Despite long-running diplomatic efforts by the U.S., North Korea has developed a sizable nuclear arsenal, allowing it to bully its neighbors and shake down the international community. Some, arguing that the failure to restrain North Korea’s nuclear program was due to U.S. intransigence, conclude that negotiations with Iran will succeed only if America is more generous this time. These analysts, write Sue Mi Terry and Max Boot, have it backwards:

It takes a willful denial of reality to claim . . . that the United States was at fault for the breakdown in U.S.-North Korean negotiations. A dispassionate reading of the evidence suggests that North Korea was never serious about giving up a nuclear program into which it had invested decades—not to mention billions of dollars—and that it saw as vital to regime protection and internal legitimacy. If North Korea has not developed as many nuclear weapons as U.S. intelligence agencies once feared, that is most likely a side effect of the regime’s dysfunction rather than any lack of desire to acquire more weapons.

The parallels with Iran are not comforting. If Iran is anything like North Korea, it will seek to gain the benefits of a deal—notably, the lifting of sanctions—without truly ending its nuclear program. Keeping Iran in check will require verification procedures more strict than those imposed on North Korea. But there was little sign of such procedures in the framework agreement [with Tehran] negotiated in Lausanne. In fact, shortly after the deal was announced, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, said that Iran would never accept unfettered inspection of its military facilities. And even if Iran does eventually accept stricter oversight, the United States will have to commit to holding the country to account instead of simply offering extra concessions in a futile bid to get it to live up to its original promises, as it did with North Korea. Only then will the lessons of the Agreed Framework truly have been learned.

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.