Many have pointed out that the Iranian government is watching closely what the Barack Obama administration does in Syria. With the president having declared a year ago that the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons “would be a game changer,” the Iranian government wonders what the new game will be. It does so not only out of interest in its clients in Syria, but more important, to judge what Obama’s reaction might be if Iran acquires a nuclear weapons capability, which the president has declared as another red line.

Focusing solely on events in Syria, however, misses a large part of the Iranian calculus, if not the largest. What really matters to Iran is how successful Obama is in winning congressional support for his Syria policy. If he fails, it will deal a double blow to the president. Not only will the Iranian government dismiss the possibility of negotiations with his administration, it will also conclude that Obama can be defied with impunity. The international cost of domestic political failure would be profound.

To start, it is worth noting the extent to which foreign governments are sophisticated consumers of American political information. Decades of international cable news broadcasts and newspaper websites have brought intimate details of US politics into global capitals. Foreign ministers in the Middle East and beyond are US news junkies, and they seem increasingly distrustful of their embassies. For key US allies, the foreign minister often seems to have made him- or herself the US desk officer. Most can have a quite sophisticated discussion on congressional politics and their impact on US foreign relations.

The Iranian government is no exception. While former president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad was emotional and shrill in his opposition to the United States, there remains in Iran a cadre of Western-trained technocrats, fluent in English and nuanced in their understanding of the world. President Hassan Rouhani has surrounded himself with such people, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has charged them with investigating a different relationship between Iran and the United States.