Discussing his and Peter Rough’s September essay in Mosaic, Michael Doran explains his concern that the Trump administration is repeating some of the mistakes of the Obama administration, allowing Iran and Russia to expand their influence at the expense of the U.S. and its allies. He lays out a realistic strategy that the U.S. can pursue in order to reverse course. (Interview by Jonathan Silver. Audio, 51 minutes. For streaming and downloading options, please click on the link below.)

Beginning on November 13, Michael Doran will be giving a series of monthly lectures in which he will address how every American president, from Harry Truman to Donald Trump, has understood and shaped America’s strategic relationship with Israel. Click here for more information and for a special invitation to Mosaic readers,

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.