Deep behind the headlines of recent political theater is the very real rattle of Iran’s ballistic sabre.

Missile tests that don’t violate specific wording of President Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) are pushing the early limits of what will certainly be future violations of the agreement.

The recent ballistic missile tests likely violate multiple U.N. resolutions including UN Security Council Resolution #2231, which bans ballistic missile tests by Iran.

It’s a game for Iran, whose Ayatollah has written a book on how to “destroy America.”

Jonathan Tobin at “Commentary” provides links to the translated version, such as:

“Our position against Israel is, as always: Israel is a malignant cancer gland that needs to be uprooted. In contrast to what shallow people believe, it is not impossible to defeat Israel and the United States. Superpowers have come and gone throughout history. Materialistic powers are neither everlasting nor infinite.”

The game is a nasty set of maneuvers and lying about their nuclear ambitions while truthfully declaring their goal to exterminate Israel.

Only fools would play by their rules.

John Kerry, for whom the title “misguided” would be high praise, praised the administration’s agreement this way:

“If Iran did decide to cheat, its technicians would have to do more than bury a processing facility deep beneath the ground.

“They would have to come up with a complete — complete — and completely secret nuclear supply chain: a secret source of uranium, a secret milling facility, a secret conversion facility, a secret enrichment facility. And our intelligence community and our Energy Department, which manages our nuclear program and our nuclear weapons, both agree Iran could never get away with such a deception.”

The Chicago Tribune reports Iran has already cheated:

“The Iranian government was supposed to resolve a dozen questions about its past nuclear research. Come clean, the rest of the world essentially said, and we’ll have enough confidence to lift economic sanctions.

“Iran hasn’t come clean. Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency released a key report on what it has learned.

“Iranian scientists secretly worked on weapons design, testing and components needed for a bomb until 2009, the report says. The scientists developed high-precision detonators and built a facility to study how a nuclear explosion could be triggered.

All this while Iranian leaders denied that they sought to build the bomb.”

Of course they lied.

Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) stood on the Senate floor and pronounced his erudite call for institutional distrust of Iran:

“We need to be strictly and aggressively enforcing the terms of our nuclear deal with Iran that we reached with a variety of our other international partners and that is currently moving forward. And we need to push back on Iran’s bad and disruptive behavior, not just in its region but globally, and to give our administration and international agencies the resources and the nominees confirmed that will allow them to be successful in enforcing our actions against Iran.

“We must not let Iran re-litigate the terms of the deal and escape the boundaries of this deal and lay the groundwork for its future development of a nuclear weapon. We must deter them by holding them accountable.”

These words will fall on deaf ears. President Obama believes this deal, giving Iran ICBM’s within 10 years and nuclear weapons within 15 years, is his foreign policy legacy.

It is.

He will remove the sanctions in January and Iran will have what they want.

Which brings up another question.

Is there really an agreement when only one side has actually signed the document?

According to the Gatestone Institute International Policy Council, Iranian government officials have not signed the agreement as of December 15, 2015.

If so, with whom does the Obama administration really have an agreement?

Rick Jensen is Delaware’s award-winning conservative talk show host on WDEL.