and what can be done better, that we have for airplane crashes. In that sense, he says, “A disaster is an opportunity.”

[Editor's note: This article has been updated to clarify the description of Roger Pielke's work to more accurately describe his position on attribution science.]

Known in the Senate for doing her homework on issues, Republican Susan Collins of Maine thoroughly weighed the pros and cons of running for governor before she finally announced on Friday that she was staying put as the state’s senior senator in Washington. 

It was a decision that caused a ballroom full of Mainers – Republicans and Democrats – to give her a standing ovation, including a sharp whistle of approval. For many, Senator Collins is a voice of reason and civility in today’s highly charged political atmosphere. Indeed, she’s been ranked the most bipartisan member of the Senate four-years running.

But a sense of duty also played a huge role in her decision, she told the Monitor in an exclusive interview at the seaside resort where she made her announcement. Though she feels the pull of home every day, and is the target of criticism and pressure from the White House and Maine’s current Republican governor, the issues before the nation are just too great, and her role as a bridge builder is just too important for her to leave, she says.

“I can't just walk away.... It's too consequential for our country,” says the senator, first elected in 1996. “I know that my voice and my vote matter and that I can help shape the outcome of events that I care deeply about.”

Certainly, Americans saw that when she was one of three Republicans to vote against the GOP effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, killing the bill in a late-night, cliffhanger vote in July. She objected to the effort because it never involved a real bipartisan process, and because it would have meant huge Medicaid cuts for Maine, among other reasons. 

'I am a congenital optimist'

Looking across her state and the world, Collins sees enormous challenges in families prostrated by stagnant wages, a nuclear North Korea, Russian interference with US elections, and hyper-partisanship. But as she told a sold-out breakfast put on by the local chamber of commerce here, “I am a congenital optimist.” Indeed, she’s hopeful on issues from tax reform to America’s future generation of public servants. 

While her friend and colleague Sen. Bob Corker (R) of Tennessee warns publicly that only a few key players in the Trump administration separate the country from “chaos,” and questions the president’s “stability” and “competence,” Collins does not see things quite so darkly.

President Trump is inexperienced in foreign policy, defense, and government, and underestimates the power of his words, she says in the interview. He does not “fully appreciate” that every single word he utters matters and is scrutinized by enemies and allies. “I think that’s the underlying problem.”

When asked whether she thought the president is endangering the country with his reckless utterances, as Senator Corker seems to charge, she answered that “people are beginning to understand that when the president says something that is inflammatory, that he often changes his language later or it's dialed back.” They are getting used to his style, she says. As a result, “the alarm level has diminished.”

She’s still critical of Mr. Trump, whom she did not vote for, if diplomatically so, calling him out during her morning address for his executive actions, particularly his decision this week that the government would stop paying certain subsidies related to the Affordable Care Act. 

Every day seems to produce a crisis, she says, joking: “Couldn’t we just have one day off?” To relieve stress, she kayaks on Cold Stream Pond, about 40 miles from her home in Bangor. Kayaking is a cell-free zone. Crystal-clear water, without a ripple on the lake – that’s what “renews my spirit,” she says.

Still, she says, her work is "exciting," because she feels she is making a difference. 

Pondering political dysfunction

Making the decision to stay in Washington was not easy, says Collins. Being a governor has hands-on appeal. Nor is it easy being a senator in today’s deeply divided world – especially when, as is the case with Collins, you are a swing vote.

Hyper-partisanship and a lack of civility are at the root of political dysfunction, Collins believes. In the interview, she said she’s thought a lot about whether the fault lies with Washington or whether Washington reflects the country, and has come to the conclusion that it’s both.

She laments that Americans segregate themselves politically on social media, in their intake of news and interactions with each other, and even in their choice of where to live. “Our society needs to become less fragmented and more open to alternative viewpoints,” she says.

The growth of outside political groups has meanwhile weakened the parties, often exceeding their power, particularly in campaign funding and advertising, she says.

She cites the president’s former strategic advisor Steve Bannon's targeting of Republicans in primaries while Bernie Sanders supporters “go after” moderate Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California. Their influence – financial and otherwise – makes members “concerned and skittish” because they can create “real electoral trouble.”

In her view, bipartisan groups like “No Labels” need to ramp it up. “They need to become fanatical moderates. They need to be as vocal and as active and as engaged as people on the far left and the far right.” 

