In accordance with legislation that accompanied the 2015 agreement, the U.S. president must decide every 90 days whether to “recertify” that the Islamic Republic is complying with its terms or to declare it in violation. After reportedly vigorous debate among his senior advisers, President Trump opted on Monday to recertify for the second time in his term. The White House argues that more time is needed to study the question and formulate new policy before blowing up the entire deal by declaring Iran in violation. But the editors of the Weekly Standard argue that time is short:

Iran is not, in fact, complying with the agreement. As Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, David Perdue, and Marco Rubio pointed out in a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last week, the Iranian regime has exceeded the number of uranium-enrichment centrifuges and levels of heavy-water production it’s permitted under the agreement; it’s aggressively trying to attain nuclear and missile technology outside the terms of the deal; and it’s refusing to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect its nuclear operations. . . .

Administration officials tell us that this recertification is pro forma, a congressionally mandated box-checking that buys the White House time to complete a comprehensive policy review. The real debate about Iran policy continues. Fair enough, but we strongly suspect the same reasons for keeping up the conceit will exist 90 days from now, when the next recertification is due.

Secretary Tillerson has said his goal is a new deal, or at least significant provisions to strengthen the existing one. But it’s unclear how the Trump administration, having paraded its “America First” foreign policy throughout Europe in recent weeks, will convince other parties to the Iran deal—some of whom have strong economic [and, in Russia’s case, military] ties to Tehran—to sign up for an Iran deal, Part Two.

Donald Trump was engaging in a bit of campaign hyperbole when he promised to make dismantling the Iran deal his first order of business as president. The longer he waits to formulate a comprehensive Iran policy, the more likely it is that Iran will become that top priority on its own.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.