Noting that the presidential candidate has expressed contempt for NATO, that several of his advisers have close ties with Vladimir Putin, and that Putin’s court philosopher Aleksandr Dugin has endorsed him, Robert Zubrin argues that a Trump administration is likely to adopt the current White House’s callous attitude toward U.S. alliances. Zubrin takes Poland and Israel as his prime examples:

Russian military [threats] against Poland and the Baltic states were greatly enhanced by the failure of the Obama administration to honor America’s commitment to defend Ukraine with more than token support. Trump’s adviser Carter Page, however, has attacked Obama for defending Ukraine too strongly. . . .

Another country that a Trump administration would place in existential danger is Israel. While Trump’s statement that he would act as a neutral arbiter between Israel and the Palestinians has received some attention, the much greater threat to the Jewish state comes from Trump’s desire to align America with Putin’s Russia. This is so because Russia’s Middle East strategy is centered on building up an Iranian empire stretching from Lebanon to Afghanistan as a powerful junior partner to Moscow in the planned Eurasian bloc. . . .

Consistent with his pro-Putin tilt, Trump has stated that the United States should back the Russian-Iranian client Bashar al-Assad, as [President Obama has]. Thus a Trump administration offers Israel the terrifying prospect of a nuclear-armed Iranian regional hegemon, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Hindu Kush, backed by Russia and unopposed by the United States. A Trump presidency could lead to the end of Poland’s independence and of Israel’s existence.

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.