Working across the aisle

What she can personally do about this is to continue to act as a bridge-builder, one who brings senators from both parties together, she says. Collins pointed to a dinner that she put together at a local restaurant after the first Obamacare repeal effort failed in the Senate. About a dozen senators from both parties came. “That was encouraging” and bipartisan efforts continue. That kind of bringing together is typical of her, and helped to end the partial government shutdown of 2013.

Rather surprisingly, Collins is hopeful on tax reform. The better way to have started this year, she says, would have been to begin with a bipartisan win – infrastructure – and then gone on to tax reform, dealing with the highly partisan issue of health care last.

That said, she thinks some lessons have been learned from the health-care debacle. It looks like the Senate is going to proceed with a more normal process – hearings, marking up the bill in committee, and giving Democrats an opportunity to offer amendments. She’s talked with many Democrats, and they want a bill, as does the president.

Collins traces her roots in public service back to her own family – both her mother and father were mayor of her hometown of Caribou – and also to Maine’s first female senator, Margaret Chase Smith. A young Collins had a chance to meet the senator when she was 18, visiting the Capitol on a youth program. Senator Smith spent nearly two hours with Collins, and Collins came away with the message to “stand tall” for what she believed in. Indeed, Smith talked of her own “Declaration of Conscience” speech in which she spoke out against McCarthyism on the Senate floor. 

What does Collins tell today’s youth, brought up in an age of political combat in which “government” is a dirty word for many and Americans’ approval of Congress is practically in the cellar?

She had an opportunity to share her thoughts with students right after her talk, when she took pictures with a group of high-schoolers who were invited to the breakfast.

“I talked to the group, [saying] that government is like teaching. It is an area where you can affect lives and make a difference,” she says. “There aren’t that many fields where you can really affect people’s lives.”

She tries to bring that home by specifically pointing to the good that government can do – from funding their internships to helping develop the waterfront of their town. 

One of the students, when asked before her announcement whether Collins should run for governor, answered emphatically: “She should run for president!” A junior at Medomak Valley High School in Waldoboro, Peter Alexander worries that America’s political system has “gotten to the point where we can’t fix it.”

People need to be more open-minded, he says. One of his classmates agrees, chiming in: “As a generation, we can make things better.”

Jonathan Blanc/Courtesy of The New York Public Library

The entrance to the New York Public Library - from the documentary 'Ex Libris.'

Frederick Wiseman’s voluminously fascinating documentary “Ex Libris” is ostensibly about the New York Public Library system and its many branches, but, like all of this 87-year-old director’s best work, it’s about a great deal more than its stated subject.

Since 1967, with “Titicut Follies,” Wiseman has looked deeply into the lives of the people who regulate and inhabit metropolitan hospitals, domestic violence crisis centers, dance companies, art galleries, state legislatures, public colleges, meatpacking plants, zoos, high schools, boxing gyms, welfare offices, juvenile courts, and so much more. 

He does not tell us how to think about what he puts before us. There are no off-screen or on-screen interviewers in his films, no identifying labels to guide us, no tacked-on music soundtrack. Without any overt editorializing on his part, he and his longtime cinematographer, John Davey, want us to comprehend these institutions as repositories of experience. The slow accretion of detail in his films is essentially novelistic. They offer up a full-scale immersion in the human comedy. 

I have been writing about Wiseman in these same terms for so long that at this point, I fear sounding generic. But it’s not my fault that he has been so consistently first-rate over a span of more than 40 films. I don’t know any other living director, of fiction or nonfiction films, who has created a comparable body of work. And I don’t know of any other director who has made so many exceptional films well into his 80s. 

The New York Public Library has 88 branches stretching throughout Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, almost a dozen of which Wiseman features, including the main Beaux Arts structure on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue with the famous stone lions fronting the entrance. The NYPL is an especially resonant subject for him because it brings to the fore his lifelong theme: the necessity for human connection. For Wiseman, the basic question of what exactly is a library in these digital days becomes a latchkey to a wider world. To him, libraries are finally a celebration of a free society.

It should come as no surprise that the notion of libraries as repositories of books is now quite quaint. In fact, we hardly see any old-school books – or as they are sometimes referred to here, “physical books” – at all. What we do see are the ways in which the NYPL functions as a gateway to a fuller life for an extraordinary range of people. (Among other things, “Ex Libris,” which runs 197 minutes and was filmed in the fall of 2015, is an ode to New York and the shimmering diversity of its people, as was Wiseman’s equally fine “In Jackson Heights” a few years back.) 

One library staff member refers to the library as “a warm, welcoming place that’s committed to education and committed to nurturing everyone’s passion and curiosities.” Another, Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, says, “What we do is mind-building, soul-affirming, lifesaving.” 

This may sound like empty rhetoric until you see what is actually at work in these branches. There are community forums and job fairs that bring in recruiters from the New York Fire Department, the US Army, and the US Border Patrol. Seniors take part in dance classes. In book clubs, they discuss Gabriel García Márquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera,” and the weight of the years that they bring to their reading testifies to their unquenchable curiosity. On the other end of the age scale, preschoolers join in singalongs; those a bit older are taught how to read. (As of 2015, more than 1 in 5 New York residents do not have internet at home.) 

In the Harlem branch, a man describes how he could not afford film school and so “I learned from the library.” A sign language interpreter for theatrical productions demonstrates two very different ways of expressing the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. A fielder of phone calls calmly explains to a questioner that “a unicorn is actually an imaginary animal.” The curator of the library’s vast photographic library describes it as a hands-on resource for people who make things and adds, “Andy Warhol stole lots of stuff from us.” We see donor banquets, and we see homeless people sleeping in the stacks. Classical string quartets concertize. Rap artists expound, as do such notables as Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, Richard Dawkins, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. At the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library on West 20th Street, we see a blind library volunteer show a newly blind patron how to read Braille.

Ultimately “Ex Libris” demonstrates that libraries are about people, and what gives the film its great and accumulating force is that people are infinitely complex. At least, in Frederick Wiseman’s films they are. Grade: A (This movie is not rated.)

AP Photo

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei listens to Revolutionary Guard commander Mohammad Ali Jafari during a 2015 graduation ceremony of a group of the guard's officers in Tehran. Iran's Revolutionary Guard faces new sanctions from the U.S. after an Oct. 13 speech by President Trump.

In what Tehran’s leaders might call an act of heroic flexibility, President Trump has decided not to blow up a 2015 deal – as he once promised – that has so far curbed Iran’s nuclear program. Mr. Trump now seems persuaded of the strategic reasons to honor the international pact. Instead, in an Oct. 13 speech, he left the issue of whether to scuttle the deal up to Congress and, by default, American public opinion.

But what are Americans to make of the deal now, especially as Iran could again become a nuclear threat? Under the pact, Iran can resume processing uranium in 2031. That “sunset” provision was the best that the West could do in the negotiations. And it represents a perception among many experts that Iran will not be nearly as dangerous in 14 years.

The deal’s success depends on deep social trends among Iranians, especially its large population of young people. Through their street protests, thirst for Western culture and ideas, and votes for moderates in rigged elections, they have shown an independence of conscience after living for decades under Muslim clerics who claim a divine right to rule.

As a leading expert on Iran, Ray Takeyh at the Council on Foreign Relations, put it recently:

“The Iranians have given up not just on the Islamic Republic, but even on religious observance, as mosques go empty during most Shia commemorations. Three decades of theocratic rule has transformed Iran into one of the most secular nations in the world. The middle class and the working poor are equally hard pressed by the regime’s incompetence and corruption. Even the senior ayatollahs are beginning to realize the toll that has taken on Shia Islam by its entanglement with politics.”

And in a recent survey of young clerics in Iran’s sacred city of Qoms, scholar Abbas Mehregan found 52.5 percent reject the use of violence to guide people to “real” Islam. (One-third do not tolerate religious diversity.)

“This implies the creation and gradual expansion of a softer interpretation of Shia Islam in Iran,” he writes. “In other words, Shia believers have a free choice in the multivocal market of religious ideas.”

Such readings of shifts in Iranian society suggest Americans should support the nuclear pact even as the United States and its allies keep Iran in check on other issues, such as the Iranian missile program and the regime’s support for terrorist groups.

Iranian-style theocratic rule, which is not popular among most of the world’s Muslims, defies a person’s capacity to live by the light of reason, faith, and a respect for equality and the opinion of others. A religion must not impose itself by coercion, only by example and peaceful persuasion.

In his speech, Trump spoke at times directly to the Iranian people. It was a wise move, one often done by his predecessors. More Iranians are eager for ideas different than the dictates of unelected theocrats.